And feature gross: or worse, to ruthless deeds,
Mad jealousy, blind rage, and fell revenge,
Their fervid spirit fires. Love dwells not there,
The soft regards, the tenderness of life,
The heart-shed tear, th' ineffable delight
Of sweet humanity: these court the beam
Of milder climes; in selfish fierce desire,
And the wild fury of voluptuous sense,
There lost. The very brute creation there
This rage partakes, and burns with horrid fire.

Lo! the green serpent, from his dark abode,
Which even Imagination fears to tread,
At noon forth-issuing, gathers up his train
In orbs immense, then, darting out anew,

Seeks the refreshing fount; by which diffus'd,

He throws his folds; and while, with threat'ning tongue, And deathful jaws erect, the monster curls

His flaming crest, all other thirst appall❜d,

Or shivering flies, or check'd at distance stands,
Nor dares approach. But still more direful he,
The small close-lurking minister of fate,
Whose high-concocted venom through the veins
A rapid lightning darts, arresting swift
The vital current. Form'd to humble man,
This child of vengeful Nature! There, sublim'd
To fearless lust of blood, the savage race
Roam, licens'd by the shading hour of guilt,
And foul misdeed, when the pure day has shut
His sacred eye. The tiger darting fierce
Impetuous on the prey his glance has doom'd:
The lively-shining leopard, speckled o'er
With many a spot, the beauty of the waste;
And, storning all the taming arts of man,
The keen hyæna, fellest of the fell.

These, rushing from th' inhospitable woods
Of Mauritania, or the tufted isles,

That verdant rise amid the Lybian wild,
Innumerous glare around their shaggy king,
Majestic, stalking o'er the printed sand;
And, with imperious and repeated roars,
Demand their fated food. The fearful flocks
Crowd near the guardian swain; the nobler herds,
Where, round their lordly bull, in rural ease,
They ruminating lie, with horror hear

The coming rage. Th' awakened village starts;
And to her fluttering breast the mother strains
Her thoughtless infant. From the pirate's den,
Or stern Morocco's tyrant fang, escaped,
The wretch half wishes for his bonds again:
While, uproar all, the wilderness resounds,
From Atlas eastward to the frighted Nile.

Unhappy he! who from the first of joys,
Society, cut off, is left alone

Amid this world of death. Day after day,
Sad on the jutting eminence he sits,
And views the main that ever toils below;
Still fondly forming in the farthest verge,
Where the round ether mixes with the wave,
Ships, dim-discovered, dropping from the clouds;
At evening, to the setting sun he turns
A mournful eye, and down his dying heart
Sinks helpless; while the wonted roar is up,
And hiss continual through the tedious night.
Yet here, even here, into these black abodes
Of monsters, unappall'd, from stooping Rome,
And guilty Cæsar, Liberty retir'd,

Her Cato following through Numidian wilds:
Disdainful of Campania's gentle plains,

And all the green delights Ausonia pours;
When for them she must bend the servile knee,
And fawning take the splendid robber's boon.

Nor stop the terrors of these regions here.
Commission'd dæmons oft, angels of wrath,
Let loose the raging elements. Breathed hot,
From all the boundless furnace of the sky,
And the wide glittering waste of burning sand,
A suffocating wind the pilgrim smites
With instant death. Patient of thirst and toil,
Son of the desert! even the camel feels,
Shot through his wither'd heart, the fiery blast.
Or from the black-red ether, bursting broad,
Sallies the sudden whirlwind. Straight the sands,
Commov'd around, in gathering eddies play:
Nearer and nearer still they darkening come;
Till, with the general all-involving storm
Swept up, the whole continuous wilds arise;
And by their noon-day fount dejected thrown,
Or sunk at night in sad disastrous sleep,
Beneath descending hills, the caravan

Is buried deep. In Cairo's crowded streets
Th' impatient merchant, wondering, waits in vain,
And Mecca saddens at the long delay.

But chief at sea, whose every flexile wave
Obeys the blast, the aërial tumult swells.
In the dread ocean, undulating wide,

Beneath the radiant line that girts the globe,

The circling typhon*, whirl'd from point to point,

Exhausting all the rage of all the sky,

And dire ecnephia* reign. Amid the heavens,

Typhon and ecnephia, names of particular storms or hurricanes, known only between the tropics.

Falsely serene, deep in a cloudy✶ speck
Compress'd, the mighty tempest brooding dwells:
Of no regard, save to the skilful eye,
Fiery and foul, the small prognostic hangs
Aloft, or on the promontory's brow
Musters its force. A faint deceitful calm,
A fluttering gale, the dæmon sends before,
To tempt the spreading sail. Then down at once,
Precipitant, descends a mingled mass

Of roaring winds, and flame, and rushing floods,
In wild amazement fix'd the sailor stands.
Art is too slow: by rapid fate oppress'd,
His broad-wing'd vessel drinks the whelming tide,
Hid in the bosom of the black abyss.

With such mad seas the daring Gama + fought,
For many a day, and many a dreadful night,
Incessant, lab'ring round the stormy Cape;
By bold ambition led, and bolder thirst

Of gold. For then from ancient gloom emerged
The rising world of trade: the Genius, then,
Of Navigation, that, in hopeless sloth,
Had slumber'd on the vast Atlantic deep
For idle ages, starting, heard at last

• The Lusitanian prince‡; who, heaven-inspir'd,
To love of useful glory roused mankind,
And in unbounded commerce mix'd the world.

Increasing still the terrors of these storms,
His jaws horrific arm'd with threefold fate,

Called by sailors the ox-eye, being in appearance at first no bigger. Vasco de Gama, the first who sailed round Africa, by the Cape of Good Hope, to the East Indies.

His

Don Henry, third son to John the First, king of Portugal. strong genius to the discovery of new countries was the chief source of all the modern improvements in navigation.

Here dwells the direful shark. Lured by the scent
Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death,
Behold! he, rushing, cuts the briny flood,
Swift as the gale can bear the ship along,
And, from the partners of that cruel trade,
Which spoils unhappy Guinea of her sons,
Demands his share of prey-demands themselves.
The stormy fates descend: one death involves
Tyrants and slaves; when straight, their mangled limbs
Crashing at once, he dyes the purple seas
With gore, and riots in the vengeful meal.

When o'er this world, by equinoctial rains
Flooded immense, looks out the joyless sun,
And draws the copious steam; from swampy fens,
Where putrefaction into life ferments,

And breathes destructive myriads; or from woods,
Impenetrable shades, recesses foul,

In vapours rank and blue corruption wrapt,
Whose gloomy horrors yet no desperate foot
Has ever dared to pierce; then, wasteful, forth
Walks the dire power of pestilent disease.
A thousand hideous fiends her course attend,
Sick Nature blasting, and to heartless woe,
And feeble desolation, casting down
The towering hopes and all the pride of man.
Such as, of late, at Carthagena quench'd
The British fire. You, gallant Vernon, saw
The miserable scene; you, pitying, saw
To infant weakness sunk the warrior's arm;
Saw the deep-racking pang, the ghastly form,
The lip pale quivering, and the beamless eye
No more with ardour bright: you heard the groans
Of agonizing ships, from shore to shore;
Heard, nightly plunged amid the sullen waves,