Page:The West Indies, and Other Poems.djvu/35
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Is he not man, by sin and suffering tried?
Is he not man, for whom the Saviour died?
Belie the Negro's powers:—In headlong will,
Christian! thy brother thou shalt prove him still;
Belie his virtues; since his wrongs began,
His follies and his crimes have stampt him Man.
Is he not man, for whom the Saviour died?
Belie the Negro's powers:—In headlong will,
Christian! thy brother thou shalt prove him still;
Belie his virtues; since his wrongs began,
His follies and his crimes have stampt him Man.
The Spaniard found him such:—the island-race
His foot had spurn'd from earth's insulted face;
Among the waifs and foundlings of mankind,
Abroad he look'd, a sturdier stock to find;
A spring of life, whose fountains should supply
His channels as he drank the rivers dry:
That stock he found on Afric's swarming plains,
That spring he open'd in the Negro's veins;
A spring, exhaustless as his avarice drew,
A stock that like Prometheus' vitals grew
Beneath the eternal beak his heart that tore,
Beneath the insatiate thirst that drain'd his gore.
His foot had spurn'd from earth's insulted face;
Among the waifs and foundlings of mankind,
Abroad he look'd, a sturdier stock to find;
A spring of life, whose fountains should supply
His channels as he drank the rivers dry:
That stock he found on Afric's swarming plains,
That spring he open'd in the Negro's veins;
A spring, exhaustless as his avarice drew,
A stock that like Prometheus' vitals grew
Beneath the eternal beak his heart that tore,
Beneath the insatiate thirst that drain'd his gore.