they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and
science, through church and state. One of these signs is the fact that
the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the
lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as
benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the
low, the common was explored and poetized. That which had been
negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and
provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is
suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of
the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the
meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great
stride. It is a sign--is it not?--of new vigour, when the extremities
are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet.
I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in
Italy and Arabia; what is Greek art or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace
the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give
me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.
What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the
milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the
glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; show me the
ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the
highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these
suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling
with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the
shop, the plough, and the leger referred to the like cause by which
light undulates and poets sing; and the world lies no longer a dull
miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle,
there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest
pinnacle and the lowest trench."
... "Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political
movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything
that tends to insulate the individual--to surround him with barriers of
natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man
shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state--tends
to true union as well as greatness. 'I learned,' said the melancholy
Pestalozzi, 'that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able
to help any other man.' Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar
is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time,
all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must
be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another
which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing; the man is
all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a
globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is
for you to know all; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and
gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs by all
motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American scholar.
We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of
the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.
Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The
scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic
consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects,
eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the
complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our
shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of
God, find the earth below not in unison with these; but are hindered
from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is
managed inspire, and turn drudges or die of disgust, some of them
suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of
young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not
yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his
instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Patience, patience; with the shades of all the good and great for
company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and
for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making
those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the
chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; not to be reckoned one
character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created
to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the
thousand of the party, the section to which we belong; and our opinion
predicted geographically, as the North or the South? Not so, brothers
and friends; please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."
Of the last class of originals--those who are not only strong to form a
purpose in life and fulfil it, but who are driven by pressure of
circumstance to put forth their whole force for the control of other
destinies than their own--there is no more conspicuous example than
Father Taylor, as he is called. In America there is no need to explain
who Father Taylor is. He is known in England, but not extensively.
Father Taylor is the seamen's apostle. He was a sailor-boy himself, and
at twenty years old was unable to read. He rose in his calling, and at
length became full of some religious convictions which he longed to
express. He has found a mode of expression, and is happy. He is one of
the busiest and most cheerful of men; and, of all preachers living,
probably the most eloquent to those whom his preaching suits. So it
would appear from events. I heard him called a second homely Jeremy
Taylor; and I certainly doubt whether Jeremy Taylor himself could more
absolutely sway the minds and hearts of the learned and pious of his day
than the seamen's friend does those of his flock. He has a great
advantage over other preachers in being able to speak to his hearers
from the ground of their common experience; in being able to appeal to
his own sealife. He can say, "You have lodged with me in the forecastle;
did you ever know me profane?" "You have seen me land from a long
voyage. Where did I betake myself? Am not I a proof that a sealife need
not be soiled with vice on land?" All this gives him some power; but it
would be little without the prodigious force which he carries in his
magnificent intellect and earnest heart.
A set of institutions is connected with the Boston Port Society, whose
agent Mr. Taylor is. There is the Seamen's Bethel, in North Square,
where Mr. Taylor preaches; a Reading-room, and a Nautical School; a
Temperance Society, and the Bethel Union, the last being an association
of seamen and masters of vessels for the purpose chiefly of settling
disputes without litigation and scandal, promoting the just and kind
treatment of seamen, and watching over their rights. There is also a
Clothing Society, the object of which is economy rather than charity;
and a Savings' Bank for seamen, the merits of which are sufficiently
indicated by the title.
Father Taylor is the life and soul of all this. Some help him liberally
with the purse, and many with head and hands; but he is the animating
spirit of the whole. His chapel is filled, from year's end to year's
end, with sailors. He has no salary, and will not hear of one. He takes
charge of all the poor connected with his chapel. To many this must look
like an act of insanity. No class is more exposed to casualties than
that of seamen; and, when a life is lost, an entire helpless family
comes upon the charity of society. Father Taylor speaks of his ten
thousand children, and all the woes and faults of a multitude are
accumulated upon his hands; and yet he retains the charge of all his
poor, though he has no fixed income whatever. He does it by putting his
charge in the way of helping each other and themselves. He encourages
sobriety and economy in all their habits, and enforces them with a power
which it would be vain to attempt to give an idea of. He uses the utmost
openness about his plans, and thereby obtains valuable co-operation. He
has a collection of money made twice every Sunday in his church. The
sums are given by the seamen almost exclusively, and are in very small
coin; but the amount has gone on increasing, from first to last, except
during intervals when Father Taylor was absent for his health. Between
the years 1828 and 1835, the annual sum thus contributed rose from 98 to
1079 dollars.
