“Fame asks not where was sown the seed,

Or where was nursed the root;

But victory's palm and honour's meed

Adjudges to the fruit!”

It stood beside the broad and billowy deep,

A humble dwelling, in its better day;

Over its thatch the winter winds would sweep,

And on its walls oft beat the ocean spray:

As years rolled on it fell into decay,

Sharing the doom that prouder piles must share,

And now its very form hath passed away,

Buried amidst the wreck of things which were ;

Yet still its memory lives, cherished with grateful care.

For Genius hath immortalized the spot!

Blending it with the Poet's deathless name,

And casting round the memory of that cot

The potent charm of his enduring fame;

Potent— because not won by numbers tame

And common-place, in flowers of fiction drest,

But by the TRUTH, which formed his proudest claim,

“Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best!”

This was his highest charm, his verses’ truest test.

It was not his to sing of rural swains,

In strains Arcadian, caught from days of yore;

Painting their hopes and fears, their joys and pains,

To classic models true— and nothing more;

He sang them, as he found them on the shore

Of the wild ocean, “an amphibious race;”

Yet not unmindful, in their varied store

Of good and ill, of each redeeming grace,

Though few and far between, which truth allowed to trace.

’Tis in the sterling truth and sober sense

Legible in his deeply moral lay,

Are found “the head and front of the offence,”

For which some still his graphic page gainsay:

Poetry was, with him, no artist's play!

But Nature's voice, the heart's interpreter;

And by this standard tested, even they

Who at his darker touches most demur,

Must own him of his themes a faithful chronicler.

Sailors and smugglers, gipsies, poachers, boors,

Fishers, and publicans; a motley throng!

The life these led, or in or out of doors,

Such, chiefly, formed the staple of his song;

His lot was cast, by circumstance, among