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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=420867" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Toussaint L’Ouverture</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">'T WAS night. The tranquil moonlight smile<br>With which Heaven dreams of Earth, shed down<br>Its beauty on the Indian isle, —<br>On broad green field and white-walled town;<br>And inland waste of rock and wood,<br>In searching sunshine, wild and rude,<br>Rose, mellowed through the silver gleam,<br>Soft as the landscape of a dream.<br>All motionless and dewy wet,<br>Tree, vine, and flower in shadow met:<br>The myrtle with its snowy bloom,<br>Crossing the nightshade's solemn gloom, —<br>The white cecropia's silver rind<br>Relieved by deeper green behind,<br>The orange with its fruit of gold,<br>The lithe paullinia's verdant fold,<br>The passion-flower, with symbol holy,<br>Twining its tendrils long and lowly,<br>The rhexias dark, and cassia tall,<br>And proudly rising over all,<br>The kingly palm's imperial stem,.<br>Crowned with its leafy diadem,<br>Star-like, beneath whose sombre shade,<br>The fiery-winged cucullo played!<br>How lovely was thine aspect, then,<br>Fair island of the Western Sea!<br>Lavish of beauty, even whe<br>Thy brutes were happier than thy men,<br>For they, at least, were free!<br>Regardless of thy glorious clime,<br>Unmindful of thy soil of flowers,<br>The toiling negro sighed, that Time<br>No faster sped his hours.<br>For, by the dewy moonlight still,<br>He fed the weary-turning mill,<br>Or bent him in the chill morass,<br>To pluck the long and tangled grass,<br>And hear above his scar-worn back<br>The heavy slave-whip's frequent crack:<br>While in his heart one evil thought<br>In solitary madness wrought,<br>One baleful fire surviving still<br>The quenching of the immortal mind,<br>One sterner passion of his kind,<br>Which even fetters could not kill,<br>The savage hope, to deal, erelong,<br>A vengeance bitterer than his wrong!<br>Hark to that cry! long, loud, and shrill,<br>From field and forest, rock and hill,<br>Thrilling and horrible it rang,<br>Around, beneath, above;<br>The wild beast from his cavern sprang,<br>The wild bird from her grove!<br>Nor fear, nor joy, nor agony<br>Were mingled in that midnight cry;<br>But like the lion's growl of wrath,<br>When falls that hunter in his path<br>Whose barbed arrow, deeply set,<br>Is rankling in his bosom yet,<br>It told of hate, full, deep, and strong,<br>Of vengeance kindling out of wrong;<br>It was as if the crimes of years —<br>The unrequited toil, the tears,<br>The shame and hate, which liken well<br>Earth's garden to the nether hell—<br>Had found in nature's self a tongue,<br>On which the gathered horror hung;<br>As if from cliff, and stream, and glen<br>Burst on the startled ears of men<br>That voice which rises unto God,<br>Solemn and stern, —the cry of blood!<br>It ceased, and all was still once more,<br>Save ocean chafing on his shore,<br>The sighing of the wind between<br>The broad banana's leaves of green,<br>Or bough by restless plumage shook,<br>Or murmuring voice of mountain brook.<br>Brief was the silence. Once again<br>Pealed to the skies that frantic yell,<br>Glowed on the heavens a fiery stain,<br>And flashes rose and fell;<br>And painted on the blood-red sky,<br>Dark, naked arms were tossed on high;<br>And, round the white man's lordly hall,<br>Trod, fierce and free, the brute he made;<br>And those who crept along the wall,<br>And answered to his lightest call<br>With more than spaniel dread,<br>The creatures of his lawless beck,<br>Were trampling on his very neck!<br>And on the night-air, wild and clear,<br>Rose woman's shriek of more than fear;<br>For bloodied arms were round her thrown,<br>Aan dark cheeks pressed against her own!<br>Then, injured Afric! for the shame<br>Of thy own daughters, vengeance came<br>Full on the scornful hearts of those,<br>Who mocked thee in thy nameless woes,<br>And to thy hapless children gave<br>One choice,—pollution or the grave!<br>Where then was he whose fiery zeal<br>Had taught the trampled heart to feel,<br>Until despair itself grew strong,<br>And vengeance fed its torch from wrong?<br>Now, when the thunderbolt is speeding;<br>Now, when oppression's heart is bleeding;<br>Now, when the latent curse of Time<br>Is raining down in fire and blood,<br>That curse which, through long years of crime,<br>Has gathered, drop by drop, its flood, —<br>Why strikes he not, the foremost one,<br>Where murder's sternest deeds are done?<br>He stood the aged palms beneath,<br>That shadowed o'er his humble door,<br>Listening, with half-suspended breath,<br>To the wild sounds of fear and death,<br>Toussaint L'Ouverture!<br>What marvel that his heart beat high!<br>The blow for freedom had been given,<br>And blood had answered to the cry<br>Which Earth sent up to Heaven!<br>What marvel that a fierce delight<br>Smiled grimly o'er his brow of night,<br>As groan and shout and bursting flame<br>Told where the midnight tempest came,<br>With blood and fire along its van,<br>And death behind! he was a Man!