Climbs with red eye, the light-illumined steep,
And brightly beautiful continuous smiles
A fecund blessing on those Indian Isles!
Like eastern woods which sweeten as they burn,
So, the parched earths to odorous flowrets turn,
And feathered fayes their murmurous wings expand,
Waked by the magic of his conjuror's wand,
Flash their red plumes, and vocalize each dell
Where browse the fecho and the dun-gazelle,[11]
While half forgetful of her changing sphere,
The loathful summer lingers year by year.
Here, in the light of God's supernal eye--
His realms unbounded, and his woes a sigh--
The dusky son of evening placed whilcome
Found with the Gnu an ever-vernal home,
And wiser than Athenas' wisest schools,[12]
Nor led by zealots, nor scholastic rules,
Gazed at the stars that stud yon tender blue,
And hoped, and deemed the cheat of death untrue;
Yet, supple sophist to a plastic mind,[13]
Saw gods in woods, and spirits in the wind,
Heard in the tones that stirred the waves within,
The mingled voice of Hadna and Odin,
Doomed the fleeced tenant of the wild to bleed
A guileless votive to his harmless creed,
Then gladly grateful at each rite fulfilled,
Sought the cool shadow where the spring distilled,
And lightly lab'rous thro' the torpid day,
Whiled in sweet peace the sultry eve away.
Or if perchance to nature darkly true,
He strikes the war-path thro' the midnight dew,
Steals in the covert on the sleeping foe,
And wreaks the horrors of a barbarous woe;
Yet, yet returning to the home-girt spot--
The vengeful causes and the deed forgot--[14]
Where greenest boughs o'er sloping banks impend,
And gurgling waves to bosky dells descend;
Intent the long expectant brood to sea,
He halts beneath the broad acacia tree;
And warmly pressed by wonder-gloating eyes,
Displays the vantage of each savage prize;
Stills with glad pride and plundered gems, uncouth,
The ardent longings of his daughter's youth;
Bids the dark spouse the tropic meal prepare,
Mid laughing echoes from the bird-voiced air;
Passes before him in a fond review
The merry numbers of his crisp-haired crew;[15]
Recounts the dangers of the last night's strife,
Joys with their joy, and lives their inner life;
And then when slow the lengthened day expires,
Mid twilight balms and star-enkindled fires,
With _all_ the father sees each form retire,
A ruthless heathen, but a loving sire.[16]
Innocuously thus, thro' long, long years
Untaught by learning, yet unknown to fears,
The swarthy Afric whiled the jocund hours,
A petted child of nature's rosiest bowers,
Till lured by wealth the hardy Portuguese,[17]
Seeks the green waters of his Eastern seas,
And venturous nations more excursive grown,
Scan his glad coast from radiant zone to zone,
Then Fortune's minion in a foreign clime,
Cursed by his own and damned to later time,
Of incest born and by the chances thrown
A tainted alien on a ravished throne,
Gapes the foul flatteries of a fawning train,
And fatuous mock'ries, which themselves disdain,
A fancied monarch, but the witless sport
Of adulation, and a practiced court,
Vaunts to his broad realms and Timour-like proclaims
Illusive titles of barbaric names,
Cheats his own nature, and now generous grown,[18]
Dispenses souls and empires not his own,
Draws the deep purple round his royal seat,
Lifts his low crest, affects the God complete,
By giving with light breath, oh, shame to tell!
These heirs of Heav'n unto the fate of hell.
Sped by the mandate of his recreant train,
Lo! commerce, broad winged seraph of the main!
Shook her white plumage and coqueting, won
Propitious favors from the southern sun,
Till manly hearts and keel-impelling gales,
Furled on the coast her half-reluctant sails.
Abashed, amazed, with fear-dilated eye
The marvelling tribes these new-born wonders spy;
See from the shore, bright glittering in the sun,
The moving freightage of each galleon;
Wait till the measured strokes of oars bring near
These way-lost wanderers of another sphere,
Then timorously glad, yet awe-struck still,
Lead from the sunshine to the breezy hill;
With courteous grace a resting place assign
'Neath rustling leaves and grape-empurpled vine,
And led by craft in artless pride make known
The lustrous lurements of their gorgeous zone,
As in the field some skilful ranger sets
The fraudful cordage of his specious nets,
Places some fragrant viand in the snare,
And captive takes the unsuspicious hare;
So the bold strangers with superior will
Lay their base plans with disingenuous skill,
Ope their stored treasures and with art display
Their worthless figments to the air of day,
Roll their large lids, and with grave gestures laud
Each tinsel trinket and each painted gaud;
With mystic signs of strange import apply
Some gew-gaw bauble to the gloating eye;
Touch with nice skill, yet craft-dissembled smile,
Gems from the mine and spices from the Isle,
Affect no care, yet hope a thrifty sale--
The wealth of Empires in th' opposing scale--
While he, the poor victim of their selfish creed,
Prescient of evil art foredoomed to bleed,
Pleased yet alarmed, desiring but deterred,
Flutters still nearer like a snake-charmed bird;
Alas, too often taken with a toy--
Too soon to weep a kindred fate with Troy!
