- Strow’d with each fruit of taste, each flower of smell, [65]
- Sicilian Proserpine,1 delighted, sought;
- Can vie, blest Isle, with thee.—Tho’ no soft sound
- Of pastoral stop thine echoes e’er awak’d;
- Nor raptured poet, lost in holy trance,
- Thy streams arrested with enchanting song: [70]
- Yet virgins, far more beautiful than she
- Whom Pluto ravish’d,2 and more chaste, are thine:
- Yet probity, from principle, not fear,
- Actuates thy sons, bold, hospitable, free:
- Yet a fertility, unknown of old, [75]
- To other climes denied, adorns thy hills;
- Thy vales, thy dells adorns.—O might my strain
- As far transcend the immortal songs of Greece,
- As thou the partial subject of their praise! [80]
- Thy fame should float familiar thro’ the world;
- Each plant should own thy Cane her lawful lord;
- Nor should old Time, song stops the flight of Time,
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Obscure thy lustre with his shadowy wing.
- SCARCE less impregnated, with every power
- Of vegetation, is the red brick-mould,3 [85]
- That lies on marly beds.4—The renter, this
- Can scarce exhaust; how happy for the heir!
VER. 71. yet virgins, far more beautiful] The inhabitants of St. Christopher look whiter, are less sallow, and enjoy finer complexions, than any of the dwellers on the other islands.5 Sloane.
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Persephone, queen of the underworld. ↩︎
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Roman God of the underworld who abducted Proserpine and made her his queen. ↩︎
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Loose and clay-like soil beneficial for cultivation. ↩︎
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Marl is an earthy deposit, typically loose and consisting chiefly of clay mixed with calcium carbonate, used to improve the texture of sandy or light soil. ↩︎
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Europeans generally believed in climatist theories of health and identity. These suggested that human bodies adapted to their environments and that temperate climates (and societies) were superior to tropical ones. As a result, colonists worried that their skin color would change in tropical climates and that this change would be a sign of physical and moral degeneration. ↩︎