Boston owes to Mr. Taylor and to Dr. Tuckerman its convictions of the
pernicious operation of some of the old methods of charity by
almsgiving; and the names of these gentlemen ought ever to be held in
honour for having saved the young community in which they dwell from the
curse of such pauperism in kind (the degree could never have become very
formidable) as has afflicted the kingdoms of the Old World. Mr. Taylor
owns that he little foresaw what he was undertaking in assuming the
charge of all his poor, under such liabilities as those who follow the
seaman's calling are exposed to: but he does it. The funds are, as it
has been seen, provided by the class to be benefited; and they have
proved hitherto sufficient, under the wise administration of the pastor
and his wife, and under the animating influence of his glowing spirit,
breathed forth from the pulpit and amid their dwellings. It seems as if
his power was resorted to in difficult and desperate cases, like that of
a superior being; such surprising facts was I told of his influence over
his flock. He was requested to visit an insane man, who believed himself
to be in heaven, and therefore to have no need of food and sleep. The
case had become desperate, so long had the fasting and restlessness
continued. Father Taylor prevailed at once; the patient was presently
partaking of "the feast of the blessed" with Father Taylor, and enjoying
the "saints' rest on a heavenly couch." From carrying a single point
like this to redeeming a whole class from much of the vice and wo which
had hitherto afflicted it, the pastor's power seems universally to
prevail.
I have not mentioned all this time what Father Taylor's religion is, or,
rather, what sect he belongs to. This is one of the last considerations
which, in his case, occurs to an observer. All the essentials of his
faith must be so right to produce such results, that the separate
articles of belief do not present themselves for inquiry. He is
"orthodox" (Presbyterian), but so liberal as to be in some sort disowned
by the rigid of his sect. He opens his pulpit to ministers of any
Protestant denomination; and Dr. Beecher and other bigots of his own
sect refused to preach thence after Unitarians. When this opposition of
theirs diminished the contributions of his people during his absence,
they twitted him with it, and insultingly asked whether he cheated the
Unitarians, or they him? to which he replied, that they understood one
another, and left all unfair proceedings to a third party.
Mr. Taylor has a remarkable person. He is stoutly built, and looks more
like a skipper than a preacher. His face is hard and weather-beaten, but
with an expression of sensibility, as well as acuteness, which it is
wonderful that features apparently so immoveable can convey. He uses a
profusion of action. His wife told me that she thought his health was
promoted by his taking so much exercise in the shape of action, in
conversation as well as in the pulpit. He is very loud and prodigiously
rapid. His splendid thoughts come faster than he can speak them; and, at
times, he would be totally overwhelmed by them, if, in the midst of his
most rapid utterance of them, a burst of tears, of which he is wholly
unconscious, did not aid in his relief. I have seen them streaming,
bathing his face, when his words breathed the very spirit of joy, and
every tone of his voice was full of exhilaration. His pathos, shed in
thoughts and tones so fleeting as to be gone like lightning, is the most
awful of his powers. I have seen a single clause of a short sentence
call up an instantaneous flush on the hundreds of hard faces turned to
the preacher; and it is no wonder to me that the widow and orphan are
cherished by those who hear his prayers for them. The tone of his
petitions is importunate, even passionate; and his sailor hearers may be
forgiven for their faith, that Father Taylor's prayers cannot be
refused. Never, however, was anything stranger than some particulars of
his prayers. I have told elsewhere[13] how importunately he prayed for
rain in fear of conflagration, and, as it happened, the Sunday before
the great New-York fire. With such petitions, urged with every beauty of
expression, he mixes up whatever may have struck his fancy during the
week, whether mythology, politics, housewifery, or anything else. He
prayed one day, when dwelling on the moral perils of seamen, "that
Bacchus and Venus might be driven to the end of the earth, and off it."
I heard him pray that the members of Congress might be preserved from
buffoonery. Thence he passes to supplication, offered in a spirit of
sympathy which may appear bold at another moment, but which is true to
the emotion of the hour. "Father! look upon us! _We are a widow._"
"Father! the mother's heart thou knowest; the mother's bleeding heart
thou pitiest. Sanctify to us the removal of this lamb!"
