THE BOWER OF PEACE
From "Ode Written during the War with America, 1814"
When shall the Island Queen of Ocean lay
The thunderbolt aside,
And, twining olives with her laurel crown,
Rest in the Bower of Peace?
Not long may this unnatural strife endure
Beyond the Atlantic deep;
Not long may men, with vain ambition drunk,
And insolent in wrong,
Afflict with their misrule the indignant land
Where Washington hath left
His awful memory
A light for after-times!
Vile instruments of fallen Tyranny
In their own annals, by their countrymen.
For lasting shame shall they be written down.
Soon may the better Genius there prevail!
Then will the Island Queen of Ocean lay
The thunderbolt aside,
And, twining olives with her laurel crown,
Rest in the Bower of Peace.
Robert Southey.
One of the most remarkable naval battles of the war occurred on September 26, 1814, in Fayal Roads. The General Armstrong, the famous privateer schooner, Captain Samuel Chester Reid, had anchored there, trusting to the neutrality of the harbor, and was attacked after nightfall by the boats of a strong British squadron. A fearful struggle followed, the British being finally beaten off.
REID AT FAYAL
[September 26, 1814]
A cliff-locked port and a bluff sea wall,
And a craggy rampart, brown and bold;
Proud Pico's bastions towering tall,
And a castle dumb and cold.
The scream of a gull where a porpoise rolls;
And the flash of a home-bound fisher's blade,
Where the ghostly boom of the drum fish tolls
For wrecks that the surf has made.