All great reformations have had their bards. The Hebrew prophets were
poets. They clothed their terrible denunciations of national iniquities
and their confident predictions of the ultimate triumph of truth and
righteousness in imagery so vivid that it will never fade. Mr. Garrison
was bathed in their spirit when a child by his pious mother. He is a
poet and an ardent lover of poetry. The columns of _The Liberator_,
from the beginning, were every week enriched by gems in verse, not
unfrequently the product of his own rapt soul. No sentiment inspires
men to such exalted strains as the love of liberty. Many of the early
Abolitionists uttered themselves in fervid lines of poetry,--Mrs. M. W.
Chapman, Mrs. E. L. Follen, Miss E. M. Chandler, Miss A. G. Chapman,
Misses C. and A. E. Weston, Mrs. L. M. Child, Mrs. Maria Lowell, Miss
Mary Ann Collier, and others, male and female. In 1836--the time that
tried men’s souls--Mrs. Chapman gathered into a volume the effusions
of the above-named, together with those of kindred spirits in other
lands and other times. The volume was entitled, “Songs of the Free and
Hymns of Christian Freedom.” Many of these songs and hymns will live
so long as oppression of every kind is abhorred, and men aspire after
true liberty. This book was a powerful weapon in our moral welfare. My
memory glows with the recollections of the fervor, and often obvious
effect, with which we used to sing in true accord the 13th hymn, by
_Miss E. M. Chandler_:--
“Think of our country’s glory
All dimmed with Afric’s tears!
Her broad flag stained and gory
With the hoarded guilt of years!”