How shall we rank thee upon glory's page?
Thou more than soldier and just less than sage!
Of peace too fond to act the conqueror's part,
Too long in camps to learn a statesman's art,
Nature designed thee for a hero's mould,
But, ere she cast thee, let the stuff grow cold.
While loftier souls command, nay, make their fate,
Thy fate made thee and forced thee to be great.
Yet Fortune, who so oft, so blindly sheds
Her brightest halo round the weakest heads,
Found thee undazzled, tranquil as before,
Proud to be useful, scorning to be more;
Less moved by glory's than by duty's claim,
Renown the meed, but self-applause the aim;
All that thou wert reflects less fame on thee,
Far less, than all thou didst forbear to be.
Nor yet the patriot of one land alone,—
For, thine's a name all nations claim their own;
And every shore, where breathed the good and brave,
Echoed the plaudits thy own country gave.
Now look, my friend, where faint the moonlight falls
On yonder dome, and, in those princely halls,—
If thou canst hate, as sure that soul must hate,
Which loves the virtuous, and reveres the great,
If thou canst loathe and execrate with me
The poisoning drug of French philosophy,
That nauseous slaver of these frantic times,
With which false liberty dilutes her crimes,
If thou has got, within thy free-born breast,
One pulse that beats more proudly than the rest,
With honest scorn for that inglorious soul,
Which creeps and whines beneath a mob's control,
Which courts the rabble's smile, the rabble's nod,
And makes, like Egypt, every beast its god,
There, in those walls—but, burning tongue forbear!
Rank must be reverenced, even the rank that's there:
So here I pause—and now, dear Hume, we part:
But oft again, in frank exchange of heart,
Thus let us meet, and mingle converse dear
By Thames at home, or by Potowmac here.
O'er lake and marsh, through fevers and through fogs,
'Midst bears and yankees, democrats and frogs,
Thy foot shall follow me, thy heart and eyes
With me shall wonder, and with me despise.
While I, as oft, in fancy's dream shall rove,
With thee conversing, through that land I love,
Where, like the air that fans her fields of green,
Her freedom spreads, unfevered and serene;
And sovereign man can condescend to see
The throne and laws more sovereign still than he.
[1] "On the original location of the ground now allotted for the seat of the Federal City [says Mr. Weld] the identical spot on which the capitol now stands was called Rome. This anecdote is related by many as a certain prognostic of the future magnificence of this city, which is to be, as it were, a second Rome."—Weld's Travels, letter iv.
[2] A little stream runs through the city, which, with intolerable affectation, they have styled the Tiber. It was originally called Goose- Creek.
[3] "To be under the necessity of going through a deep wood for one or two miles, perhaps, in order to see a next-door neighbor, and in the same city, is a curious and I believe, a novel circumstance."—Weld, letter iv.
The Federal City (if it, must be called a city), has hot been much increased since Mr. Weld visited it.
[4] The picture which Buffon and De Pauw have drawn of the American Indian, though very humiliating, is, as far as I can judge, much more correct than the flattering representations which Mr. Jefferson has given us. See the Notes on Virginia, where this gentleman endeavors to disprove in general the opinion maintained so strongly by some philosophers that nature (as Mr. Jefferson expresses it) belittles her productions in the western world.
[5] On a small hill near the capital there is to be an equestrian statue of General Washington.