His test of valor and his task of fame.
With his young host Montgomery first moves forth
To crush the vast invasion of the north;
O’er streams and lakes their flags far onward play,
Navies and forts surrendering mark their way;
Rocks, fens and deserts thwart the paths they go,
And hills before them lose their crags in snow.
Loud Lawrence, clogg’d with ice, indignant feels
Their sleet-clad oars, choked helms and crusted keels;
They buffet long his tides; when rise in sight
Quebec’s dread walls, and Wolfe’s unclouded height.
Already there a few brave patriots stood,
Worn down with toil, by famine half subdued;
Untrencht before the town they dare oppose
Their fielded cohorts to the forted foes.
Ah gallant troop! deprived of half the praise
That deeds like yours in other times repays,
Since your prime chief (the favorite erst of fame)
Hath sunk so deep his hateful, hideous name,
That every honest Muse with horror flings
The name unsounded from her sacred strings;
Else what high tones of rapture must have told
The first great action37 of a chief so bold!
’Twas his, ’twas yours, to brave unusual storms,
To tame rude nature in her drearest forms;
Foodless and guideless, through that waste of earth,
You marcht long months; and, sore reduced by dearth,
Reacht the proud capital, too feeble far
To tempt unaided such a task of war;
Till now Montgomery’s host with hopes elate
Joins your scant powers, to try the test of fate.
With skilful glance he views the fortress round.
Bristled with pikes, with dark artillery crown’d;
Resolves with naked steel to scale the towers
And snatch a realm from Britain’s hostile powers.
Now drear December’s boreal blasts arise,
A roaring hailstorm sweeps the shuddering skies,
Night with condensing horror mantles all
And trembling watch-lights glimmer from the wall.
From bombs o’erarching, fusing, bursting high,
The glare scarce wanders through the loaded sky;
And in the louder shock of meteors drown’d,
The accustom’d ear in vain expects the sound.
He points the assault, and, through the howling air
O’er rocky ramparts leads audacious war.
Swift rise the rapid files, the walls are red
With flashing flames that show the piles of dead;
Till back recoiling from the ranks of slain,
They leave their leader with a feeble train,
Begirt with foes within the sounding wall
Who thick beneath his single sabre fall.
But short the conflict; others hemm’d him round,
And brave Montgomery prest the gory ground.
A second Wolfe Columbus here beheld,
In youthful charms, a soul undaunted yield;
Forlorn, o’erpower’d, his hardy host remains
Stretcht by his side or led in captive chains.
Macpherson, Cheesman share their general’s doom;
Meigs, Morgan, Dearborn, planning deeds to come,
Resign impatient prisoners; soon to wield
Their happier falchions in a broader field.
Triumphant to New York’s ill forted post
Britannia turns her vast amphibious host,
That seas and storms, obedient to her hand
Heave and discharge on every distant land;
Fleets, floating batteries shake Manhattan’s shore,
And Hellgate rocks reverberate the roar.
Swift o’er the shuddering isles that line the bay
The red flags wave and battering engines play;
Howe leads aland the interminable train,
While his bold brother still bestorms the main,
Great Albion’s double pride, both famed afar
On each vext element, each world of war,
Where British rapine follows peaceful toil
And murders nations, but to seize their spoil.
Wide sweep the veteran myriads o’er the strand,
Outnumbering thrice the raw colonial band;
Flatbush and Harlem sink beneath their fires,
Brave Stirling yields and Sullivan retires.
In vain sage Washington from hill to hill
Plays round his foes with more than Fabian skill,
Retreats, advances, lures them to his snare,
To balance numbers by the shifts of war.
For not their swords alone, but fell disease
Thins his chill camp and chokes the sedgy seas.
The baleful malady from Sirius sent,
Floats in each breeze, impesting every tent,
Strikes the young soldier with the morning ray
And lays him lifeless ere the close of day,
Far from his father’s house, his mother’s care
And all the charities that nursed him there.
Dampt is the native rage that first impell’d
The insulted colons to the battling field;
When first their high-soul’d sentiment of right
And full-vein’d vigor nerved their arm to fight.
For stript of health, benumb’d thy vital flood,
Thy muscles laxt and decomposed thy blood,
What is thy courage, man? a foodless flame,
A light unseen, a soul without a frame.
Each day the decimated ranks forgo
Their dying comrades to repulse the foe,
And each damp night along the slippery trench
Breathe at their post the suffocating stench;
They sink by hundreds on the vapory soil,
Till a new fight relieves their deadlier toil.
At last from fruitless combat, sore defeat,
To Croton hills they lead a long retreat;
Pale, curbed, exanimate, in dull despair,
Train the scant relics of the twofold war:
The sword, the pestilence press hard behind;
The body both assail, and one beats down the mind.
Book VI
British cruelty to American prisoners—Prison Ship—Retreat of Washington with the relics of his army, pursued by Howe—Washington recrossing the Delaware in the night, to surprise the British van, is opposed by uncommon obstacles—His success in this audacious enterprise lays the foundation of the American empire—A monument to be erected on the bank of the Delaware—Approach of Burgoyne, sailing up the St. Lawrence with an army of Britons and various other nations—Indignant energy of the colonies, compared to that of Greece in opposing the invasion of Xerxes—Formation of an army of citizens under the command of Gates—Review of the American and British armies, and of the savage tribes who join the British standard—Battle of Saratoga—Story of Lucinda—Second battle, and capture of Burgoyne and his army.
But of all tales that war’s black annals hold
The darkest, foulest still remains untold;
New modes of torture wait the shameful strife,
And Britain wantons in the waste of life.
Cold-blooded Cruelty, first fiend of hell,
Ah think no more with savage hordes to dwell;
Quit the Caribbean tribes who eat their slain,
Fly that grim gang, the Inquisitors of Spain,
Boast not thy deeds in Moloch’s shrines of old,
Leave Barbary’s pirates to their blood-bought gold,
Let Holland steal her victims, force them o’er
To toils and death on Java’s morbid shore;
Some cloak, some color all these crimes may plead;
’Tis avarice, passion, blind religion’s deed;
But Britons here, in this fraternal broil,
Grave, cool, deliberate in thy service toil.
Far from the nation’s eye, whose nobler soul
Their wars would humanize, their pride control,
They lose the lessons that her laws impart
And change the British for the
