Greed and fraud, unabashed, unawed, may strive to sting thee at heel in vain: Craft and fear and mistrust may leer and mourn and murmur and plead and plain: Thou art thou: and thy sunbright brow is hers that blasted the strength of Spain. Mother, mother beloved, none other could claim in place of thee England’s place: Earth bears none that beholds the sun so pure of record, so clothed with grace: Dear our mother, nor son nor brother is thine, as strong or as fair of face. How shall thou be abased? or how shall fear take hold of thy heart? of thine, England, maiden immortal, laden with charge of life and with hopes divine? Earth shall wither, when eyes turned hither behold not light in her darkness shine. England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory, free, Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships thee; None may sing thee: the sea-wind’s wing beats down our songs as it hails the sea. _Algernon Charles Swinburne._ XCV A JACOBITE’S EXILE (1746) The weary day rins down and dies, The weary night wears through: And never an hour is fair wi’ flower, And never a flower wi’ dew. I would the day were night for me, I would the night were day: For then would I stand in my ain fair land, As now in dreams I may. O lordly flow the Loire and Seine, And loud the dark Durance: But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne Than a’ the fields of France; And the waves of Till that speak sae still Gleam goodlier where they glance. O weel were they that fell fighting On dark Drumossie’s day: They keep their hame ayont the faem And we die far away. O sound they sleep, and saft, and deep, But night and day wake we; And ever between the sea-banks green Sounds loud the sundering sea. And ill we sleep, sae sair we weep, But sweet and fast sleep they; And the mool that haps them roun’ and laps them Is e’en their country’s clay; But the land we tread that are not dead Is strange as night by day. Strange as night in a strange man’s sight, Though fair as dawn it be: For what is here that a stranger’s cheer Should yet wax blithe to see? The hills stand steep, the dells lie deep, The fields are green and gold: The hill-streams sing, and the hill-sides ring, As ours at home of old. But hills and flowers are nane of ours, And ours are over sea: And the kind strange land whereon we stand, It wotsna what were we Or ever we came, wi’ scathe and shame, To try what end might be. Scathe, and shame, and a waefu’ name, And a weary time and strange, Have they that seeing a weird for dreeing Can die, and cannot change.