Elegy XIV. Declining an Invitation To Visit Foreign Countries
DECLINING AN INVITATION TO VISIT FOREIGN COUNTRIES, HE TAKES OCCASION TO INTIMATE THE ADVANTAGES OF HIS OWN. TO LORD TEMPLE.
While others, lost to friendship, lost to love,
Waste their best minutes on a foreign strand,
Be mine, with British nymph or swain to rove,
And court the Genius of my native land.
Deluded Youth! that quits these verdant plains,
To catch the follies of an alien soil!
To win the vice his genuine soul disdains,
Return exultant, and import the spoil!
In vain he boasts of his detested prize;
No more it blooms, to British climes convey'd;
Cramp'd by the impulse of ungenial skies,
See its fresh vigour in a moment fade;
Th' exotic folly knows its native clime;
An awkward stranger, if we waft it o'er;
Why then these toils, this costly waste of time,
To spread soft poison on our happy shore?
I covet not the pride of foreign looms;
In search of foreign modes I scorn to rove;
Nor, for the worthless bird of brighter plumes,
Would change the meanest warbler of my grove.
No distant clime shall servile airs impart,
Or form these limbs with pliant ease to play;
Trembling I view the Gaul's illusive art,
That steals my loved rusticity away.
'Tis long since Freedom fled th' Hesperian clime,
Her citron groves, her flower-embroider'd shore;
She saw the British oak aspire sublime,
And soft Campania's olive charms no more.
Let partial suns mature the western mine,
To shed its lustre o'er th' Iberian maid;
Mien, beauty, shape, O native soil! are thine;
Thy peerless daughters ask no foreign aid.
Let Ceylon's envied plant perfume the seas,
Till torn to season the Batavian bowl;
Ours is the breast whose genuine ardours please,
Nor need a drug to meliorate the soul.
Let the proud Soldan wound th' Arcadian groves,
Or with rude lips th' Aonian fount profane;
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poem by William Shenstone
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