294 
HISTORY OF THE [book iv. 
calamities of their condition, but also as a passport 
to the place of their nativity; a deliverance which, 
while it frees them from bondage, restores them to 
the society of their dearest, long-lost, and lamented 
natives in Africa. But I am afraid that this, like 
other European notions concerning the negroes, is 
the dream of poetry; the sympathetic effusion of a 
fanciful or too credulous an imagination.* The ne¬ 
groes, in general, are so far from courting death, that, 
among such of them as have resided any length of 
* Perhaps it was some such imagination that gave rise to the follow¬ 
ing little poem, the production of early youth, and now published for 
the first time. 
ODE ON SEEING A NEGRO FUNERAL. 
Mahali dies! O’er yonder plain 
His bier is borne : The sable train 
By youthful virgin’s led : 
Daughters of injur’d Afric, say, 
Why raise ye thus th’ heroic lay. 
Why triumph o’er, the dead ? 
No tear bedews their fixed eye : 
’Tis now the hero lives they cry 
Releas’d from slav’ry’s chain : 
Beyond the billowy surge he flies. 
And joyful views his native skies, 
And long lost bowers again. 
On Koromantyn’s palmy soil 
Heroic deeds and martial toil, 
Shall fill each glorious day; 
Love, fond and faithful, crown thy nights, 
And bliss unbought, unmix’d delights, 
Past cruel wrongs repay. 
