You Ask Me Why...

You ask me why, though ill at ease
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist
And languish for the purple seas.

It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land where, girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;

A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent;

Where Faction seldom gathers head,
But, by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.

Should banded unions persecute
Opinion, and induce a time
When single thought is civil crime,
And individual freedom mute,

Tho' power should make from land to land
The name of Britain trebly great-
Tho' every channel of the state
Is filled and choked with golden sand-

Yet waft me from the harbor mouth
Wild Wind! I seek a warmer sky,
And I shall see before I die
The palms and temples of the South.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson-