By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Let us DO or DIE!
Mr. Thompson, in acknowledging the Poem, remarked:—
“Your heroic ode is to me the noblest composition of the kind in the Scottish language. I happened to dine yesterday with a party of your friends to whom I read it. They were all charmed with it, entreated me to find out a suitable air for it, and reprobated the idea of giving it a tune so totally devoid of interest or grandeur as ‘Hey tuttie taittie.’
I have been running over the whole hundred airs, of which I lately sent you the list; and I think ‘Lewie Gordon’ is most happily adapted to your ode; at least with a very short variation of the fourth line, which I shall presently submit to you. There is in ‘Lewie Gordon’ more of the grand than the plaintive, particularly when it is sung with a degree of spirit which your words would oblige the singer to give it. I would have no scruple about substituting your ode in the room of ‘Lewie Gordon,’ which has neither the interest, the grandeur, nor the poetry that characterize your verses. Now the variation I have to suggest on the last line of each verse, the only line too short for the air, is as follows:—