"Lives there a reptile baser than the slave? --Lothsome as death, corrupted as the grave; See the dull Creole, at his pompous board, Attendant vassals cringing round their lord; Satiate with food, his heavy eyelids close, Voluptuous minions fan him to repose; Prone on the noonday couch he lolls in vain, Delirious slumbers mock his maudlin brain; He starts in horror from bewildering dreams; His bloodshot eye with fire and frenzy gleams; He stalks abroad; through all his wonted rounds, The negro trembles, and the lash resounds, And cries of anguish, thrilling through the air, To distant fields his dread approach declare. Mark, as he passes, every head reclined; Then slowly raised--to curse him from behind. This is the veriest wretch on nature's face, Owned by no country, spurned by every race; The tethered tyrant of one narrow span; The bloated vampire of a living man: His frame,--a fungus form of dunghill birth, That taints the air, and rots above the earth; His soul;--has _he_ a soul, whose sensual breast Of selfish passions is a serpent's nest? Who follows headlong, ignorant and blind, The vague, brute instincts of an idiot mind; Whose heart 'mid scenes of suffering senseless grown, Even from his mother's lap was chilled to stone; Whose torpid pulse no social feelings move; A stranger to the tenderness of love; His motley harem charms his gloating eye, Where ebon, brown, and olive beauties vie: His children, sprung alike from sloth and vice, Are born his slaves, and loved at market price: Has _he_ a soul?--With his departing breath A form shall hail him at the gates of death, The specter Conscience,--shrieking through the gloom, 'Man, we shall meet again beyond the tomb!'" There are few more pathetic passages in the English language than these, describing the labors and the extinctions of the Charib tribes:-- "The conflict o'er, the valiant in their graves, The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves: --Condemned in pestilential cells to pine, Delving for gold amid the gloomy mine. The sufferer, sick of life-protracting breath, Inhaled with joy the fire-damp blast of death; --Condemned to fell the mountain palm on high, That cast its shadow from the evening sky, Ere the tree trembled to his feeble stroke, The woodman languished, and his heart-strings broke; --Condemned in torrid noon, with palsied hand, To urge the slow plough o'er the obdurate land, The laborer, smitten by the sun's fierce ray, A corpse along the unfinished furrow lay. O'erwhelmed at length with ignominious toil, Mingling their barren ashes with the soil, Down to the dust the Charib people passed, Like autumn foliage, withering in the blast; The whole race sunk beneath the oppressor's rod, And left a blank among the works of GOD."