<br>Yes, dark-souled chieftain! if the light<br>Of mild Religion's heavenly ray<br>Unveiled not to thy mental sight<br>The lowlier and the purer way,<br>In which the Holy Sufferer trod,<br>Meekly amidst the sons of crime;<br>That calm reliance upon God<br>For justice in His own good time;<br>That gentleness to which belongs<br>Forgiveness for its many wrongs,<br>Even as the primal martyr, kneeling<br>For mercy on the evil-dealing;<br>Let not the favored white man name<br>Thy stern appeal, with words of blame.<br>Has he not, with the light of heaven<br>Broadly around him, made the same?<br>Yea, on his thousand war-fields striven,<br>And gloried in his ghastly shame?<br>Kneeling amidst his brother's blood,<br>To offer mockery unto God,<br>As if the High and Holy One<br>Could smile on deeds of murder done!<br>As if a human sacrifice<br>Were purer in His holy eyes,<br>Though offered up by Christian hands,<br>Than the foul rites of Pagan lands!<br>. . . . . . . .<br>Sternly, amidst his household band,<br>His carbine grasped within his hand,<br>The white man stood, prepared and still,<br>Waiting the shock of maddened men,<br>Unchained, and fierce as tigers, when<br>The horn winds through their caverned hill.<br>And one was weeping in his sight,<br>The sweetest flower of all the isle,<br>The bride who seemed but yesternight<br>Love's fair embodied smile.<br>And, clinging to her trembling knee,<br>Looked up the form of infancy,<br>With tearful glance in either face<br>The secret of its fear to trace.<br>'Ha! stand or die!' The white man's eye<br>His steady musket gleamed along,<br>As a tall Negro hastened nigh,<br>With fearless step and strong.<br>'What, ho, Toussaint!' A moment more,<br>His shadow crossed the lighted floor.<br>'Away!' he shouted; 'fly with me,<br>The white man's bark is on the sea;<br>Her sails must catch the seaward wind,<br>For sudden vengeance sweeps behind.<br>Our brethren from their graves have spoken,<br>The yoke is spurned, the chain is broken;<br>On all the hills our fires are glowing,<br>Through all the vales red blood is flowing!<br>No more the mocking White shall rest<br>His foot upon the Negro's breast;<br>No more, at morn or eve, shall drip<br>The warm blood from the driver's whip:<br>Yet, though Tonssaint has vengeance sworn<br>For all the wrongs his race have borne,<br>Though for each drop of Negro blood<br>The white man's veins shall pour a flood;<br>Not all alone the sense of ill<br>Around his heart is lingering still,<br>Nor deeper can the white man feel<br>The generous warmth of grateful zeal.<br>Friends of the Negro! fly with me,<br>The path is open to the sea:<br>Away, for life!' He spoke, and pressed<br>The young child to his manly breast,<br>As, headlong, through the cracking cane,<br>Down swept the dark insurgent train,<br>Drunken and grim, with shout and yell<br>Howled through the dark, like sounds from hell.<br>Far out, in peace, the white man's sail<br>Swayed free before the sunrise gale.<br>Cloud-like that island hung afar,<br>Along the bright horizon's verge,<br>O'er which the curse of servile war<br>Rolled its red torrent, surge on surge;<br>And he, the Negro champion, where<br>In the fierce tumult struggled he?<br>Go trace him by the fiery glare<br>Of dwellings in the midnight air,<br>The yells of triumph and despair,<br>The streams that crimson to the sea!<br>Sleep calmly in thy dungeon-tomb,<br>Beneath Besançon's alien sky,<br>Dark Haytien! for the time shall come,<br>Yea, even now is nigh,<br>When, everywhere, thy name shall be<br>Redeemed from color's infamy;<br>And men shall learn to speak of thee<br>As one of earth's great spirits, born<br>In servitude, and nursed in scorn,<br>Casting aside the weary weight<br>And fetters of its low estate,<br>In that strong majesty of soul<br>Which knows no color, tongue, or clime,<br>Which still hath spurned the base control<br>Of tyrants through all time!<br>Far other hands than mine may wreathe<br>The laurel round thy brow of death,<br>And speak thy praise, as one whose word<br>A thousand fiery spirits stirred,<br>Who crushed his foeman as a worm,1<br>Whose step on human hearts fell firm:<br>Be mine the better task to find<br>A tribute for thy lofty mind,<br>Amidst whose gloomy vengeance shone<br>Some milder virtues all thine own,<br>Some gleams of feeling pure and warm,<br>Like sunshine on a sky of storm,<br>Proofs that the Negro's heart retains<br>Some nobleness amid its chains, —<br>That kindness to the wronged is never<br>Without its excellent reward,<br>Holy to human-kind and ever<br>Acceptable to God.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=John+Greenleaf+Whittier">John Greenleaf Whittier</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=420867" data-title="Toussaint L’Ouverture de John Greenleaf Whittier" data-description="'T WAS night. The tranquil moonlight smile
With which Heaven dreams of Earth, shed down
Its beauty on the Indian isle, —
On broad green field and white-walled town;
And inland waste of rock and wood,
In searching sunshine, wild and rude,
Rose, m..."></div>
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