Page:The West Indies, and Other Poems.djvu/68
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She, miserable mother, from the shore,
Age after age, beheld the barks that bore
Her tribes to bondage:—with distraction wrung,
Wild as the lioness that seeks her young,
She flash'd unheeded lightnings from her eyes;
Her inmost deserts echoing to her cries;
Till agony the sense of suffering stole,
And stern unconscious grief benumb'd her soul.
So Niobe, when all her race were slain,
In ecstasy of woe forgot her pain;
Cold in her eye serenest horror shone,
While pitying Nature sooth'd her into stone.
Age after age, beheld the barks that bore
Her tribes to bondage:—with distraction wrung,
Wild as the lioness that seeks her young,
She flash'd unheeded lightnings from her eyes;
Her inmost deserts echoing to her cries;
Till agony the sense of suffering stole,
And stern unconscious grief benumb'd her soul.
So Niobe, when all her race were slain,
In ecstasy of woe forgot her pain;
Cold in her eye serenest horror shone,
While pitying Nature sooth'd her into stone.
Thus Africa, entranced with sorrow, stood,
Her fix'd eye gleaming on the restless flood:
—When Sharpe, on proud Britannia's charter'd shore,
From Lybian limbs the unsanction'd fetters tore,
And taught the world, that while she rules the waves,
Her soil is freedom to the feet of slaves:3
Her fix'd eye gleaming on the restless flood:
—When Sharpe, on proud Britannia's charter'd shore,
From Lybian limbs the unsanction'd fetters tore,
And taught the world, that while she rules the waves,
Her soil is freedom to the feet of slaves:3