Quito Rears Her Fanes

Grupo Deseo: ECUADOR

The clime where Quito since hath rear’d her fanes,
And now no more her barbarous rites maintains.
He saw these vales in richer blooms array’d,
And tribes more numerous haunt the woodland shade…

Yet softer fires his daring views control,
And mixt emotions fill his changing soul.
Shall genius rare, that might the world improve,
Bend to the milder voice of careless love,
That bounds his glories, and forbids to part
From bowers that woo’d his fluctuating heart?
Or shall the toils imperial heroes claim
Fire his brave bosom with a patriot flame, Prisoners-of-Sun-inca-dream
Bid sceptres wait him on Peruvia’s shore,
And loved Oella meet his eyes no more?

Sudden his near approach the maid alarms;
He flew enraptured to her yielding arms,
And lost, dissolving in a softer flame,
His distant empire and the fire of fame.
At length, retiring thro the homeward field,
Their glowing souls to cooler converse yield;
O’er various scenes of blissful life they ran,
When thus the warrior to the maid began:
Long have we mark’d the inauspicious reign Capac round
That waits our sceptre in this rough domain;
A soil ungrateful and a wayward race,
Their game but scanty, and confined their space.
Where late my steps the southern war pursued,
The fertile plains grew boundless as I view’d;
More numerous nations trod the grassy wild,
And joyous nature more delightful smiled…

The Argument: Natives of America appear in vision.
Their manners and characters. Columbus demands the cause of the dissimilarity of men in different countries, Hesper replies, That the human body is composed of a due proportion of the elements suited to the place of its first formation; that these elements, differently proportioned, produce all the changes of health, sickness, growth and decay; and may likewise produce any other changes which occasion the diversity of men; that these elemental proportions are varied, not more by climate than temperature and other local circumstances; that the mind is likewise in a state of change, and will take its physical character from the body and from external objects: examples. Inquiry concerning the first peopling of America.

**excerpts from: The Columbiad, Book II by Joel Barlow**

Princesas

Courting the Ice Maiden

May23

She was an Andean maiden, a sacrificial victim, an embodiment of unspoken longings, sealed in a frozen tomb at the peak of a Bolivian mountain. I heard Inca music leading me on for years before I ever met her, walked up glaciers to find her, searched the headwaters of the Amazon for her essence, bathed my soul in forbidden tears, Inca on heights brought her treasures and tribute, laid my offerings at the foot of her mountain heights . . . but she was not there. Her tomb was empty. She was living in a mining town in Arizona with hair died Gothic black. I tried in vain to win her, I wrote her poems, prayed for her, but communication was impossible.
She wouldn’t splash around in the wading pool—
and I wanted to plunge below the Atlantean depths with her.
She figured I was a misfit outsider—I thought she was the fate of the Americas.
I offered her the treasures of darkness—she wanted someone to pay her light bill.
I would have borne her burdens—she gave me the cold shoulder.
I moved out of that town about nine months after she got knocked-up (not by me), and I lost touch, forever.