Footnote 13: Society in America, vol. ii., p. 264.
The eloquence of his sermons was somewhat the less amazing to me from my
feeling that, if there be inspiration in the world, it arises from being
so listened to. It was not like the preaching of Whitfield, for all was
quiet in Father Taylor's church. There were no groans, few tears, and
those unconsciously shed, rolling down the upturned face, which never
for a moment looked away from the preacher. His voice was the only
sound; now tremendously loud and rapid, overpowering the senses; now
melting into a tenderness like that of a mother's wooings of her infant.
The most striking discourse I heard from him was on the text, "That we,
through the comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope." A crew from
among his hearers were going to sail in the course of the week. He gave
me a totally new view of the great trial of the seaman's life, the
pining for rest. Never, among the poets of the earth, was there finer
discourse of the necessity of hope to man, and never a more tremendous
picture of the state of the hopeless. Father Taylor is no reader except
of his Bible, and probably never heard of any poem on the subject on
which he was speaking; and he therefore went unhesitatingly into a
picture of what hope is to the mariner in his midnight watches and amid
the tossing of the storm; and, if Campbell had been there, he would have
joyfully owned himself outdone. But then the preacher went off into one
of his strange descriptions of what people resort to when longing for a
home for their spirits, and not finding the right one. "Some get into
the stomach, and think they can make a good home of that; but the
stomach is no home for the spirit;" and then followed some particular
reasons why. Others nestle down into people's good opinion, and think,
if they can get praise enough, they shall be at peace. "But opinion is
sometimes an easy tradewind, and sometimes a contrary hurricane." Some
wait and wait upon change; but the affairs of Providence go on while
such are standing still, "and God's chronometer loses no time." After a
long series of pictures of forlornness and pinings for home, he burst
forth suddenly upon the promise, "I will give you rest." He was for the
moment the wanderer finding rest; his flood of tears and of gratitude,
his rapturous account of the change from pining to hope and rest were
real to himself and to us for the time. The address to the departing
seamen was tender and cheerful; with a fitting mention of the chances of
mortality, but nothing which could be ever construed by the most
superstitious of them, in the most comfortless of their watches, into a
foreboding.
Such preaching exerts prodigious power over an occasional hearer, and it
is an exquisite pleasure to listen to it; but it does not, for a
continuance, meet the religious wants of any but those to whom it is
expressly addressed. The preacher shares the mental and moral
characteristics, as well as the experience in life of his nautical
hearers; their imaginative cast of mind, their superstition, their
strong capacity for friendship and love, their ease about the future,
called recklessness in some, and faith in others. This is so unlike the
common mind of landsmen, that the same expression of worship will not
suit them both. So Father Taylor will continue to be the seaman's
apostle; and, however admired and beloved by the landsman, not his
priest. This is as it should be, and as the good man desires. His field
of labour is wide enough for him. No one is more sensible than he of its
extent. He told me what he tells seamen themselves, that they are the
eyes and tongues of the world; the seed carriers of the world; the
winged seeds from which good or evil must spring up on the wildest
shores of God's earth. His spirit is so possessed with this just idea of
the importance of his work, that praise and even immediate sympathy are
not necessary; though the last is, of course, pleasant to him. One
Christmas day there was a misunderstanding as to whether the chapel
would be open, and not above twenty people were present; but never did
Father Taylor preach more splendidly.
There is one great drawback in the religious services of his chapel.
There is a gallery just under the roof for the people of colour; and
"the seed carriers of the world" are thus countenanced by Father Taylor
in making a root of bitterness spring up beside their homes, which,
under his care, a better spirit should sanctify. I think there can be no
doubt that an influence so strong as his would avail to abolish this
unchristian distinction of races within the walls of his own church; and
it would elevate the character of his influence if the attempt were
made.
No one doubts Garrison's being an original. None who know him can wonder
that the coloured race of Americans look upon him as raised up to be
their deliverer, as manifestly as Moses to lead the Israelites out of
bondage.
