Forced from home and all its pleasures,
    Afric’s coast I left forlorn,
  To increase a stranger’s treasures,
    O’er the raging billows borne;
  Men from England bought and sold me,
    Paid my price in paltry gold;
  But, though theirs they have enroll’d me,
    Minds are never to be sold.

  Still in thought as free as ever,
    What are England’s rights, I ask,
  Me from my delights to sever,
    Me to torture, me to task? 
  Fleecy locks and black complexion
    Cannot forfeit Nature’s claim;
  Skins may differ, but affection
    Dwells in black and white the same.

  Why did all-creating Nature
    Make the plant, for which we toil? 
  Sighs must fan it, tears must water,
    Sweat of ours must dress the soil. 
  Think, ye masters, iron-hearted,
    Lolling at your jovial boards,
  Think, how many backs have smarted
    For the sweets your cane affords.

  Is there, as you sometimes tell us,
    Is there one, who rules on high;
  Has he bid you buy and sell us,
    Speaking from his throne, the sky? 
  Ask him, if your knotted scourges,
    Fetters, blood-extorting screws,
  Are the means, which duty urges
    Agents of his will to use?

  Hark! he answers.  Wild tornadoes,
    Strewing yonder sea with wrecks,
  Wasting towns, plantations, meadows,
    Are the voice with which he speaks. 
  He, foreseeing what vexations
    Afric’s sons should undergo,
  Fixed their tyrants’ habitations
    Where his whirlwinds answer—­No.

  By our blood in Afric wasted,
    Ere our necks received the chain;
  By the miseries, which we tasted
    Crossing, in your barks, the main;
  By our sufferings, since you brought us
    To the man-degrading mart,
  All-sustained by patience, taught us
    Only by a broken heart: 

  Deem our nation brutes no longer,
    Till some reason you shall find
  Worthier of regard, and stronger,
    Than the colour of our kind. 
  Slaves of gold! whose sordid dealings
    Tarnish all, your boasted powers,
  Prove that you have human feelings,
    Ere you proudly question ours.

This little piece Cowper presented in manuscript to some of his friends in London; and these, conceiving it to contain a powerful appeal in behalf of the injured Africans, joined in printing it.  Having ordered it on the finest hot-pressed paper, and folded it up in a small and neat form, they gave it the printed title of A Subject for Conversation at the Tea-table.  After this, they sent many thousand copies of it in franks into the country.  From one it spread to another, till it travelled almost over the whole island.  Falling at length into the hands of the musician, it was set to music; and it then found its way into the streets, both of the metropolis and of the country, where it was sung as a ballad; and where it gave a plain account of the subject, with an appropriate feeling, to those who heard it.