Colebrook Dale

Scene of superfluous grace, and wasted bloom, O, violated COLEBROOK! in an hour, To beauty unpropitious and to song, The Genius of thy shades, by Plutus brib’d, Amid thy grassy lanes, thy woodwild glens, Thy knolls and bubbling wells, thy rocks, and streams, Slumbers!—- while tribes fuliginous invade The soft, romantic, consecrated scenes; Haunt of the wood-nymph, who with airy step, In times long vanish’d, through thy pathless groves Rang’d;—while the pearly-wristed Naiads lean’d, Braiding their light locks o’er thy crystal flood, Shadowy and smooth. What, though to vulgar eye Invisible, yet oft the lucid gaze Of the rapt Bard, in every dell and glade Beheld them wander;—saw, from the clear wave Emerging, all the watry sisters rise, Weaving the aqueous lily, and the flag, In wreaths fantastic, for the tresses bright Of amber-hair’d SABRINA.—Now we view Their fresh, their fragrant, and their silent reign Usurpt by Cyclops;—hear, in mingled tones, Shout their throng’d barge, their pond’rous engines clang Through thy coy dales; while red the countless fires, With umber’d flames, bicker on all thy hills, Dark’ning the Summer’s sun with columns large Of thick, sulphureous smoke, which spread, like palls, That screen the dead, upon the sylvan robe Of thy aspiring rocks; pollute thy gales, And stain thy glassy waters.—See, in troops, The dusk artificers, with brazen throats, Swarm on thy cliffs, and clamour in thy glens, Steepy and wild, ill suited to such guests.

Ah! what avails it to the poet’s sense, That the large stores of thy metallic veins Gleam over Europe; transatlantic shores Illumine wide;—are chang’d in either Ind For all they boast, hot Ceylon’s breathing spice; Peruvian gums; Brazilia’s golden ore; And odorous gums, which Persia’s white-rob’d seer, With warbled orisons, on Ganges’ brink, Kindles, when first his MITHRA’S living ray Purples the Orient.—Ah! the traffic rich, With equal ‘vantage, might Britannia send From regions better suited to such aims, Than from her Colebrook’s muse-devoted vales, To far resounding BIRMINGHAM, the boast, The growing LONDON of the MERCIAN realm; Thence to be wafted o’er our subject seas To every port;—yes, from that town, the mart Of rich inventive Commerce. Science there Leads her enlighten’d sons, to guide the hand Of the prompt artist, and with great design Plan the vast engine, whose extended arms, Heavy and huge, on the soft-seeming breath Of the hot steam, rise slowly;—till, by cold Condens’d, it leaves them soon, with clanging roar, Down, down, to fall precipitant. Nor yet Her fam’d Triumvirate, in every land Known and rever’d, not they the only boast, Of this our second London; the rapt sage, Who trac’d the viewless Aura’s subtle breath Through all its various powers, there bending feeds The lamp of Science with the richest oils Which the arch-chemist. Genius, knows to draw From Nature’s stores, or latent, or reveal’d.

While neighbouring cities waste the fleeting hours, Careless of art and knowledge, and the smile Of every Muse, expanding BIRMINGHAM, Illum’d by intellect, as gay in wealth, Commands her aye-accumulating walls, From month to month, to climb the adjacent hills; Creep on the circling plains, now here, now there, Divergent—change the hedges, thickets, trees, Upturn’d, disrooted, into mortar’d piles, The street elongate, and the statelier square.

So, with intent transmutant, Chemists bruise The shrinking leaves and flowers, whose steams saline, Congealing swift on the recipient’s sides, Shoot into crystals;—and the night-frost thus Insidious creeping on the watry plain, Wave after wave incrusts, till liquid change To solid, and support the volant foot.

Warn’d by the Muse, if Birmingham should draw, In future years, from more congenial climes Her massy ore, her labouring sons recall, And sylvan Colebrook’s winding vales restore To beauty and to song, content to draw From unpoetic scenes her rattling stores, Massy and dun; if, thence supplied, she fail, Britain, to glut thy rage commercial, see Grim WOLVERHAMPTON lights her smouldering fires, And SHEFFIELD, smoke-involv’d; dim where she stands Circled by lofty mountains, which condense Her dark and spiral wreaths to drizzling rains, Frequent and sullied; as the neighbouring hills Ope their deep veins, and feed her cavern’d flames; While, to her dusky sister, Ketley yields, From her long-desolate, and livid breast, The ponderous metal. No aerial forms On Sheffield’s arid moor, or Ketley’s heath, E’er wove the floral crowns, or smiling stretch’d The shelly scepter;—there no Poet rov’d To catch bright inspirations. Blush, ah, blush, Thou venal Genius of these outraged groves, And thy apostate head with thy soil’d wings Veil!—who hast thus thy beauteous charge resign’d To habitants ill-suited; hast allow’d Their rattling forges, and their hammer’s din, And hoarse, rude throats, to fright the gentle train, Dryads, and fair hair’d Naiades;—the song, Once loud as sweet, of the wild woodland choir To silence;—disenchant the poet’s spell, And to a gloomy Erebus transform The destined rival of Tempean vales.