On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn,
No glittering fanes or marble domes appear:
Yet shall the weeping muse thy course adorn,
And still to her thy rustic waves be dear.
For with the infant Otway lingering here
Of early woes she bade her votary dream,
While thy low murmurs soothed his pensive ear;
And still the poet consecrates the stream.
Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side,
The first-born violets of the year shall spring
And in thy hazels, bending o'er the tide,
The earliest nightingales delight to sing:
While kindred spirits pitying shall relate
Thy Otway's sorrows, and lament his fate
The poet and novelist Charlotte Turner Smith went to school in Chichester, near the River Arun. Her family also had estates in Sussex. Later in life she moved back to Sussex, living in Brighton and again near Chichester and the River Arun.
Otway is presumably Thomas Otway, the poet and dramatist, who was born nearby in Midhurst, West Sussex.