reflected two more different countenances, or sent more opposite
feelings to two hearts. Over Immalee’s, it breathed that deep and
delicious reverie, which those forms of nature that unite tranquillity
and profundity diffuse over souls whose innocence gives them a right to
an unmingled and exclusive enjoyment of nature. None but crimeless and
unimpassioned minds ever truly enjoyed earth, ocean, and heaven. At our
first transgression, nature expels us, as it did our first parents, from
her paradise for ever.
“To the stranger the view was fraught with far different visions. He
viewed it as a tiger views a forest abounding with prey; there might be
the storm and the wreck; or, if the elements were obstinately calm,
there might be the gaudy and gilded pleasure barge, in which a Rajah and
the beautiful women of his haram were inhaling the sea breeze under
canopies of silk and gold, overturned by the unskilfulness of their
rowers, and their plunge, and struggle, and dying agony, amid the smile
and beauty of the calm ocean, produce one of those contrasts in which
his fierce spirit delighted. Or, were even this denied, he could watch
the vessels as they floated by, and, from the skiff to the huge trader,
be sure that every one bore its freight of woe and crime. There came on
the European vessels full of the passions and crimes of another
world,--of its sateless cupidity, remorseless cruelty, its intelligence,
all awake and ministrant in the cause of its evil passions, and its very
refinement operating as a stimulant to more inventive indulgence, and
more systematized vice. He saw them approach to traffic for “gold, and
silver, and the souls of men;”--to grasp, with breathless rapacity, the
gems and precious produce of those luxuriant climates, and deny the
inhabitants the rice that supported their inoffensive existence;--to
discharge the load of their crimes, their lust and their avarice, and
after ravaging the land, and plundering the natives, depart, leaving
behind them famine, despair, and execration; and bearing with them back
to Europe, blasted constitutions, inflamed passions, ulcerated hearts,
and consciences that could not endure the extinction of a light in their
sleeping apartment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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