“For Banquo’s issue have I filed my mind.”
[132] _Page 202, note 1._ Mr. F. B. Sanborn, in his _Life of Thoreau_,
says that Webster gave, as a reason for not visiting Concord in his later
years, that “Many of those whom I so highly esteemed in your beautiful
and quiet village have become a good deal estranged, to my great grief,
by abolitionism, free-soilism, transcendentalism and other notions which
I cannot but regard as so many vagaries of the imagination.”
[133] _Page 204, note 1._
Or who, with accent bolder,
Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer?
I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook!
And in thy valleys, Agiochook!
The jackals of the negro-holder.
...
Virtue palters; Right is hence;
Freedom praised, but hid;
Funeral eloquence
Rattles the coffin-lid.
_Poems_, “Ode,”
inscribed to W. H. Channing.
See also what is said of “the treachery of scholars” in the last pages of
“The Man of Letters,” _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_.
[134] _Page 209, note 1._ This appeal for a general movement in the free
states to free the slaves and to recompense the planters, unhappily
brought up to the institution, for their loss, was so much better in an
anti-slavery address in New York, in 1855, than in the Concord speech
four years earlier, that I have substituted the later version here.
In Mr. Cabot’s Memoir, pp. 558-593, a portion of the New York speech,
including this paragraph, is given.