Evils received, like twilight stars dilate,
The less the light, the larger grows their state;
Thus the first error in that savage air,
Spreads as a flame, and leaves a ruin there.
Too dearly generous and too warmly true,[19]
The simple black wears out the fatal clew,--
From barter flies to trade; from trade to wants;
From wants to interests and derided haunts;
Thence, rolls from off the once-sequestered shore,
The turgid tide of havoc and of war;
No warning ringing from the red adunes,
No prophets rising, and no Laocoons,
Remotest tribes the baleful influence own;
Feel to extremes, and at their centres groan.
Now laughs the stranger at their anguished throes,[20]
Feeds on their ills, and battens on their woes;
Glads his freed conscience at each pillaged mine,
And finds forgiveness at a Christian shrine;
By specious creeds and sophists darkly taught,[21]
To semble virtue and dissemble thought,
With Saviour-seeming smile, adds fuel to the flame,--
Ulysses' craft, without Ulysses' aim,--
And sadly faithful to his dark designs,
Fiction improves; heroic rage refines;
For lo! Achilles, victor of the train!
Draws Hector lifeless, round the Ilian plain;
But ah! these later Greeks more cruel strive,
And bind their victim to the load alive!
Oh, beats there, Heaven, beneath thy gorgeous blue,
One heart so basely to itself untrue,
So dead of pulse, and so insensate grown,
It feels not such a cause dear as its own?
Dwells there a being 'neath thine eye, oh, God!
A fellow-worm from out the self-same clod,
Whose fevered blood does not impatient boil,
Fierce as a tiger's in the hunter's toil,
To see degenerate men and States prolong,
So foul a deed--so thrice accursed a wrong?
Tell me, ye loud-voiced winds that ceaseless roll,
Eternal miracles from pole to pole,
Breathes there on earth so vile and mean a thing
That crushed, it will not turn again and sting?
And say! ye tyrants in your boasted halls,
Read ye no warnings on your darkened walls?
Hear ye no seeming mutterings of the cloud
Break from the millions which your steps have bowed?
Think ye, ye hold in your ignoble thrall,
Mind, soul, thought, taste, hope, feeling, valor, all?
No; these unfettered scorn your nerveless hand,
Sport at their will, and scoff at your command,
Range through arcades of shadow-brooding palms,
Snuff their free airs and breathe their floating balms,
Or bolder still, on fancy's fiery wing--[22]
Caught from their letters at the noon-day spring--
With star-eyed science, and her seraph train
Read the bright secrets of yon azure plain;
Hear Loxian murmurs in Rhodolphe's caves[23]
Meet with sweet answers from the nymph-voiced waves;
Sit with the pilot at Phoenicia's helm,
And mark the boundries of the Lybian realm;
See swarthy Memnon in the grave debate,
Dispute with gods, and rule a conqu'ring state,
And warmly and kindling dare--yes, _dare_ to hope,
A second Empire on the future's scope!
And thou, my country, latest born of time!
Dearest of all, of all the most sublime!
How long shall patriots own, with blush of shame,
So foul a blot upon so fair a name?
How long thy sons with filial hearts deplore,
A Python evil on thy Cyprean shore?
What! and wilt thou, the moral Hercules
Whose youth eclipsed the dream of Pericles,
Whose trunceant bands heroically caught,
The Spartan phalanx with the Attic thought,
The wizard throne of age-nursed error hurled,
Defied a tyrant and transfixed a world!
Wilt _thou_ see Afric like old Priam sue,
The bones of children as in nature due,
And foully craven, ingrate-like forget,
Thy life, thy learning's her dishonored debt?
Say; wilt not _thou_, whose time-ennobling sons--
Thy Jay's, thy Franklin's and thy Washington's,
Caught the bright cestus from fair freedom's God,
And bound it as a girdle to thy sod;
Ah! wilt not thou with generous mind confess
The might of woe, the strength of helplessness?
High-Heaven's almoner to a world oppressed,
Who in the march of nations led the rest![24]
Will there no Gracchus in _thy_ Senate stand
And speak the words that millions should command?
No Clysthementhe 'neath thy broad arched dome,
Predict the fortunes with the crimes of Rome?
