Behold, At Closing Day,
The Negro Village Swarms Abroad To Play;
He Treads The Dance, Through All Its Rapturous Rounds,
To the wild music of barbarian sounds;
Or, stretched at ease where broad palmettos shower
Delicious coolness in his shadowy
Bower,
He feasts on tales of witchcraft, that give birth
To breathless wonder or ecstatic mirth:
Yet most delighted when, in rudest rhymes,
The minstrel wakes the song of elder times,
When men were heroes, slaves to Beauty's charms,
And all the joys of life were love and arms.
Is not the Negro blest? His generous soil
With harvest plenty crowns his simple toil;
More than his wants his flocks and fields afford:
He loves to greet a stranger at his board:
"The winds were roaring and the White Man fled;
The rains of night descended on his head;
The poor White Man sat down beneath our tree:
Weary and faint and far from home was he:
For him no mother fills with milk the bowl,
No wife prepares the bread to cheer his soul.
Pity the poor White Man, who sought our tree;
No wife, no mother, and no home has he."
Thus sung the Negro's daughters; - once again,
O that the poor White Man might hear that strain!
Whether the victim of the treacherous Moor,
Or from the Negro's hospitable door
Spurned as a spy from Europe's hateful clime,
And left to perish for thy country's crime,
Or destined still, when all thy wanderings cease,
On Albion's lovely lap to rest in peace,
Pilgrim!
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