At this period the New York Evening Post spoke out strongly in

condemnation of the mob. William Leggett was not then an Abolitionist;

he had known nothing of the proscribed class, save through the cruel

misrepresentations of their enemies; but, true to his democratic faith,

he maintained the right to discuss the question of slavery. The

infection of cowardly fear, which at that time sealed the lips of

multitudes who deplored the excesses of the mob and sympathized with its

victims, never reached him. Boldly, indignantly, he demanded that the

mob should be put down at once by the civil authorities. He declared the

Abolitionists, even if guilty of all that had been charged upon them,

fully entitled to the privileges and immunities of American citizens. He

sternly reprimanded the board of aldermen of the city for rejecting with

contempt the memorial of the Abolitionists to that body, explanatory of

their principles and the measures by which they had sought to disseminate

them. Referring to the determination, expressed by the memorialists in

the rejected document, not to recant or relinquish any principle which

they had adopted, but to live and die by their faith, he said: "In this,

however mistaken, however mad, we may consider their opinions in relation

to the blacks, what honest, independent mind can blame them? Where is

the man so poor of soul, so white-livered, so base, that he would do less

in relation to any important doctrine in which he religiously believed?

Where is the man who would have his tenets drubbed into him by the clubs

of ruffians, or hold his conscience at the dictation of a mob?"

In the summer of 1835, a mob of excited citizens broke open the post-

office at Charleston, South Carolina, and burnt in the street such papers

and pamphlets as they judged to be "incendiary;" in other words, such as

advocated the application of the democratic principle to the condition of

the slaves of the South. These papers were addressed, not to the slave,

but to the master. They contained nothing which had not been said and

written by Southern men themselves, the Pinkneys, Jeffersons, Henrys, and

Martins, of Maryland and Virginia. The example set at Charleston did not

lack imitators. Every petty postmaster south of Mason and Dixon's line

became ex officio a censor of the press. The Postmaster-General, writing

to his subordinate at Charleston, after stating that the post-office

department had "no legal right to exclude newspapers from the mail, or

prohibit their carriage or delivery, on account of their character or

tendency, real or supposed," declared that he would, nevertheless, give

no aid, directly or indirectly, in circulating publications of an

incendiary or inflammatory character; and assured the perjured

functionary, who had violated his oath of office, that, while he could

not sanction, he would not condemn his conduct. Against this virtual

encouragement of a flagrant infringement of a constitutional right, this

licensing of thousands of petty government officials to sit in their mail

offices--to use the figure of Milton--cross-legged, like so many envious

Junos, in judgment upon the daily offspring of the press, taking counsel

of passion, prejudice, and popular excitement as to what was "incendiary"

or "inflammatory," the Evening Post spoke in tones of manly protest.

While almost all the editors of his party throughout the country either

openly approved of the conduct of the Postmaster-General or silently

acquiesced in it, William Leggett, who, in the absence of his colleague,

was at that time sole editor of the Post, and who had everything to lose,

in a worldly point of view, by assailing a leading functionary of the

government, who was a favorite of the President and a sharer of his

popularity, did not hesitate as to the course which consistency and duty

required at his hands. He took his stand for unpopular truth, at a time

when a different course on his part could not have failed to secure him

the favor and patronage of his party. In the great struggle with the

Bank of the United States, his services had not been unappreciated by the

President and his friends. Without directly approving the course of the

administration on the question of the rights of the Abolitionists, by

remaining silent in respect to it, he might have avoided all suspicion of

mental and moral independence incompatible with party allegiance. The

impracticable honesty of Leggett, never bending from the erectness of

truth for the sake of that "thrift which follows fawning," dictated a

most severe and scorching review of the letter of the Postmaster-General.

"More monstrous, more detestable doctrines we have never heard

promulgated," he exclaimed in one of his leading editorials. "With what

face, after this, can the Postmaster-General punish a postmaster for any

exercise of the fearfully dangerous power of stopping and destroying any

portion of the mails?" "The Abolitionists do not deserve to be placed on

the same footing with a foreign enemy, nor their publications as the

secret despatches of a spy. They are American citizens, in the exercise

of their undoubted right of citizenship; and however erroneous their

views, however fanatic their conduct, while they act within the limits of

the law, what official functionary, be he merely a subordinate or the

head of the post-office department, shall dare to abridge them of their

rights as citizens, and deny them those facilities of intercourse which

were instituted for the equal accommodation of all? If the American

people will submit to this, let us expunge all written codes, and resolve

society into its original elements, where the might of the strong is

better than the right of the weak."

