Page:The West Indies, and Other Poems.djvu/35

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Is he not man, by sin and suffering tried ? Is he not man, for whom the Saviour died ? Belie the Negro's powers : — In headlong will. Christian ! thy brother thou shalt prove him still ; Belie his virtues ; since his wrongs began. His follies and his crimes have stampt him Man.

The Spaniard found him such : — the island-race

His foot had spurn'd from earth's insulted face ;

Among the waifs and foundlings of mankind.

Abroad he look'd, a sturdier stock to find ;

A spring of life, whose fountains should supply

His channels as he drank the rivers dry :

That stock he found on Afric's swarming plains,

That spring he open'd in the Negro's veins ;

A spring, exhaustless as his avarice drew,

A stock that like Prometheus' vitals grew

Beneath the eternal beak his heart that tore,

Beneath the insatiate thirst that drain'd his gore.

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