from you with impatience, and, coward like, endeavor to forget you amid
the sumptuousness of their palaces.




PHILADELPHIA TRANSLATION.


INVOCATION.

Hail, ye solitary ruins, ye sacred tombs, and silent walls! 'Tis your
auspicious aid that I invoke; 'tis to you my soul, wrapt in meditation,
pours forth its prayers! What though the profane and vulgar mind shrinks
with dismay from your august and awe-inspiring aspect; to me you unfold
the sublimest charms of contemplation and sentiment, and offer to my
senses the luxury of a thousand delicious and enchanting thoughts!
How sumptuous the feast to a being that has a taste to relish, and an
understanding to consult you! What rich and noble admonitions;
what exquisite and pathetic lessons do you read to a heart that is
susceptible of exalted feelings! When oppressed humanity bent in timid
silence throughout the globe beneath the galling yoke of slavery, it was
you that proclaimed aloud the birthright of those truths which tyrants
tremble at while they detect, and which, by sinking the loftiest head of
the proudest potentate, with all his boasted pageantry, to the level
of mortality with his meanest slave, confirmed and ratified by your
unerring testimony the sacred and immortal doctrine of Equality.

Musing within the precincts of your inviting scenes of philosophic
solitude, whither the insatiate love of true-born Liberty had led me, I