Excerpt from The Niger: A Prize Poem, Recited in the Theatre, Oxford, June 12, 1850 And theirs were marts with goodly bales heap'd high, Spice, and red gold, and milk-white ivory, And priceless freightage brought from many a land By the fleet desert-ship o'er seas of sand. Throughout the list'ning nations 'gan prevail, In later times, the negro captive's tale, A simple tale, for sorrow made it plain; Sadly he thought of home, who felt the chain, Sadly he spoke of native dale and hill, In a strange land, to please a tyrant's will; Scarce he recall'd the scenes of early years, Where grief had blotted memory's page with tears, The fight, - the captive's march, - the ocean crost, A foreign rule, - and home for ever lost But this brief story fir'd th' adventurous mind, And rous'd to pity spirits wise and kind, Till Wilberforce annull'd the guilty laws, And Park went forth a pilgrim in his cause. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.