"How often have I loitered o'er thy green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene!"
With what delight he shares the rustic revelry. There falls the light of lingering love on each and every line and word:
"These were thy charms, but all these charms are fled,"
he cries,
"And desolation saddens all thy green."
He depicts emigration and its devastating and enforced exile, so widely diverse from the healthful, free, and willing spirit of true and liberal colonisation:
"Far, far away thy children leave the land.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay."
Years later the man wrote these lines, but the thoughts, the burning sense of burning wrong, the pain and anguish, were hidden in the heart of the youth, outwardly so careless:
"A bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied."
There is a majesty in the lines—