DISILLUSIONED.
I blush that I am England's son!
Yet deemed her once the inviolate home
Of matchless freedom nobly won:
And little thought the hour would come,
When, freer on an alien strand,
My soul should scorn its native land.
How mocks my ear the idle song
That "Britons never shall be slaves"
These Britons have been slaves so long
To fraud and falsehood, fiends and knaves,
They spurn true freedom's very name,
And, self-duped, revel in their shame.
O Albion! once the "Isle of Saints,"
The "Dower of Mary," what thy crime?
Not sternest pen—not envy's—paints
The annals of thy golden time
In aught but glory. Whence the call
For such a vengeance, such a fall?
A tyrant's lust, a woman's pride,
Could rend thee from the parent stem,
And lay thee wither'd by the side
Of barren branches—cursed with them!
Save that thy head was too elate,
What hadst thou done for such a fate?
And oh! if thou hadst welcomed back
The Christless worship of the Celt,
Thy darkness were of hue less black—
Were less like Egypt's, "to be felt"!
'Twere rather twilight of the morn:
Another day might still be born.
But no: more hellward yet thy fall!
To turn and trample in her blood
The Mother who had brought thee all
Thou ever hadst of highest good:
Behold a guilt—ay, deeplier dyed
Than blinded Juda's deicide!
And lo! a sleek usurper now—
Meet tool of perjured royalty—
Rears shameless her apostate brow:
Her creed a sham, her claim a lie!
The children's bread no more divine,
A hireling throws them husks of swine.
This vaunted church, they built her stout:
And if by dint of fellest strife
She failed to crush and strangle out
Her foe's imperishable life,
'Twas not, I ween, from lack of force,
Or craft of state, or base resource.