William Lloyd Garrison was, not many years ago, a printer's boy. The
time will come when those who worked by his side will laboriously recall
the incidents of the printing-office in those days, to make out whether
the poor boy dropped expressions or shot glances which indicated what a
spirit was working within him, or prophesied of the work which awaited
him. By some accident his attention was turned to the condition of the
coloured race, and to colonization as a means of rescue. Like all the
leading abolitionists, Garrison was a colonizationist first; but, before
his clear mind, enlightened by a close attachment to principles, and
balanced by his being of a strong practical turn, the case soon appeared
in its true aspect.
Garrison, then a student in some country college, I believe, engaged to
deliver a lecture on colonization; and, in order to prepare himself, he
went down to Baltimore to master the details of the scheme on the spot
where it was in actual operation. His studies soon convinced him of the
fallacies and iniquities involved in the plan, and he saw that nothing
short of the abolition of the slave system would redeem the coloured
race from their social depression. A visitation of persecution came at
this time in aid of his convictions. A merchant of Newburyport,
Massachusetts, gave permission to the master of a vessel of which he was
the owner to freight the ship with slaves at Baltimore, and carry them
down to the New-Orleans market. Garrison commented upon this transaction
in a newspaper in the terms which it deserved, but which were libellous,
and he was, in consequence, brought to a civil and criminal trial,
thrown into prison, and fined 1000 dollars, which he had not the
remotest prospect of being able to pay. When he had been imprisoned
three months, he was released by the fine being paid by Arthur Tappan,
of New-York; a gentleman who was an entire stranger to Garrison, and who
did this act (the first of a long series of munificent deeds) for the
sake of the principle involved in the case.
Of this gentleman a few words before we proceed. He is one of the few
wealthy original abolitionists, and his money has been poured out freely
in the cause. He has been one of the most persecuted, and his nerves
have never appeared to be shaken. He has been a mark for insult from the
whole body of his countrymen (except a handful of abolitionists) for a
series of years; and he has never, on this account, altered his
countenance towards man or woman. His house was attacked in New-York,
and his family driven from the city; he quietly took up his abode on
Long Island. His lady and children are stared at like wild beasts on
board a steamboat; he tranquilly observes on the scenery. His partners
early remonstrated with him on the injury he was doing to his trade by
publicly opposing slavery, and supported one another in declaring to him
that he must give up his connexion with the abolitionists. He heard them
to an end; said, "I will be hanged first," and walked off. When I was in
America, immense rewards for the head, and even for the ears of Mr.
Tappan, were offered from the South, through advertisements in the
newspapers and handbills. Whether these rewards were really offered by
any committee of vigilance or not was the same thing to Mr. Tappan; he
was, in either case, in equal danger from wretches who would do the deed
for money. But it cannot be thought improbable that a committee of
vigilance should commit an act of any degree of eccentricity at a time
of such panic that a meeting was called in a new settlement in Alabama
for the purpose of voting Mr. O'Connell a nuisance. Mr. Tappan's house
on Long Island is in an exposed situation; but he hired no guard, and
lost not an hour's sleep. When some one showed him one of these
handbills, he glanced from the sum promised to the signatures. "Are
these good names?" said he. A cause involving a broad principle, and
supported to the point of martyrdom by men of this make, is victorious
from the beginning. Its complete triumph is merely a question of time.
Garrison lectured in New-York in favour of the abolition of slavery, and
in exposure of the colonization scheme, and was warmly encouraged by a
few choice spirits. He went to Boston for the same purpose; but in the
enlightened and religious city of Boston, every place in which he could
lecture was shut against him. He declared his intention of lecturing on
the Common if he could get no door opened to him, and this threat
procured for him what he wanted. At his first lecture he fired the souls
of some of his hearers; among others, of Mr. May, the first Unitarian
clergyman who embraced the cause. On the next Sunday Mr. May, in
pursuance of the custom of praying for all distressed persons, prayed
for the slaves; and was asked, on descending from the pulpit, whether he
was mad.
Garrison and his fellow-workman, both in the printing-office and the
cause--his friend Knapp--set up the Liberator, in its first days a
little sheet of shabby paper, printed with old types, and now a handsome
and flourishing newspaper. These two heroes, in order to publish their
paper, lived for a series of years in one room on bread and water, "with
sometimes," when the paper sold unusually well, "the luxury of a bowl of
milk." In course of time twelve men formed themselves into an abolition
society at Boston, and the cause was fairly afoot.