Thy friendship thus thy judgment wronging, With praises not to me belonging, In task more meet for mightiest powers, Wouldst thou engage my thriftless hours. But say, my Erskine, hast thou weighed That secret power by all obeyed, Which warps not less the passive mind, Its source concealed, or undefined: Whether an impulse, that has birth Soon as the infant wakes on earth, One with our feelings and our powers, And rather part of us than ours; Or whether fitlier termed the sway Of habit formed in early day? Howe’er derived, its force confessed Rules with despotic sway the breast, And drags us on by viewless chain, While taste and reason plead in vain. Look east, and ask the Belgian why, Beneath Batavia’s sultry sky, He seeks not eager to inhale The freshness of the mountain gale, Content to rear his whitened wall Beside the dank and dull canal? He’ll say, from youth he loved to see The white sail gliding by the tree. Or see yon weather-beaten hind, Whose sluggish herds before him wind, Whose tattered plaid and rugged cheek His northern clime and kindred speak; Through England’s laughing meads he goes, And England’s wealth around him flows; Ask, if it would content him well, At ease in those gay plains to dwell, Where hedgerows spread a verdant screen, And spires and forests intervene, And the neat cottage peeps between? No! not for these would he exchange His dark Lochaber’s boundless range: Nor for fair Devon’s meads forsake Ben Nevis grey, and Garry’s lake.