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;