"Yet supple sophist to a plastic mind,
Sees gods in woods, and spirits in the wind."
The imagination of the African, like his musical genius, which extracts surprising harmony from the rudest of sources, the clapping of hands, the clanking of chains, the resonance of lasso wood, and perforated shells, seems to invest everything with a resident spirit of peculiar power. Accordingly, his mythologies are most numerous and poetical—his entire catalogue of superior gods alone, embracing a more extended length than the Assyro-Babylon Alphabet, with its three hundred letters.
"The vengeful causes and the deed forgot."
All travellers agree in the facile ductility and inertia-like amiability of the native African character.—Brewster on Africa.
"The merry numbers of his crisp-haired crew."
The negro race is, perhaps, the most prolific of all the human species. Their infancy and youth are singularly happy. The parents are passionately fond of their children.—Goldbury's Travels.
"Strike me," said my attendant, "but do not curse my mother." The same sentiment I found universally to prevail.
Some of the first lessons in which the Mandings women instruct their children is the practice of truth. It was the only consolation for a negro mother, whose son had been murdered by the Moors, that "the boy had never told a lie."—Park's Travels.