Then, as a mother's love and fears Throng round the child, unseen but felt, So by his couch his nation knelt, Loving and worshipping with her tears:-- Tears!--late amends for all that debt Due to the Liberator yet! For though the years their golden round O'er all the lavish region roll, And realm on realm, from pole to pole, In one beneath thy stars be bound: The far-off centuries as they flow, No whiter name than this shall know! --O larger England o'er the wave, Larger, not greater, yet!--With joy Of generous hearts ye hail'd the Boy Who bow'd before the sacred grave, With Love's fair freight across the sea Sped from the Fatherland to thee! And Freedom on that Empire-throne Blest in his Mother's rule revered, On popular love a kingdom rear'd, And rooted in the years unknown,-- Land rich in old Experience' store And holy legacies of yore, And youth eternal, ever-new,-- From the high heaven look'd out:--and saw This other later realm of Law, Of that old household first-born true, And lord of half a world!--and smiled Upon the nations reconciled. The date prefixed is that of the visit which the Prince of Wales paid to the tomb of Washington: carrying home thence, as one of the most distinguished of his hosts said, 'an unwritten treaty of amity and alliance.' Mount Vernon on the Potomac, named after the Admiral, was the family seat of Augustine, father to George Washington, and the residence of the latter from 1752. But all his early years also had been spent in that neighbourhood, in those country pursuits which formed his ideal of life: and thither, on resigning his commission as Commander-in-Chief, he retired in 1785; devoting himself to farming and gardening with all the strenuousness and devoted passion of a Roman of Vergil's type. And there (Dec. 1799) was he buried. _Not eager_; When the ill-feeling between England and America deepened after 1765, Washington 'was less eager than some others in declaring or declaiming against the mother country;' (Mahon: _Hist_. ch. lii). _Ripe to wed with Liberty_; See _Appendix_ G. _And to the end_; See Petrarch's beautiful lines: _Trionfo della Morte_, cap. I. _Due to the Liberator_; Compare the epitaph by Ennius on Scipio: Hic est ille situs, cui nemo civi' neque hostis Quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium. History, it may be said with reasonable confidence, records no hero more unselfish, no one less stained with human error and frailty, than George Washington. _The years unknown_; It is to Odin, whatever date be thereby signified, that our royal genealogy runs back. SANDRINGHAM 1871 In the drear November gloom And the long December night, There were omens of affright, And prophecies of doom; And the golden lamp of life burn'd spectre-dim, Till Love could hardly mark The little sapphire spark That only made the dark More dark and grim.