With living colours give my verse to glow,
The sad memorial of a tale of woe!
The fate in lively sorrow to deplore
Of wanderers shipwreck'd on a leeward shore.
Alas! neglected by the sacred Nine,
Their suppliant feels no genial ray divine: 40
Ah! will they leave Pieria's happy shore
To plough the tide where wintry tempests roar?
Or shall a youth approach their hallow'd fane,
Stranger to Phoebus, and the tuneful train?
Far from the Muses' academic grove
'Twas his the vast and trackless deep to rove;
Alternate change of climates has he known,
And felt the fierce extremes of either zone:
Where polar skies congeal the eternal snow,
Or equinoctial suns for ever glow, 50
Smote by the freezing, or the scorching blast,
'A ship-boy on the high and giddy mast,' [1]
From regions where Peruvian billows roar,
To the bleak coasts of savage Labrador;
From where Damascus, pride of Asian plains,
Stoops her proud neck beneath tyrannic chains,
To where the Isthmus, [2] laved by adverse tides,
Atlantic and Pacific seas divides:
But while he measured o'er the painful race
In fortune's wild illimitable chase, 60
Adversity, companion of his way,
Still o'er the victim hung with iron sway,
Bade new distresses every instant grow,
Marking each change of place with change of woe: