Wild mountaineer of Corsica, why laid In idle dreams beneath the olive shade? With gun in hand, supinely outstretch'd there, Gazing half-conscious on the glitt'ring air? Thy hungry child, in gloomy dwelling pent, Weeps with his mother o'er her spinning bent; They weep, their toil unceasing and untold, Their chamber empty and their hearth-stone cold. Yet thou can'st falcon-like perch idly there, And scorn to cultivate that valley fair, To sow the golden seed in fertile ground, And train the clust'ring vine thy walls around. Look, look below thee, where the sunny plain, Stretches away to yon blue mountain-chain, And slopes down smiling to the very main: A Paradise where living streams abound;— Yet there the rude Albatro chokes the ground, The myrtle revels in its empire wide, Tall ferns and heather flourish side by side, And black-hair'd goats the summer-crop divide. The Golo creeps along its swampy bed, Whose tainted vapour thro' the air is spread, Sapping the fisher's life from day to day, While amply furnishing his finny prey. The lonely wand'rer at each onward tread, Sees heath-birds rise and wheel about his head; Finds ruin'd fragments of a nobler past— Traces of Rome, to dust decaying fast. Up, then, thou Corsican, from dull repose, Arise and seize thine axe, and deal thy blows; Take spade and mattock, till the ground, and see A golden-fruited garden smile on thee! THE CORSICAN.