On Slavery -

Eternal nature! When thy giant hand
Had heaved the floods and fixed the trembling land,
When life sprung startling at thy plastic call
(Endless her forms, and man the lord of all),
Say, was that lordly form inspired by thee
To wear eternal chains and bow the knee?
Was man ordained the slave of man to toil,
Yoked with the brutes and fettered to the soil,
Weighed in a tyrant's balance with his gold?
No! Nature stamped us in a heav'nly mould!
She bade no wretch his thankless labour urge
Nor, trembling, take the pittance and the scourge!
No homeless Lybian on the stormy deep
To call upon his country's name and weep!
Lo! Once in triumph, on his boundless plain,
The quivered chief of Congo loved to reign;
With fires proportioned to his native sky,
Strength in his arm and lightning in his eye,
Scoured with wild feet his sun-illumined zone,
The spear, the lion and the woods his own;
Or led the combat, bold without a plan —
An artless savage, but a fearless man.
The plunderer came — alas, no glory smiles
For Congo's chief on yonder Indian isles!
Forever fallen, no son of nature now,
With freedom chartered on his manly brow!
Faint, bleeding, bound, he weeps the night away,
And, when the sea-wind wafts the dewless day,
Starts, with a bursting heart, for evermore
To curse the sun that lights their guilty shore.
The shrill horn blew — at that alarum knell
His guardian angel took a last farewell;
That funeral dirge to darkness hath resigned
The fiery grandeur of a generous mind.
Poor fettered man! I hear thee whispering low
Unhallowed vows to Guilt, the child of Woe!
Friendless thy heart, and canst thou harbour there
A wish but death, a passion but despair?
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