Note 13 — Extract from an unpublished Poem on Freedom.
Reading edition
"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.