Poet, who thus dost rove, say, shall thou fear
New Jordan's stream prefigured by the old?
It will but waft thee where thy fathers are
The bards with long eternity enroll'd.
It will but waft thee where thy Homer shrouds
His laurell'd head in some Elysian grove,
And on whose skirts perhaps in future years,
At awful distance you and I may rove.
Enough—when God and nature give the word,
I'll tempt the dusky shore and narrow sea:
Content to die, just as it be decreed,
At four score years, or now at twenty-three."
In the edition of 1795, Freneau used only stanzas 3-17, 119-124 of the poem, giving it the title "The Vision of the Night. A Fragment." In this there are some sixteen variations from the earlier text, nearly all minor verbal changes not always for the better. Several, however, are significant, for instance, line 12 is made to read, "I sing the horrors and the shades of night"; line 32 is changed to "with her ebon spear"; line 478 to "raised by churchmen's hands"; and 480 to "texts from Moses."
The poet used the 1786 edition as a sort of quarry for his later editions. He used thirteen stanzas for "The Sexton's Sermon," q.v.; stanzas 39-43 were reprinted in the 1809 edition in connection with stanzas 35-38 of "Santa Cruz" and entitled "Elegiac Lines"; stanza 79 became stanza one and 55 stanza two of the "Hessian Embarkation," and stanza 49 was inserted after stanza 90 of the 1809 version of "Santa Cruz."
THE JAMAICA FUNERAL[158]
1776
1