But he who lies here so still and mournfully in this flickering torch-light had struggling within him the energies which make the patriot and the prophet. Crushed beneath a mountain of ignorance, they rose blind and distorted; yet had knowledge enlightened and success crowned them, his name might have been, with that of Toussaint, celebrated in mournful sonnet by the deepest thinking poet of the age:—
"Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There's not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exaltations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."
The weight of so great an affliction seemed to have repressed the usual vivacity with which the negro is wont to indulge the expression of grief. When the body was laid down by the side of the grave, there was for a time a silence so deep that the rustling of the leaves, and the wild, doleful clamor of the frogs and turtles in the swamps, and the surge of the winds in the pine-tree tops, were all that met the ear. Even the wife of the dead stood with her shawl wrapped tightly about her, rocking to and fro, as if in the extremity of grief.
An old man in the company, who had officiated sometimes as preacher among the negroes, began to sing a well-known hymn very commonly used at negro funerals, possibly because its wild and gloomy imagery has something exciting to their quick imaginations. The words rose on the night air:—
"Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound,