30 To pardon willing, and to punish loth,
You strike with one hand, but you heal
with both;
Lifting up all that prostrate lie, you
grieve
You cannot make the dead again to live.
31 When fate, or error, had our age misled,
And o’er this nation such confusion
spread,
The only cure, which could from Heaven
come down,
Was so much power and piety in one!
32 One! whose extraction from an ancient line
Gives hope again that well-born men may
shine;
The meanest in your nature, mild and good,
The noblest rest secured in your blood.
33 Oft have we wonder’d how you hid in peace
A mind proportion’d to such things
as these;
How such a ruling sp’rit you could
restrain,
And practise first over yourself to reign.
34 Your private life did a just pattern give,
How fathers, husbands, pious sons should
live;
Born to command, your princely virtues
slept,
Like humble David’s, while the flock
he kept.
35 But when your troubled country called you forth,
Your flaming courage, and your matchless
worth,
Dazzling the eyes of all that did pretend,
To fierce contention gave a prosp’rous
end.
36 Still as you rise, the state, exalted too,
Finds no distemper while ’tis changed
by you;
Changed like the world’s great scene!
when, without noise,
The rising sun night’s vulgar light
destroys.
37 Had you, some ages past, this race of glory
Run, with amazement we should read your
story;
But living virtue, all achievements past,
Meets envy still, to grapple with at last.
38 This Caesar found; and that ungrateful age,
With losing him went back to blood and
rage;
Mistaken Brutus thought to break their
yoke,
But cut the bond of union with that stroke.
39 That sun once set, a thousand meaner stars
Gave a dim light to violence and wars,
To such a tempest as now threatens all,
Did not your mighty arm prevent the fall.
40 If Rome’s great senate could not wield that
sword,
Which of the conquer’d world had
made them lord;
What hope had ours, while yet their power
was new,
To rule victorious armies, but by you?
41 You! that had taught them to subdue their foes,
Could order teach, and their high sp’rits
compose;
To every duty could their minds engage,
Provoke their courage, and command their
rage.
42 So when a lion shakes his dreadful mane,
And angry grows, if he that first took
pain
To tame his youth approach the haughty
beast,
He bends to him, but frights away the
rest.
43 As the vex’d world, to find repose, at last
Itself into Augustus’ arms did cast;
So England now does, with like toil oppress’d,
Her weary head upon your bosom rest.
44 Then let the Muses, with such notes as these,
Instruct us what belongs unto our peace;
Your battles they hereafter shall indite,
And draw the image of our Mars in fight;