A few days after the publication of this manly rebuke, he wrote an

indignantly sarcastic article upon the mobs which were at this time

everywhere summoned to "put down the Abolitionists." The next day, the

4th of the ninth month, 1835, he received a copy of the Address of the

American Anti-Slavery Society to the public, containing a full and

explicit avowal of all the principles and designs of the association. He

gave it a candid perusal, weighed its arguments, compared its doctrines

with those at the foundation of his own political faith, and rose up from

its examination an Abolitionist. He saw that he himself, misled by the

popular clamor, had done injustice to benevolent and self-sacrificing

men; and he took the earliest occasion, in an article of great power and

eloquence, to make the amplest atonement. He declared his entire

concurrence with the views of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with the

single exception of a doubt which rested, on his mind as to the abolition

of slavery in the District of Columbia. We quote from the concluding

paragraph of this article:--

"We assert without hesitation, that, if we possessed the right, we should

not scruple to exercise it for the speedy annihilation of servitude and

chains. The impression made in boyhood by the glorious exclamation of

Cato,

"'A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty

Is worth a whole eternity of bondage!'

has been worn deeper, not effaced, by time; and we eagerly and ardently

trust that the day will yet arrive when the clank of the bondman's

fetters will form no part of the multitudinous sounds which our country

sends up to Heaven, mingling, as it were, into a song of praise for our

national prosperity. We yearn with strong desire for the day when

freedom shall no longer wave

"Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.'"

A few days after, in reply to the assaults made upon him from all

quarters, he calmly and firmly reiterated his determination to maintain

the right of free discussion of the subject of slavery.

"The course we are pursuing," said he, "is one which we entered upon after

mature deliberation, and we are not to be turned from it by a species of

opposition, the inefficacy of which we have seen displayed in so many

former instances. It is Philip Van Artevelde who says:--

"'All my life long,

I have beheld with most respect the man

Who knew himself, and knew the ways before him;

And from among them chose considerately,

With a clear foresight, not a blindfold courage;

And, having chosen, with a steadfast mind.

Pursued his purpose.'

"This is the sort of character we emulate. If to believe slavery a

deplorable evil and curse, in whatever light it is viewed; if to yearn

for the day which shall break the fetters of three millions of human

beings, and restore to them their birthright of equal freedom; if to be

willing, in season and out of season, to do all in our power to promote

so desirable a result, by all means not inconsistent with higher duty: if

these sentiments constitute us Abolitionists, then are we such, and glory

in the name."

"The senseless cry of 'Abolitionist' shall never deter us, nor the more

senseless attempt of puny prints to read us out of the democratic party.

The often-quoted and beautiful saying of the Latin historian, Homo sum:

humani nihil a me alienum puto, we apply to the poor slave as well as his

master, and shall endeavor to fulfil towards both the obligations of an

equal humanity."

The generation which, since the period of which we are speaking, have

risen into active life can have but a faint conception of the boldness of

this movement on the part of William Leggett. To be an Abolitionist then

was to abandon all hope of political preferment or party favor; to be

marked and branded as a social outlaw, under good society's interdict of

food and fire; to hold property, liberty, and life itself at the mercy of

lawless mobs. All this William Leggett clearly saw. He knew how rugged

and thorny was the path upon which, impelled by his love of truth and the

obligations of humanity, he was entering. From hunted and proscribed

Abolitionists and oppressed and spirit-broken colored men, the Pariahs of

American democracy, he could alone expect sympathy. The Whig journals,

with a few honorable exceptions, exulted over what they regarded as the

fall of a formidable opponent; and after painting his abolitionism in the

most hideous colors, held him up to their Southern allies as a specimen

of the radical disorganizers and democratic levellers of the North. His

own party, in consequence, made haste to proscribe him. Government

advertising was promptly withdrawn from his paper. The official journals

of Washington and Albany read him out of the pale of democracy. Father

Ritchie scolded and threatened. The democratic committee issued its bull

against him from Tammany Hall. The resolutions of that committee were

laid before him when he was sinking under a severe illness. Rallying his

energies, he dictated from his sick-bed an answer marked by all his

accustomed vigor and boldness. Its tone was calm, manly, self-relying;

the language of one who, having planted his feet hard down on the rock of

principle, stood there like Luther at Worms, because he "could not

otherwise." Exhausted nature sunk under the effort. A weary sickness of

nearly a year's duration followed. In this sore affliction, deserted as

he was by most of his old political friends, we have reason to know that

he was cheered by the gratitude of those in whose behalf he had well-nigh

made a martyr's sacrifice; and that from the humble hearths of his poor

colored fellow-citizens fervent prayers went up for his restoration.

His work was not yet done. Purified by trial, he was to stand forth once

more in vindication of the truths of freedom. As soon as his health was

sufficiently reestablished, he commenced the publication of an

independent political and literary journal, under the expressive title of

The Plaindealer. In his first number he stated, that, claiming the right

of absolute freedom of discussion, he should exercise it with no other

limitations than those of his own judgment. A poor man, he admitted that

he established the paper in the expectation of deriving from it a

livelihood, but that even for that object he could not trim its sails to

suit the varying breeze of popular prejudice. "If," said he, "a paper

which makes the Right, and not the Expedient, its cardinal object, will

not yield its conductor a support, there are honest vocations that will,

and better the humblest of them than to be seated at the head of an

influential press, if its influence is not exerted to promote the cause

of truth." He was true to his promise. The free soul of a free, strong

man spoke out in his paper. How refreshing was it, after listening to

the inanities, the dull, witless vulgarity, the wearisome commonplace of

journalists, who had no higher aim than to echo, with parrot-like

exactness, current prejudices and falsehoods, to turn to the great and

generous thoughts, the chaste and vigorous diction, of the Plaindealer!