Shall time yet partial in his cycling course,
Bring thee no Fox, no Pitt, no Wilberforce?
Still must thou live and corybantic die,
A traceless meteor in a clouding sky;
Thy name a cheat; thyself, a world-wide lie?
No; there will come, prophetic hearts may trust,
Some embryo angel of superior dust,
With brow of cloud and tongue of livid flame--
Another Moses, but in time and name--
Whose Heaven-appealing voice shall bid thee pass--
On either hand a wall of living glass;--
Ope for the Lybian with convulsive shock
His more than Horeb's adamantine rock,
And gazing from some second Pisgah, see
Thy idol broken and thy people free.
[Illustration: (signature) William D. Snow]
RICHMOND, Dec. 1st, 1853.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] "Ye Christian _Bondous_ who of feeling boast!"
Unable in the whole range of my vernacular, to find an epithet
sufficiently expressive to enunciate the aggravated contempt which all
feel for that pseudonymous class of philanthropists, who flauntingly
parade a pompous sympathy with popular and distant distresses, but
studiously cultivate a coarse ignorance of, and hauteur to, the
Greeks, which "are at the door," I have had recource to the Metonymy,
_Bondou_, as rendered mournfully significant through the melancholy
fate of the illustrious Houghton.--Vide _Report African Discovery
Society_.
[8] "Contemn a Marius' or a Scylla's ire."
Napoleon in his protest to Lord Bathurst, provoked by the petty
tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe, said of the "Proscriptions," and (by
negative inference) in extenuation of them, that they "_were made with
the blood yet fresh upon the sword_." A sentence, which, falling from
the lips of one of the most imperturbably cool and calculating of
mankind, under circumstances superinducing peculiar reflection on
every word uttered, cannot but come with the force of a whole volume
of excoriative evidence against the demoralization of war, even upon
the most abstracted and elevated natures.--Vide _Letters of Montholon
and Las Cases_.
[9] "Weep o'er an Agis' or Jugurtha's fate."
Agis, King of Lacedemon and colleague of Leonidas, was a youth of
singular purity and promise. Aiming to correct the abuses which had
crept into the Spartan polity, he introduced regenerative laws. Among
others, one for the equalization of property, and as an example of
disinterested liberality, shared his estate with the community.
Unappreciated by the degenerated Senate however, he was deposed, and,
with his whole family, strangled by order of the ingrate
State.--_Edin. Encyc._
It is said that when Jugurtha was led before the ear of the conquerer,
he lost his senses. After the triumph he was thrown into prison,
where, whilst they were in haste to strip him, some tore his robes off
his back, and others, catching eagerly at his pendants, pulled off the
tips of his ears with them. When he was thrust down naked into the
dungeon, all wild and confused, he said, with a frantic smile,
"Heavens! how cold is this bath of yours!" There struggling for six
days with starvation, and to the last hour laboring for the
preservation of his life, he came to his end.--_Plut. Cai. Mar._
[10] "Breathes the warm odor which the _girgir_ bears,"
The girgir, or the _geshe el aube_, a species of flowering grass.
Piercing, fragrant, and grateful in its odor, it operates not unlike a
mild stimulant, when respired for any length of time, and is found
chiefly near the borders of small streams and in the vicinage of the
Tassada.--_Lyn. Gui. and Soud._
[11] "Where browse the _fecho_ and the dun-gazelle."
Among the wild animals are prodigious numbers of the vari-colored
species of the gazelle, the bohur sassa, fecho, and madoqua. They are
extremely numerous in the provinces depopulated _by war and slavery_,
enjoying the wild oats of the deserted hamlets without fear of
molestation from a returning population.--_Notes on Central Africa._
[12] "And wiser than Athenas' wisest schools,
Nor led by zealots, nor scholastic rules,
Gazed at the stars which stud yon tender blue,
And hoped and deemed the cheat of death untrue."
Though Socrates and Plato, particularly the former, are generally
admitted by writers of authority, among whom, indeed, are Polycarpe,
Chrysotom, and Eusebius, to have in a manner _suspected_ rather than
believed, the immortality of the soul; yet we have no evidence of
their ever having, by the finest process of ratiocination, so
thoroughly convinced themselves as to introduce it generally as a
tenable thesis on the portico. A beautiful thread of implicit belief
and fervent hope, of after life, assimilating to the hunting-ground of
our own American Indians, and though sensuous still, a step far in
advance of the black void of ancient philosophy, has always run
through the higher mythologies of the Negro. So notorious, indeed, was
the fact among early Christians, that that ubiquitous riddle, "Prestor
John," was, by believers, regarded as having a _locale_ in Central
Africa; while Henry of Portugal actually despatched two ambassadors,
Corvilla and Payvan, to a rumored Christian court, south of the
Sahara.--_Edin. Encyc. Early Chris. His. Port._
[13] "Yet supple sophist to a plastic mind,
Sees gods in woods, and spirits in the wind."
