17 Whether they unctuous exhalations are,
       Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone: 
     Or each some more remote and slippery star,
       Which loses footing when to mortals shown.

  18 Or one, that bright companion of the sun,
       Whose glorious aspect seal’d our new-born king;
     And now a round of greater years begun,
       New influence from his walks of light did bring.

  19 Victorious York did first with famed success,
       To his known valour make the Dutch give place: 
     Thus Heaven our monarch’s fortune did confess,
       Beginning conquest from his royal race.

  20 But since it was decreed, auspicious King,
       In Britain’s right that thou shouldst wed the main,
     Heaven, as a gage, would cast some precious thing,
       And therefore doom’d that Lawson[37] should be slain.

  21 Lawson amongst the foremost met his fate,
       Whom sea-green Sirens from the rocks lament;
     Thus as an offering for the Grecian state,
       He first was kill’d who first to battle went.

  22 Their chief blown up in air, not waves, expired,
       To which his pride presumed to give the law: 
     The Dutch confess’d Heaven present, and retired,
       And all was Britain the wide ocean saw.

  23 To nearest ports their shatter’d ships repair,
       Where by our dreadful cannon they lay awed: 
     So reverently men quit the open air,
       When thunder speaks the angry gods abroad.

  24 And now approach’d their fleet from India, fraught
       With all the riches of the rising sun: 
     And precious sand from southern climates brought,
       The fatal regions where the war begun.

  25 Like hunted castors, conscious of their store,
       Their waylaid wealth to Norway’s coasts they bring: 
     There first the north’s cold bosom spices bore,
       And winter brooded on the eastern spring.

  26 By the rich scent we found our perfumed prey,
       Which, flank’d with rocks, did close in covert lie;
     And round about their murdering cannon lay,
       At once to threaten and invite the eye.

  27 Fiercer than cannon, and than rocks more hard,
       The English undertake the unequal war: 
     Seven ships alone, by which the port is barr’d,
       Besiege the Indies, and all Denmark dare.

  28 These fight like husbands, but like lovers those: 
       These fain would keep, and those more fain enjoy: 
     And to such height their frantic passion grows,
       That what both love, both hazard to destroy.

  29 Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball,
       And now their odours arm’d against them fly: 
     Some preciously by shatter’d porcelain fall,
       And some by aromatic splinters die.

  30 And though by tempests of the prize bereft,
       In Heaven’s inclemency some ease we find: 
     Our foes we vanquish’d by our valour left,
       And only yielded to the seas and wind.