Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River

And call they this Improvement?—to have changed,My native Clyde, thy once romantic shore,Where Nature’s face is banished and estranged,And Heaven reflected in thy wave no more;Whose banks, that sweetened May-day’s breath before,Lie sere and leafless now in summer’s beam,With sooty exhalations covered o’er;And for the daisied green sward, down thy streamUnsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam.

Speak not to me of swarms the scene sustains;One heart free tasting Nature’s breath and bloomIs worth a thousand slaves to Mammon’s gains.But whither goes that wealth, and gladd’ning whom?See, left but life enough and breathing-roomThe hunger and the hope of life to feel,Yon pale Mechanic bending o’er his loom,And Childhood’s self as at Ixion’s wheel,From morn till midnight tasked to earn its little meal.

Is this Improvement?—where the human breedDegenerates as they swarm and overflow,Till Toil grows cheaper than the trodden weed,And man competes with man, like foe with foe,Till Death, that thins them, scarce seems public woe?Improvement!—smiles it in the poor man’s eyes,Or blooms it on the cheek of Labour?—No—To gorge a few with Trade’s precarious prize,We banish rural life, and breathe unwholesome skies.

Nor call that evil slight; God has not givenThis passion to the heart of man in vain,For Earth’s green face, th’ untainted air of Heaven,And all the bliss of Nature’s rustic reign.For not alone our frame imbibes a stainFrom fœtid skies; the spirit’s healthy prideFades in their gloom—And therefore I complain,That thou no more through pastoral scenes shouldst glide,My Wallace’s own stream, and once romantic Clyde!