Recently, a great sacrifice has been made in that Island to the Spirit of despotism, in the death of the Patriot and Poet, Placido. Freedom mourns over his early tomb. The waves of the Atlantic, of whose vastness and sublimity he had sung, chaunted his dirge as the tyrants hid him in the grave! Placido was a mulatto, a true Poet, and of course a Patriot. His noble soul was moved with pity as he saw his fellow men in chains. Born to feel, and to act, he made a bold attempt to effect a revolution, and failing in it, he fell a martyr to his principles.
On the day previous to his death, he wrote the following lines, of which Coolridge or Montgomery would not have been ashamed. They present a blaze of poetic fire, intense and sublime:—
“O Liberty! I wait for thee,
To break this chain, and dungeon bar;
I hear thy voice calling me,
Deep in the frozen North, afar,
With voice like God’s, and vision like a star.
Long cradled in the mountain wind,
Thy mates, the eagle and the storm
Arise; and from thy brow unbind