| |
(From Part III)
LIVES there a savage ruder than the slave? | |
| —Cruel as death, insatiate as the grave, | |
| False as the winds that round his vessel blow, | |
| Remorseless as the gulf that yawns below, | |
| Is he who toils upon the wafting flood, | 5 |
| A Christian broker in the trade of blood; | |
| Boisterous in speech, in action prompt and bold, | |
| He buys, he sells,—he steals, he kills, for gold. | |
| At noon, when sky and ocean, calm and clear, | |
| Bend round his bark one blue unbroken sphere; | 10 |
| When dancing dolphins sparkle through the brine, | |
| And sunbeam circles o’er the water shine; | |
| He sees no beauty in the heaven serene, | |
| No soul-enchanting sweetness in the scene, | |
| But, darkly scowling at the glorious day, | 15 |
| Curses the winds that loiter on their way. | |
| When swoll’n with hurricanes the billows rise, | |
| To meet the lightning midway from the skies; | |
| When from the unburthen’d hold his shrieking slaves | |
| Are cast, at midnight, to the hungry waves; | 20 |
| Not for his victims strangled in the deeps, | |
| Not for his crimes the harden’d pirate weeps, | |
| But grimly smiling, when the storm is o’er, | |
| Counts his sure gains, and hurries back for more. * * * * * | |
| When the loud trumpet of eternal doom | 25 |
| Shall break the mortal bondage of the tomb; | |
| When with a mother’s pangs the expiring earth | |
| Shall bring her children forth to second birth: | |
| Then shall the sea’s mysterious caverns, spread | |
| With human relics, render up their dead: | 30 |
| Though warm with life the heaving surges glow, | |
| Where’er the winds of heaven were wont to blow, | |
| In sevenfold phalanx shall the rallying hosts | |
| Of ocean slumberers join their wandering ghosts, | |
| Along the melancholy gulph, that roars | 35 |
| From Guinea to the Charibbean shores. | |
| Myriads of slaves, that perish’d on the way, | |
| From age to age the shark’s appointed prey, | |
| By livid plagues, by lingering tortures slain, | |
| Or headlong plunged alive into the main, | 40 |
| Shall rise in judgment from their gloomy beds, | |
| And call down vengeance on their murderers’ heads. | |
| |
