Classic Poem

Ships to conduct, or Oceans to control,
Phenician arts, once more, to bring to view,
Requires a daring, but a patient soul
Inured to dangers and to miseries too;
To meet the worst, with firm enduring mind,
Calm even in death, in fates last shock resigned.

When the proud ALBION struck the fatal reef
Where pitying crowds could yield her no relief,
With those, to friendship, friends, and country lost,
Lefevre perished on that iron coast,
Where cliffs, tremendous, swept by many a gale,
Mark the rude entrance to thy port, Kinsale .

Fortune, to some in clouds and glooms arrayed
Paints Life's career with one unmingling shade,
No smiles, no ray of Sunshine through the gloom
Alleviates the pain, or mitigates their doom;
Shade follows shade, to disconcert the man ,
And the dark circle ends as it began.

Such was thy lot, Lefevre, such thy fate,
Napoleon's favorite at no distant date;
Such was thy doom!—“inglorious some would say
“Better in dungeons to have pined away,
“Better in arms to find an honored grave
“Than sink, unnoticed, in the briny wave.”

They speak not so who drink at wisdom's spring,
Their cool reflection says a different thing:
When the great author of our life decrees
The final hour, and seals our destinies,
Alike to HIM— they equal honor claim
Who sink in oceans or in fields of fame.

But still, we hold Lefevre's doom severe,
Almost in view of all he held most dear;
With joy returning to a wife adored,
An infant offspring, country, friends, restored,
Just in the hour when all his hopes ran high
Just on the verge of France—fate bade him die!

Twice had his consort sought Columbia's shore,
To meet the man she early loved, once more;
Twice ruthless tempests made the ships a wreck;
And to her native Europe forced her back;
While he, an Exile in our western waste
Her long lost image in his dreams embraced.

Sighed as he toil'd, and gazed from day to day,
In Fancy's visions o'er the watery way:
Her wish'd arrival every toil endeared.
For her he ploughed the soil, the forest cleared;
For her , the solace of his six year's pain,
Whom heaven had doomed him—not to meet again.

Oh! hadst thou stayed in Alabama's waste
And her dear form in Fancy's dreams embraced,
Hope still had beamed upon thy night of gloom;
Exile was better than a watery tomb—
Now every hope, to cheer the mind is fled,
For one is wretched, and the other dead!