Page:Livingstone in Africa.djvu/64

If these prove helpful in extremity.

Whose guiltless blood weighs on my soul to-day?
I have not injured, mock'd, insulted any:
I have been wanting in an English pride;
Nor feel the grand immeasurable gulf,
Which every drunken subaltern may feel
Between the veriest scum of England's isle,
And of all infusorial "foreigners"
The least unworthy—nay; for even him,
Whom, with all colour'd races of the world,
We from superior panoramic heights,
With one judicial and exhaustive wave
Of hand, may name and sweep from sympathy,
Even the "damn'd nigger" I have not contemn'd;
Knowing that if the Lord regarded us
Proud English from "damn'd nigger" points of view,
All would be damn'd indeed without reprieve.

⁹ A lion once, a mightiest male lion,
Whom my good rifle's bullet had but maim'd,