Jamaica bodies, use him weel,
An’ hap him in a cozie biel;
Ye’ll find him ay a dainty chiel,
And fou o’ glee;
He wad na wrang’d the vera deil,
That’s owre the sea.
Fareweel, my rhyme-composing billie!
Your native soil was right ill-willie;
But may ye flourish like a lily,
Now bonnilie!
I’ll toast ye in my hindmost gillie,
Tho’ owre the sea!
LI.
THE FAREWELL.
“The valiant, in himself, what can he suffer?
Or what does he regard his single woes?
But when, alas! he multiplies himself,
To dearer selves, to the lov’d tender fair,
The those whose bliss, whose beings hang upon him,
To helpless children! then, O then! he feels
The point of misery fest’ring in his heart,
And weakly weeps his fortune like a coward.
Such, such am I! undone.”
Thomson.
[In these serious stanzas, where the comic, as in the lines to the Scottish bard, are not permitted to mingle, Burns bids farewell to all on whom his heart had any claim. He seems to have looked on the sea as only a place of peril, and on the West Indies as a charnel-house.]
I.