The imagination of the African, like his musical genius, which
extracts surprising harmony from the rudest of sources, the clapping
of hands, the clanking of chains, the resonance of lasso wood, and
perforated shells, seems to invest everything with a resident spirit
of peculiar power. Accordingly, his mythologies are most numerous and
poetical--his entire catalogue of superior gods alone, embracing a
more extended length than the Assyro-Babylon Alphabet, with its three
hundred letters.
[14] "The vengeful causes and the deed forgot."
All travellers agree in the facile ductility and inertia-like
amiability of the native African character.--BREWSTER _on Africa._
[15] "The merry numbers of his crisp-haired crew."
The negro race is, perhaps, the most prolific of all the human
species. Their infancy and youth are singularly happy. The parents are
passionately fond of their children.--GOLDBURY'S _Travels._
"Strike me," said my attendant, "but do not curse my mother." The same
sentiment I found universally to prevail.
Some of the first lessons in which the Mandings women instruct their
children is the _practice of truth_. It was the only consolation for a
negro mother, whose son had been murdered by the Moors, that "_the boy
had never told a lie_."--PARK'S _Travels._
[16] "With all the father sees each form retire,
A ruthless heathen, but a loving sire."
"Or led the combat, bold without a plan,
An artless savage, but a fearless man."
CAMPBELL.
[17] "Till lured by wealth the hardy Portuguese,
Sought the green waters of his Eastern seas,
And venturous nations more excursive grown,
Pierced his glad coast from radiant zone to zone."
Vasquez de Gama, a Portuguese nobleman, was the first to discover a
maritime passage to the Indies; unless, perhaps, we credit the
improbable achievement of the Phoenicians, related by Herodotus as
occurring, 604 B.C.
De Gama doubled the cape in 1498, explored the eastern shores as far
as Melinda, in Zanguebar, and sailing thence arrived at Calcutta in
May. This expedition, second to none in its results, save that of
Columbus six years before, drew the attention of all Europe. Whole
nations became actuated by the same enthusiasm, and private companies
of merchants sent out whole fleets on voyages of discovery, scouring
the entire coast from Cape Verd to Gaudfui, and discovering the
Mascharenhas and most of the islands of the Ethiopean Archipelago.
[18] "Cheats his own nature and now generous grown,
Dispenses realms and empires not his own."
Charles V. granted a patent _to one of his Flemish favorites_,
containing an exclusive right to import four thousand negroes!--_Hist.
Slavery_.
The crime of having _first_ recommended the importation of African
slaves into America, _is due to the Flemish nobility_, who obtained a
monopoly of four thousand negroes, which they sold to some Genoese
merchants for 25,000 ducats.--_Life of Cardinal Ximenes_.
They (the Genoese) were the first to bring into a regular form, that
commerce for slaves, between Africa and America, which has since grown
to such an amazing extent.--_Robertson._
[19] "Too warmly generous and dearly true,
The simple black," &c.
It will remain an indelible reproach on the name of Europeans, that
for more than three centuries their intercourse with the Africans has
only tended to destroy their happiness and debase their
character.--_Edin. Ency._
[20] "Now laughs the stranger at their anguished throes."
The arts of the slave-merchant have inflamed the hostility of their
various tribes, and heightened their ferocity by sedulously increasing
their wars.--_Ibid._
[21] "By specious creeds and sophists darkly taught."
Hamlet's advice to his offending mother;--
"Assume a virtue, tho' you have it not."
Adding hypocrisy to avowed unworthiness, was the acknowledged
injunction of the church, wherever and whenever she participated in
secular affairs, with a view of emolument. For a peculiar illustration
of this favorite doctrine, see Clement VI.'s edict, when, in virtue of
the right arrogated by the holy see _to dispose of all countries
belonging to the heathen_, he erected (1344) the Canaries into a
kingdom, and disposed of them to Lewis de la Corda, a prince of
Castile.
[22] "Or bolder still on fancy's fiery wing."
That I do not exaggerate the _belle lettres_ and classical
accomplishments of at least two of the "chattels" of the "peculiar
institution," in the lines following the above, see "Poems written by
Rosa and Maria," _property_ of South Carolina, and published in 1834.
[23] "Hear _Loxian_ murmurs in Rhodolphe's caves."
