of Saugor, lying below Calcutta, and which few Christians have ever passed without feeling inclined to invoke upon the island and its shrine of blood the unmitigated curse of God and man. The sight of it fired the indignation of that great linguist, Dr. John Leyden, and led to the composition of those rugged, but honest lines of his, which describe the place and those deeds for which it was regularly visited, and which made it so infamous throughout the civilized world:
“On sea-girt Saugor's desert isle,
Mantled with thickets dark and dun,
May never moon or starlight smile,
Nor ever beam the summer sun!
Strange deeds of blood have there been done,
In mercy ne'er to be forgiven;
Deeds the far-seeing eye of Heaven
Vailed its radiant orb to shun.
“To glut the shark and crocodile
A mother brought her infant here;
She saw its tender, playful smile.
She shed not one maternal tear;
She threw it on a watery bier:
With grinding teeth sea-monsters tore
The smiling infant that she bore—
She shrunk not once its cries to hear!”
He then turns and addresses Kalee, and in the second verse following literally quotes the Shaster describing her:
“Dark goddess of the iron mace,
Flesh-tearer, quaffing life-blood warm.
The terrors of thine awful face
The pulse of mortal hearts alarm—
Grim power! If human woes can charm,
Look to the horrors of this flood.
Where crimsoned Gunga shines in blood,
And man-devouring monsters swarm.
“Skull-chaplet wearer! whom the blood
Of man delights a thousand years,
Than whom no face, by land or flood.
More stern and pitiless appears;
Thine is the cup of human tears,
The pomp of human sacrifice:
Cannot the cruel blood suffice
Of tigers, which thine island bears.
