How like a prophet old Las Casas stood,
And raised his voice against a sea of blood,
Whose chilling waves recoiled while he foretold
His country's ruin by avenging gold.
-That gold, for which unpitied Indians fell;
That gold, at once the snare and scourge of hell,
Thenceforth by righteous heaven was doomed
shed
Unmingled curses on the spoiler's head;
For gold the Spaniard cast his soul away,-
His gold and he was every nation's prey.
But themes like these would ask an angel lyre, Language of light and sentiment of fire; Give me to sing, in melancholy strains, Of Charib martyrdoms, and Negro chains; One race by tyrants rooted from the earth, One doomed to slavery by the taint of birth!
Where first his drooping sails Columbus furled, And sweetly rested in another world, Amidst the heaven-reflecting ocean, smiles A constellation of Elysian isles;
Fair as Orion when he mounts on high,
Sparkling with midnight splendor from the sky: They bask beneath the sun's meridian rays, When not a shadow breaks the boundless blaze; The breath of ocean wanders through their vales In morning breezes and in evening gales;
Earth from her lap perennial verdure pours,
Ambrosial fruits, and amaranthine flowers;
O'er the wild mountains and luxuriant plains,
Nature in all the pomp of beauty reigns,
In all the pride of freedom.-Nature free
Proclaims that MAN was born for liberty:
She flourishes where'er the sunbeams play
O'er living fountains, sallying into day;
She withers where the waters cease to roll :
And night and winter stagnate round the pole :
Man too, where freedom's beams and fountains rise
Springs from the dust and blossoms to the skies;
Dead to the joys of light and life, the slave
Clings to the clod; his root is in the grave;
Bondage is winter, darkness, death, despair;
Freedom, the sun, the sea, the mountains, and the air.
In placid indolence supinely blessed,
A feeble race these beauteous isles possessed;
Untamed, untaught, in arts and arms unskilled,
Their patrimonial soil they rudely tilled,
Chased the free rovers of the savage woods,
Ensnared the wild bird, swept the scaly floods;
Sheltered in lowly huts their fragile forms
From burning suns and desolating storms;
Or, when the halcyon sported on the breeze,
In light canoes they skimmed the rippling seas:
Their lives in dreams of soothing langour flew,
No parted joys, no future pains they knew,
The passing moment all their bliss or care;
Such as their sires had been, the children were
From age to age; as waves upon the tide
Of stormless time, they calmly lived and died.
Dreadful as hurricanes athwart the main
Rushed the fell legions of invading Spain;
With fraud and force, with false and fatal breath,
(Submission bondage, and resistance death,)
They swept the isles. In vain the simple race
Kneeled to the iron sceptre of their grace,
Or with weak arms their fiery vengeance braved;
They came, they saw, they conquered, they enslaved,
And they destroyed;—the generous heart they
They crushed the timid neck beneath the yoke ;
Where'er to battle marched their grim array,
The sword of conquest ploughed resistless way;
Where'er from cruel toil they sought repose,
Around, the fires of devastation rose.
The Indian, as he turned his head in flight,
Beheld his cottage flaming through the night,
And, 'midst the shrieks of murder on the wind,
Heard the mute blood-hound's death-step close behind.
The conflict o'er, the valiant in their graves, The wretched remnant dwindled into slaves. ---Condemned in pestilential cells to pine, Delving for gold amidst 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 labourer, 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.
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