ОH for a lodge in fome vaft wilderness,
Some boundless contiguity of shade,
Where rumour of oppreffion and deceit,
Of unsuccessful or fuccessful war,
Might never reach me more. My ear is pained,
My foul is fick, with every day's report
Of wrong and outrage, with which earth is filled.
There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
It does not feel for man; the natural bond
Of brotherhood is fevered as the flax,
That falls afunder at the touch of fire.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not coloured like his own; and having power
To enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as a lawful prey.
Lands intersected by a narrow frith
Abhor each other. Mountains interpofed
Make enemies of nations, who had elfe
Like kindred drops been mingled into one.
Thus man devotes his brother, and defroys;
And, worfe than all, and moft to be deplored
As human nature's broadeft, foulest blot,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat
With stripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart
Weeps, when the fees inflicted on a beast.
Then what is man? And what man, feeing this,
And having human feelings, does not blush,
And hang his head, to think himself a man?
I would not have a flave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep,
And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth,
That finews bought and fold have ever earned.
No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart's
Juft eftimation prized above all price,
I had much rather be myself the flave,
And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him. We have no flaves at home.-Then why abroad?
And they themselves once ferried over the wave,
That parts us, are emancipate and loosed.
Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free;
They touch our country, and their fhackles fall.
That is noble, and bespeaks a nation proud
And jealous of the bleffing. Spread it then,
And let it circulate through every vein
Of all your empire; that where Britain's power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.
Sure there is need of focial intercourse, Benevolence, and peace, and mutual aid, Between the nations in a world, that seems To toll the death-bell of its own decease, And by the voice of all its elements
To preach the general doom*.
Let flip with fuch a warrant to destroy?
When did the waves fo haughtily overleap
Their ancient barriers, deluging the dry?
Fires from beneath, and meteors + from above,
* Alluding to the calamities in Jamaica.
Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and the old
And crazy earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And Nature with a dim and fickly eye
To wait the close of all? But grant her end
More diftant, and that prophecy demands.
A longer refpite, unaccomplished yet;
Still they are frowning fignals, and bespeak
Displeasure in his breaft, who fmites the earth
Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice.
And 'tis but feemly, that, where all deserve
And ftand exposed by common peccancy
To what no few have felt, there should be peace,
And brethren in calamity should love.
Alas for Sicily! rude fragments now
Lie scattered, where the shapely column ftood.
Her palaces are duft. In all her ftreets
The voice of finging and the sprightly chord
* Alluding to the fog that covered both Europe and Afia during the whole fummer of 1783.
Are filent. Revelry, and dance, and show
Suffer a fyncope and folemn pause;
While God performs upon the trembling stage
Of his own works his dreadful part alone.
How does the earth receive him?—With what figns
Of gratulation and delight her king?
Pours fhe not all her choiceft fruits abroad,
Her sweetest flowers, her aromatic gums,
Difclofing paradife wherever he treads?
She quakes at his approach. Her hollow womb,
Conceiving thunders, through a thousand deeps
And fiery caverns, roars beneath his foot.
The hills move lightly, and the mountains smoke, For he has touched them. From the extremeft point Of elevation down into the abyss
His wrath is bufy, and his frown is felt.
The rocks fall headlong, and the vallies rise,
The rivers die into offenfive pools,
And, charged with putrid verdure, breathe a gross
And mortal nuisance into all the air.
What folid was, by transformation strange,
Grows fluid; and the fix'd and rooted earth,
Tormented into billows, heaves and fwells,
Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl
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