This page has been validated.
xxxv
with little complacency that her powers were wasted in supineness or in trivial occupations; and early in 1790 he apostrophized her in the following sonnet:
Thus speaks the Muse, and bends her brow severe:—
"Did I, Lætitia, lend my choicest lays,
And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays,
That all the' expectance of thy full-grown year
Should lie inert and fruitless? O revere
Those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,
Whose potent charms the’ enraptured soul can raise
Far from the vapours of this earthly sphere!
Seize, seize the lyre! resume the lofty strain!
’T is time, 't is time! hark how the nations round
With jocund notes of liberty resound,—
And thy own Corsica has burst her chain!
O let the song to Britain's shores rebound,
Where Freedom's once-loved voice is heard, alas! in vain."
"Did I, Lætitia, lend my choicest lays,
And crown thy youthful head with freshest bays,
That all the' expectance of thy full-grown year
Should lie inert and fruitless? O revere
Those sacred gifts whose meed is deathless praise,
Whose potent charms the’ enraptured soul can raise
Far from the vapours of this earthly sphere!
Seize, seize the lyre! resume the lofty strain!
’T is time, 't is time! hark how the nations round
With jocund notes of liberty resound,—
And thy own Corsica has burst her chain!
O let the song to Britain's shores rebound,
Where Freedom's once-loved voice is heard, alas! in vain."
This animating expostulation conspiring with the events of the spirit-stirring times which now approached, had the effect of once more rousing her to exertion. In 1790, the rejection of a bill for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts called
