WRITTEN BY THE HON. WILLIAM LAMB.
SPOKEN BY MRS. JORDAN.
| Ere yet suspense has still’d its throbbing fear, | |
| Or melancholy wiped the grateful tear, | |
| While e’en the miseries of a sinking state, | |
| A monarch’s danger, and a nation’s fate, | |
| Command not now your eyes with grief to flow | |
| Lost in a trembling mother’s nearer woe; | |
| What moral lay shall poetry rehearse, | |
| Or how shall elocution pour the verse | |
| So sweetly, that its music shall repay | |
| The loved illusion which it drives away? | |
| Mine is the task, to rigid custom due, | |
| To me ungrateful as ’tis harsh to you, | |
| To mar the work the tragic scene has wrought, | |
| To rouse the mind that broods in pensive thought, | |
| To scare reflection, which, in absent dreams, | |
| Still lingers musing on the recent themes; | |
| Attention, ere with contemplation tired, | |
| To turn from all that pleased, from all that fired; | |
| To weaken lessons strongly now impress’d, | |
| And chill the interest glowing in the breast— | |
| Mine is the task; and be it mine to spare | |
| The souls that pant, the griefs they see, to share; | |
| Let me with no unhallow’d jest deride | |
| The sigh, that sweet compassion owns with pride— | |
| The sigh of comfort, to affliction dear, | |
| That kindness heaves, and virtue loves to hear. | |
| E’en gay Thalia will not now refuse | |
| This gentle homage to her sister-muse. | |
| O ye, who listen to the plaintive strain, | |
| With strange enjoyment, and with rapturous pain, | |
| Who erst have felt the Stranger’s lone des pair, | |
| And Haller’s settled, sad, remorseful care, | |
| Does Rolla’s pure affection less excite | |
| The inexpressive anguish of delight? | |
| Do Cora’s fears, which beat without control, | |
| With less solicitude engross the soul? | |
| Ah, no! your minds with kindred zeal approve | |
| Maternal feeling, and heroic love. | |
| You must approve: where man exists below, | |
| In temperate climes, or midst drear wastes of snow: | |
| Or where the solar fires incessant flame, | |
| Thy laws, all-powerful Nature, are the same: | |
| Vainly the sophist boasts he can explain | |
| The causes of thy universal reign— | |
| More vainly would his cold presumptuous art | |
| Disprove thy general empire o’er the heart: | |
| A voice proclaims thee, that we must believe— | |
| A voice, that surely speaks not to deceive: | |
| That voice poor Cora heard, and closely press’d | |
| Her darling infant to her fearful breast: | |
| Distracted dared the bloody field to tread, | |
| And sought Alonzo through the heaps of dead, | |
| Eager to catch the music of his breath, | |
| Though faltering in the agonies of death, | |
| To touch his lips, though pale and cold, once more, | |
| And clasp his bosom, though it stream’d with gore: | |
| That voice too Rolla heard, and greatly brave, | |
| His Cora’s dearest treasure died to save; | |
| Gave to the hopeless parent’s arms her child, | |
| Beheld her transports, and, expiring, smiled. | |
| That voice we hear—oh! be its will obey’d! | |
| ’Tis valour’s impulse, and ’tis virtue’s aid— | |
| It prompts to all benevolence admires, | |
| To all that heavenly piety inspires, | |
| To all that praise repeats through lengthen’d years, | |
| That honour sanctifies, and time reveres. |