To fearless luft of blood, the favage race Roam, licens'd by the shading hour of guilt, And foul misdeed, when the pure day has shut His facred eye. The tyger darting fierce Impetuous on the prey his glance has doom'd: The lively-shining leopard, speckled o’er With many a spot, the beauty of the waste; And, scorning all the taming arts of Man, The keen hyena, fellest of the fell. These, rushing from th’inhospitable woods Of Mauritania, or the tufted illes, That verdant rise amid the Lybian wild, Innumerous glare around their shaggy king, Majestic, ftalking o’er the printed sand; And, with imperious and repeated roars, Demand their fated food. The fearful flocks Crowd near the guardian swain ; the nobler herds, Where, round their lordly bull, in rural ease, They ruminating lie, with horror hear The coming rage. Th’awaken’d village starts ; And to her fluttering breast the mother strains Her thoughtless infant. From the Pyrate’s den, Or ftern Morocco's tyrant fang escap’d, The wretch half-wishes for his bonds again : While, uproar all, the wilderness resounds, From Atlas eastward to the frighted Nile.

Unhappy he! who from the first of joys, Society, cut off, is left alone Amid this world of death. Day after day, Sad on the jutting eminence he fits, And views the main that ever toils below; Still fondly forming in the farthest verge, Where the round ether mixes with the wave, Ships, dim-discovered, dropping from the clouds' At evening, to the setting fun he turns A mournful eye, and down his dying heart Sinks helpless; while the wonted roar is up, And hiss continual thro' the tedious night. Yet here, even here, into these black abodes Of monsters, unappall’d, from stooping Rome, And guilty Cæfar, LIBERTY retir'd, Her Cato following thro' Numidian wilds : Disdainful of Campania's gentle plains, And all the green delights Ausonia pours ; When for them she must bend the servile knee, And fawning take the splendid robber's boon.

Nor stop the terrors of those regions here. Commiffion'd demons oft, angels of wrath, Let loose the raging elements. Breath'd hot, From all the boundless furnace of the sky, And the wide glittering waste of burning fand,

A fuffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert! even the camel feels,
Shot thro' his wither'd heart, the fiery blast.
Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,
Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Strait the sands,
Commov'd around, in gathering eddies play :
Nearer and nearer still they darkening come ;
Till, with the general all-involving storm
Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise ;
And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown,
Or funk at night in fad disastrous sleep,
Beneath descending hills, the caravan
Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets
Th’impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,
And Mecca faddens at the long delay.

But chief at sea, whose every flexile wave
Obeys the blast, the aërial tumult swells.
In the dread ocean, undulating wide,
Beneath the radiant line that girts the globe,
The circling Typhon*, whirl'd from point to point,
Exhausting all the rage of all the sky,
And dire Ecnephia* reign. Amid the heavens,

* Typhon and Ecnephia, names of particular storms or hurri. canes, known only between the tropics.

Falfely serene, deep in a cloudy * speck
Compress’d, the mighty tempest brooding dwells :
Of no regard, fave to the skilful eye,
Fiery and foul, the small prognostic hangs
Aloft, or on the promontory's brow
Musters its force. A faint deceitful calm,
A fluttering gale, the demon sends before,
To tempt the spreading fail. Then down at once,
Precipitant, descends a mingled mass
Of roaring winds, and fame, and rushing floods.
In wild amazement fix'd the failor stands.
Art is too flow : by rapid fate oppress’d,
His broad-wing'd vessel drinks the whelming tide,
Hid in the bofom of the black abyss.
With such mad seas the daring Gamat fought,
For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
Incessant, lab’ring round the forny Cape;
By bold ambition led, and bolder thirst
Of gold. For then from ancient gloom emerg'd
The rising world of trade : the Genius, then,
Of navigation, that, in hopeless floth,

* Called by failors the Ox-eye, being in appearance at first no bigger.

+ VASCO DE GAMA, the first who failed round Africa, by the Cape of Good Hope, to the East Indics.

Had flumber'd on the vast Atlantic deep,
For idle ages, starting, heard at lait
The LUSITANIAN Prince* ; who, Heav'n-inspir’d,
To love of useful glory rous'd mankind,
And in unbounded Commerce mix'd the world.

Increasing still the terrors of these storms,
His jaws horrific arm’d with threefold fate,
Here dwells the direful shark. Lur’d by the scent
Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death,
Behold! he rushing cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the gale can bear the ship along ;
And, from the partners of that cruel trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
Demands his share of prey ; demands themselves.
The stormy fates descend: one death involves
Tyrants and Naves; when ftrait, their mangled limbs
Crashing at once, he dyes the purple feas
With gore, and riuts in the vengeful meal.

When o'er this world, by equinoctial rains
Flooded immense, looks out the joyless fun,
And draws the copious fteam : from swampy fens,
Where putrefaction into life ferments,

* Don Henry, third son to John the First, king of Portugal. His strong genius to the discovery of new countries was the chief source of all the modern improvements in navigation.