Cleveland

[Cleveland]

Cleveland! I know no nook of earth like thee!
No mountain scenes o’er charm me like mine own,—
The altars of benignant Liberty!
The palace where the muses have their throne!
Upon thy cliffs I love to take my stand, 5
And view the ocean as it rolls below,
Roaring like lions on some distant strand—
Contending like an hero when the blow
Of fierce invader’s levell’d at his head,
Whilst all around the gory trunks are laid 10
Of comrades from which life’s for ever fled:
And the valleys, ’neath some old oak’s shade,
I love to linger at the close of day,
In dreams of future good to pass my life away.

George Markham Tweddell
Stokesley G. T.
[Tweddell’s Yorkshire Miscellany, p. 248, January 1846.
The poem appears again in Tractates No. 7 as Cleveland
Sonnets, No. II.]