Loxian is a name frequently given to Apollo by Greek writers and is
met with, more than once, in the "Choephoræ of Eschylus."--_Campbell._
Euripides mentions it three times, and Sophocles twice, its euphony
recommends it more than any other name of the fair-haired god.
[24] "And in the march of nations led the _van_."
_Campbell_
[Illustration: Henry Ward Beecher. (Engraved by J. C. Buttre)]
Letter
BROOKLYN, December 6th, 1853.
Dear Sir,--
Your note of November 29th, requesting a line from me for the
Autographs for Freedom, is received.
I wish that I had something that would add to the literary value of
your laudable enterprise. In so great a cause as that of human
liberty, every great interest in society ought to have a voice and a
decisive testimony. Art should be in sympathy with freedom and
literature, and all human learning should speak with _unmistakable_
accents for the elevation, evangelization, and liberation of the
oppressed. In a future day, the historian cannot purge our political
history from the shame of wanton and mercenary oppression. But there
is not, I believe, a book in the literature of our country that will
be alive and known a hundred years hence, in which can be found the
taint of despotism. The literature of the world is on the side of
liberty.
I am very truly yours,
[Illustration: (signature) Henry Ward Beecher]
[Illustration: H. B. Stowe (Engraved by J. C. Buttre)]
[Illustration: PLAYFORD HALL, SUFFOLK. The seat of Thomas Clarkson,
Esq.]
A Day spent at Playford Hall.
It was a pleasant morning in May,--I believe that is the orthodox way
of beginning a story,--when C. and I took the cars to go into the
country to Playford Hall. "And what's Playford Hall?" you say. "And
why did you go to see it?" As to what it is, here is a reasonably good
picture before you. As to why, it was for many years the residence of
Thomas Clarkson, and is now the residence of his venerable widow and
her family.
Playford Hall is considered, I think, the oldest of the fortified
houses in England, and is, I am told, the only one that has water in
the moat. The water which is seen girdling the wall in the picture, is
the moat; it surrounds the place entirely, leaving no access except
across the bridge, which is here represented.
After crossing this bridge, you come into a green court-yard, filled
with choice plants and flowering shrubs, and carpeted with that thick,
soft, velvet-like grass, which is to be found nowhere else in so
perfect a state as in England.
The water is fed by a perpetual spring, whose current is so sluggish
as scarcely to be perceptible, but which yet has the vitality of a
running stream.
It has a dark and glassy stillness of surface, only broken by the
forms of the water plants, whose leaves float thickly over it.
The walls of the moat are green with ancient moss, and from the
crevices springs an abundant flowering vine, whose delicate leaves and
bright yellow flowers in some places entirely mantled the stones with
their graceful drapery.
The picture I have given you represents only one side of the moat. The
other side is grown up with dark and thick shrubbery and ancient
trees, rising and embowering the whole place, adding to the retired
and singular effect of the whole. The place is a specimen of a sort of
thing which does not exist in America. It is one of those significant
landmarks which unite the present with the past, for which we must
return to the country of our origin.
Playford Hall is a thing peculiarly English, and Thomas Clarkson, for
whose sake I visited it, was as peculiarly an Englishman,--a specimen
of the very best kind of English mind and character, as this is of
characteristic English architecture.
We Anglo-Saxons have won a hard name in the world. There are
undoubtedly bad things which are true about us.
Taking our developments as a race, both in England and America, we may
be justly called the Romans of the nineteenth century. We have been
the race which has conquered, subdued, and broken in pieces, other
weaker races, with little regard either to justice or mercy. With
regard to benefits by us imparted to conquered nations, I think a
better story, on the whole, can be made out for the Romans than for
us. Witness the treatment of the Chinese, of the tribes of India, and
of our own American Indians.
But still there is an Anglo-Saxon blood, a vigorous sense of justice,
as appears in our Habeas Corpus, our jury trials, and other features
of State organization, and, when this is tempered in individuals, with
the elements of gentleness and compassion, and enforced by that
energy and indomitable perseverance which are characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxon mind, they form a style of philanthropists peculiarly
efficient. In short, the Anglo-Saxon is efficient, in whatever he sets
himself about, whether in crushing the weak, or lifting them up.
Thomas Clarkson was born in a day when good, pious people, imported
cargoes of slaves from Africa, as one of the regular Christianized
modes of gaining a subsistence, and providing for them and their
households. It was a thing that everybody was doing, and everybody
thought they had a right to do. It was supposed that all the coffee,
tea, and sugar in the world were dependent on stealing men, women, and
children, and could be got no other way; and as to consume coffee,
sugar, rice, and rum, were evidently the chief ends of human
existence, it followed that men, women, and children, must be stolen
to the end of time.