Page:New England Fallen.pdf/4

Agrestic bliss! Why canst thou not remain?
Why must the years bring evil in their train?
Why have the rustics’ sons forsaken home,
In dismal towns and distant lands to roam?
Why have they left the meadows of their birth;
Quit rural ease for urban want and dearth?
Why are base foreign boors allow’d to dwell
Amongst the hills where Saxon greatness fell;
Live their low lives, themselves in filth degrade
As monkeys haunt a palace long decay’d?

Less fresh and green seem now New-England’s hills,
The air is tainted by the smoke of mills;
The tott’ring houses, scarcely held erect,
Shake in the wind, and crumble from neglect,
Though in a few some wretched aliens dwell
’Midst hideous squalor, and repulsive smell.
The empty church with mould’ring rot decays;
The lofty steeple on its fast’ning sways:
Within its grass-grown yard, in peaceful sleep,
The parson lies, but none remain to weep.
The village rings with ribald foreign cries;
Around the wine-shops loaf with bleary eyes
A vicious crew, that mock the name of “man,”
Yet dare to call themselves “American.”
New-England’s ships no longer ride the sea;
Once prosp’rous parts are sunk in poverty.
The rotting wharves as ruins tell the tale
Of days when Yankees mann’d the swelling sail.
The Indies yield no more their cargoes rare;
The sooty mill’s New-England’s present care:
The noisy mill, by foreign peasants run,
Supplants the glorious shipping that hath gone.
In arid fields, the kine no longer low;
The soil knows not the furrow of the plough;
The rolling meadows all neglected lie,
Fleck’d here and there by some foul alien’s sty.
The school no more contains the busy class;
The walls are down, the ruins chok’d with grass.
Within the gate-post swallows build their nests;
Upon the hill, the gentle master rests.
The mossy lane with briers is o’ergrown;
The bound’ry walls are shapeless heaps of stone,
And through the mourning trees the winds in sorrow moan.

Whence comes this devastation of the land,
This awful blow of the Almighty’s hand?
Where is New-England, that our fathers knew,
Where pious men in rugged virtue grew?
Where law and order rul’d the rustic realm,