THE EAST COAST
The charmed sunset linger'd low adown
In the red West: thro' mountain clefts the dale
Was seen far inland, and the yellow down
Border'd with palm, and many a winding vale
And meadow, set with slender galingale;
A land where all things always seem'd the same!
And round about the keel with faces pale,
Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,
The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.The Lotos-Eaters.In these days, the boot of the ubiquitous white man leaves its marks on all the
fair places of the Earth, and scores thereon an even more gigantic track than that
which affrighted Robinson Crusoe in his solitude. It crushes down the forests,
beats out roads, strides across the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and
generally tramples on the growths of nature, and the works of primitive man,
reducing all things to that dead level of conventionality, which we call
civilisation. Incidentally, it stamps out much of what is best in the customs and
characteristics of the native races against which it brushes; and, though it
relieves them of many things which hurt and oppressed them ere it came, it
injures them morally almost as much as it benefits them materially. We, who are
white men, admire our work not a little—which is natural—and many are found
willing to wear out their souls in efforts to clothe in the stiff garments of
European conventionalities, the naked, brown limbs of Orientalism. The natives,
who, for the most part, are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which they are
aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the laudator temporis acti
has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often tawdry luxury, which the coming
of the Europeans has placed within his reach. So effectually has the heel of the
white man been ground into the face of Pêrak and Sĕlângor, that these Native
States are now only nominally what their name implies. The alien population far
out-numbers the people of the land in most of the principal districts, and it is