Appeal for the Injured African, by J. H. Wiffen
Of sorrow and despair ascends,
Who hear'st the ravens when they cry,
The babe when at thy feet he bends!
More weak than is the raven's brood,
Less pure than infants though we be,
Our silent prayers for Lybia's good,
O Father! let them rise to Thee!
By realms dispeopled, tongues struck dumb
With the brute outrages of years,
In thy remembrance let them come-
The negro's wrongs, the negro's tears!
Whate'er of crime, whate'er of woe,
Europe has wrought, or Afric wept,
In his recording volume, lo!
The angel of thy court has kept.
Yet-ere the assessing Spirit stands,
Prepared to sound from shore to shore,
That golden trumpet which commands
The tyrant's scourge to smite no more:
Ah! stay his vials-with our prayer
No vengeance breathes,-in judgment break
The oppressor's galling chains, but spare
The oppressor, for thy mercy's sake.
Didst thou not form, from pole to pole,
The various tongues and tribes of earth
Erect, with an immortal soul,
Expectants of one holier birth?
And shall the nations dare to hold
In chains whom Thou hast chartered free,
Or buy with their accursed gold
The sinewy arm and servile knee?
No: not for this didst Thou command,
With westering keel and sails unfurled,
Columbus o'er the waves, to rend
The curtains of that younger world.
And O, 'twas not for this, that he
Upreared thy hallowed ensign there;
Alas! that e'er the cross should be
The joyless herald of Despair!-
That whom thy Loved One died to save,
Man, guilty man, should hold subdued,
And plead prescription o'er the grave,
When questioned of his brother's 'blood.
But Thou art righteous; Thou wilt rise
All mighty as in days of yore,
When Israel sighed, as Canaan sighs,
Beneath the tasks his children bore.
Cry not the isles themselves aloud,
"Three hundred thralling years are fled,
Since earth by tyranny was ploughed;
The vintage of the land is red?"
In that great day, when Afric's race
Are from their house of bondage cast,
O hide us in some peaceful place,
Till all thy wrath be overpast.
For dark, except thy mercy shine,
That later passover must be:
Hear then our pleadings at thy shrine;
O Father, let them rise to thee!
J. H. Wiffen.
Woburn Abbey,
8th month, 9th, 1828.