’Or of the Red-Cross hero teach
Dauntless in dungeon as on breach: 
Alike to him the sea, the shore,
The brand, the bridle, or the oar: 
Alike to him the war that calls 85
Its votaries to the shatter’d walls,
Which the grim Turk, besmear’d with blood,
Against the Invincible made good;
Or that, whose thundering voice could wake
The silence of the polar lake, 90
When stubborn Russ, and metal’d Swede,
On the warp’d wave their death-game play’d;
Or that, where Vengeance and Affright
Howl’d round the father of the fight,
Who snatch’d, on Alexandria’s sand, 95
The conqueror’s wreath with dying hand.

’Or, if to touch such chord be thine,
Restore the ancient tragic line,
And emulate the notes that rung
From the wild harp, which silent hung 100
By silver Avon’s holy shore,
Till twice an hundred years roll’d o’er;
When she, the bold Enchantress, came,
With fearless hand and heart on flame! 
From the pale willow snatch’d the treasure, 105
And swept it with a kindred measure,
Till Avon’s swans, while rung the grove
With Montfort’s hate and Basil’s love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deem’d their own Shakspeare lived again.’ 110

Thy friendship thus thy judgment wronging,
With praises not to me belonging,
In task more meet for mightiest powers,
Wouldst thou engage my thriftless hours. 
But say, my Erskine, hast thou weigh’d 115
That secret power by all obey’d,
Which warps not less the passive mind,
Its source conceal’d or undefined;
Whether an impulse, that has birth
Soon as the infant wakes on earth, 120
One with our feelings and our powers,
And rather part of us than ours;
Or whether fitlier term’d the sway
Of habit, form’d in early day? 
Howe’er derived, its force confest 125
Rules with despotic sway the breast,
And drags us on by viewless chain,
While taste and reason plead in vain. 
Look east, and ask the Belgian why,
Beneath Batavia’s sultry sky, 130
He seeks not eager to inhale
The freshness of the mountain gale,
Content to rear his whiten’d wall
Beside the dank and dull canal? 
He’ll say, from youth he loved to see 135
The white sail gliding by the tree. 
Or see yon weatherbeaten hind,
Whose sluggish herds before him wind,
Whose tatter’d plaid and rugged cheek
His northern clime and kindred speak; 140
Through England’s laughing meads he goes,
And England’s wealth around him flows;
Ask, if it would content him well,
At ease in those gay plains to dwell,
Where hedge-rows spread a verdant screen, 145
And spires and forests intervene,
And the neat cottage peeps between? 
No! not for these will he exchange
His dark Lochaber’s boundless range;
Not for fair Devon’s meads forsake 150
Bennevis grey, and Carry’s lake.