XI.

  She would not move him otherwise,
  Although her heart was sad and sore. 
  That which was venal in his eyes
  To her a lovely aspect wore,
  And helped to weave the thousand ties

  Which bound her to her youth, and all
  The loves that she had left behind
  When, from her father’s stately hall,
  She came, her Northern home to find,
  With him who held her heart in thrall.

  In the dark pictures which he drew
  Of instituted shame and wrong,
  She saw no figures that she knew,
  But a confused and hateful throng
  Of forms that in his fancy grew.

  Her father’s rule, benign and mild,
  Was all of slavery she had known;
  To her, an Afric was a child—­
  A charge in other ages thrown
  On Christian honor, from the wild

  Of savagery in which the Fates
  Had given him birth and dwelling-place—­
  And so, descending through estates
  Of gentle vassalage, his race
  Had come to those of later dates.

  Black hands her baby form had dressed;
  Black hands her blacker hair had curled;
  And she had found a dusky breast
  The sweetest breast in all the world
  When she was thirsty or at rest.

  Her playmates, in her native bowers,
  Were Darkest children of the sun,
  Who built the palaces and towers
  In which her reign, in love begun,
  Gave foretaste of love’s later hours.

  Her memory was full of song
  That she had learned in house and field,
  From those whose days seemed never long,
  And those who could not hold concealed
  The consciousness of shame and wrong.

  A loving ear heard their complaints;
  A faithful tongue advised and warned;
  And grave corrections and restraints
  Were rendered by a heart adorned
  By all the graces of the saints.

  There was no touch of memory’s chords—­
  No picture on her blooming wall,—­
  Of life upon the sunny swards
  They reproduced,—­but brought recall
  Of happy slaves and gentle lords.

  And Philip charged a deadly sin
  Upon that beautiful domain,
  Condemning all who dwelt therein,
  And branding with the awful stain
  Her friends, and all her dearest kin.

  XII.

  Yet still she knew his conscience clear,—­
  That he believed his voice was God’s;
  And listened with a voiceless fear
  To the portentous periods
  In which he preached the chosen year

  Of expiation and release,
  And prophesied that Slavery’s power,
  Grown great apace with crime’s increase,
  Before the front of Right should cower,
  And bid God’s people go in peace!

  The fierce invectives of his tongue
  Frayed every day her wounds afresh,
  And with new pain her bosom wrung,
  For they envenomed kindred flesh,
  To which in sympathy she clung.