Then will I seek the dreary mound STANZAS, ON THE THREATENED INVASION, 1803. OUR bosoms we'll bare for the glorious strife, To prevail in the cause that is dearer than life, Or crushed in its ruins to die! Then rise, fellow freemen, and stretch the right hand, And swear to prevail in your dear native land! "Tis the home we hold sacred is laid to our trust In a Briton's sweet home shall a spoiler abide, Shall a Frenchman insult the loved fair at our side? To arms oh, my Country, to arms! Then rise, fellow freemen, and stretch the right hand, And swear to prevail in your dear native land! Shall a tyrant enslave us, my countrymen! A death-bed repentance be taught the proud foe, THE RITTER BANN. THE Ritter Bann from Hungary While other knights held revels, he And in Vienna's hostelrie Slow paced his lonely room. There entered one whose face he knew,- He oft at mass had listened to, In the holy house of prayer. 'Twas the Abbot of St. James's monks, A fresh and fair old man : His reverend air arrested even But seeing with him an ancient dame The Ritter's color went and came, "Ha! nurse of her that was my bane, I wish it blotted from my brain: "Sir Knight," the Abbot interposed, This case your ear demands;" And the crone cried, with a cross enclosed In both her trembling hands: : "Remember, each his sentence waits; Sweet Mercy's suit, on him the gates "You wedded, undispensed by Church, "Her house denounced your marriage-band, Betrothed her to De Grey, And the ring you put upon her hand "Then wept your Jane upon my neck. "You were not there; and 'twas their threat, By foul means or by fair, To-morrow morning was to set The seal on her despair. "I had a son, a sea-boy, in A ship at Hartland Bay; By his aid from her cruel kin "To Scotland from the Devon's "She wrote you by my son, but he "For they that wronged you, to elude "To die but at your feet, she vowed To roam the world; and we Would both have sped and begged our bread, But so it might not be: "For when the snow-storm beat our roof, She bore a boy, Sir Bann, Who grew as fair your likeness proof ""Twas smiling on that babe one morn, "She shunned him, but he raved of Jane, And roused his mother's pride: Who came to us in high disdain, 'And where's the face,' she cried, "Has witched my boy to wish for one Dost love thy husband? Know, my son 'Her anger sore dismayed us, For our mite was wearing scant, And, unless that dame would aid us, There was none to aid our want. "So I told her, weeping bitterly, "And she housed us both, when, cheerfully My child to her had sworn, That even if made a widow, she Would never wed Kinghorn.". Here paused the nurse, and then began "He heard me long, with ghastly eyes And hand obdurate clenched, Speak of the worm that never dies, And the fire that is not quenched. "At last by what this scroll attests For years of anguish to the breasts "There lived,' he said, 'a fair young dame Beneath my mother's roof; |