Disappointed in love, and sickened in hope of civilized life, the speaker dreams, for a moment, of flying to some savage land, and leading the exciting life of a tropical hunter. In the reaction of his thoughts how vividly is expressed the precious preëminence of European existence, with all its attendant evils!
"Fool, again the dream, the fancy! but I know my words are wild,
But I count the gray barbarian lower than the Christian child.
I to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!
Mated with a squalid savage—what to me were sun or clime?
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time—
I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon.
Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward, let us range,