- This last brain-racking study had not ply’d:
- But, sunk in slumbers of immortal bliss,
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To bards had listned on a fancied Thames!
- ALL hail, old father Thames! tho’ not from far [635]
- Thy springing waters roll; nor countless streams,
- Of name conspicuous, swell thy watery store;1
- Tho’ thou, no Plata,2 to the sea devolve
- Vast humid offerings; thou art king of streams:
- Delighted Commerce broods upon thy wave;3 [640]
- And every quarter of this sea-girt globe
- To thee due tribute pays; but chief the world
- By great Columbus found, where now the muse
- Beholds, transported, slow vast fleecy clouds,
- Alps pil’d on Alps romantically high, [645]
- Which charm the sight with many a pleasing form.
- The moon, in virgin-glory, gilds the pole,
- And tips yon tamarinds, tips yon Cane-crown’d vale,
- With fluent silver; while unnumbered stars
- Gild the vast concave with their lively beams. [650]
- The main, a moving burnish’d mirror, shines;
- No noise is heard, save when the distant surge
- With drouzy murmurings breaks upon the shore!—
VER. 638. no Plata,] One of the largest rivers of South America.
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Compare the last fifty lines of the poem to the end of Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest (1713), a poem that celebrates Britain’s history and culminates with the triumphal image of the Thames river, symbolizing British commerce, spreading across the world, carrying peace and liberty with it. ↩︎
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Rio de la Plata is an estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay and the Paraná rivers in South America. ↩︎
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If commerce has been the implicit theme of The Sugar-Cane, here Grainger personifies it explicitly as the core of Britain’s power. ↩︎