To enforce the wrong, for fuch a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
Lands interfected 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 destroys;
And, worse than all, and most to be deplored
As hunan nature's broadeft, fouleft blat,
Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his fweat
With ftripes, that mercy with a bleeding heart
Weeps, when she 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 fleep,
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 slave,

And wear the bonds, than faften 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 loofed.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free;
They touch our country, and their shackles 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 feems To toll the death-bell of its own decease, And by the voice of all its elements

To preach the general doom *. When were the winds 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,
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 ufual rest.

Alluding to the calamities in Jamaica,
+ August 18, 1783.

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 clofe of all? But grant her end
More diftant, and that prophecy demands
A longer respite, unaccomplished yet;
Still they are frowning fignals, and bespeak
Displeasure in his breast, who smites the earth
Or heals it, makes it languish or rejoice.
And 'tis but feemly, that, where all deferve
And ftand exposed by common peccancy
To what no few have felt, there fhould be peace,
And brethren in calamity should love.

Alas for Sicily! rude fragments now

Lie fcattered, where the shapely column food.
Her palaces are duft. In all her ftreets

The voice of finging and the sprightly chord
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

Alluding to the fog, that covered both Europe and Asia during the whole fummer of 1783.

Of gratulation and delight her king
Pours the not all her choiceft fruits abroad,
Her fweetest 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 rife,

The rivers die into offenfive pools,

And, charged with putrid verdure, breathe a grofs
And mortal nuifance into all the air.

What folid was, by transformation strange,
Grows fluid and the fixt and rooted earth,
Tormented into billows, heaves and fwells,
Or with vortiginous and hideous whirl
Sucks down its prey infatiable. Immense
The tumult and the overthrow, the pangs
And agonies of human and of brute
Multitudes, fugitive on every fide,
And fugitive in vain. The fylvan scene
Migrates uplifted; and, with all its foil
Alighting in far diftant fields, finds out

A new poffeffor, and furvives the change.
Ocean has caught the frenzy, and, upwrought
To an enormous and overbearing height,
Not by a mighty wind, but by that voice,
Which winds and waves obey, invades the shore
Refiftlefs. Never fuch a fudden flood,

Upridged fo high, and sent on fuch a charge,
Poffeffed an inland fcene. Where now the throng,
That preffed the beach, and, hafty to depart,
Looked to the fea for fafety? They are gone,
Gone with the refluent wave into the deep-
A prince with half his people! Ancient towers,
And roofs embattled high, the gloomy fcenes,
Where beauty oft and lettered worth confume
Life in the unproductive shades of death,
Fall prone: the pale inhabitants come forth,
And, happy in their unforeseen release
From all the rigours of reftraint, enjoy

The terrors of the day, that fets them free.
Who then that has thee, would not hold thee faft,
Freedom! whom they that lose thee fo regret,
That even a judgment, making way for thee,
Seems in their eyes a mercy for thy fake?

Such evil fin hath wrought; and fuch a flanie Kindled in heaven, that it burns down to earth