No man ever had a clearer idea of the duties and responsibilities of a

conductor of the public press than William Leggett, and few have ever

combined so many of the qualifications for their perfect discharge: a

nice sense of justice, a warm benevolence, inflexible truth, honesty

defying temptation, a mind stored with learning, and having at command

the treasures of the best thoughts of the best authors. As was said of

Fletcher of Saltoun, he was "a gentleman steady in his principles; of

nice honor, abundance of learning; bold as a lion; a sure friend; a man

who would lose his life to serve his country, and would not do a base

thing to save it."

He had his faults: his positive convictions sometimes took the shape

of a proud and obstinate dogmatism; he who could so well appeal to the

judgment and the reason of his readers too often only roused their

passions by invective and vehement declamation. Moderate men were

startled and pained by the fierce energy of his language; and he not

unfrequently made implacable enemies of opponents whom he might have

conciliated and won over by mild expostulation and patient explanation.

It must be urged in extenuation, that, as the champion of unpopular

truths, he was assailed unfairly on all sides, and indecently

misrepresented and calumniated to a degree, as his friend Sedgwick justly

remarks, unprecedented even in the annals of the American press; and that

his errors in this respect were, in the main, errors of retaliation.

In the Plaindealer, in common with the leading moral and political

subjects of the day, that of slavery was freely discussed in all its

bearings. It is difficult, in a single extract, to convey an adequate

idea of the character of the editorial columns of a paper, where terse

and concentrated irony and sarcasm alternate with eloquent appeal and

diffuse commentary and labored argument. We can only offer at random the

following passages from a long review of a speech of John C. Calhoun, in

which that extraordinary man, whose giant intellect has been shut out of

its appropriate field of exercise by the very slavery of which he is the

champion, undertook to maintain, in reply to a Virginia senator, that

chattel slavery was not an evil, but "a great good."

"We have Mr. Calhoun's own warrant for attacking his position with all

the fervor which a high sense of duty can give, for we do hold, from the

bottom of our soul, that slavery is an evil,--a deep, detestable,

damnable evil; evil in all its aspects to the blacks, and a greater evil

to the whites; an evil moral, social, and political; an evil which shows

itself in the languishing condition of agriculture where it exists, in

paralyzed commerce, and in the prostration of the mechanic arts; an evil

which stares you in the face from uncultivated fields, and howls in your

ears through tangled swamps and morasses. Slavery is such an evil that

it withers what it touches. Where it is once securely established the

land becomes desolate, as the tree inevitably perishes which the sea-hawk

chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the

tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its

refreshing verdure what, without it, would frown in naked and incurable

sterility.

"If any one desires an illustration of the opposite influences of slavery

and freedom, let him look at the two sister States of Kentucky and Ohio.

Alike in soil and climate, and divided only by a river, whose translucent

waters reveal, through nearly the whole breadth, the sandy bottom over

which they sparkle, how different are they in all the respects over which

man has control! On the one hand the air is vocal with the mingled

tumult of a vast and prosperous population. Every hillside smiles with

an abundant harvest, every valley shelters a thriving village, the click

of a busy mill drowns the prattle of every rivulet, and all the

multitudinous sounds of business denote happy activity in every branch

of social occupation.

"This is the State which, but a few years ago, slept in the unbroken

solitude of nature. The forest spread an interminable canopy of shade

over the dark soil on which the fat and useless vegetation rotted at

ease, and through the dusky vistas of the wood only savage beasts and

more savage men prowled in quest of prey. The whole land now blossoms

like a garden. The tall and interlacing trees have unlocked their hold,

and bowed before the woodman's axe. The soil is disencumbered of the

mossy trunks which had reposed upon it for ages. The rivers flash in the

sunlight, and the fields smile with waving harvests. This is Ohio, and

this is what freedom has done for it.

"Now, let us turn to Kentucky, and note the opposite influences of

slavery. A narrow and unfrequented path through the close and sultry

canebrake conducts us to a wretched hovel. It stands in the midst of an

unweeded field, whose dilapidated enclosure scarcely protects it from the

lowing and hungry kine. Children half clad and squalid, and destitute of

the buoyancy natural to their age, lounge in the sunshine, while their

parent saunters apart, to watch his languid slaves drive the ill-

appointed team afield. This is not a fancy picture. It is a true copy

of one of the features which make up the aspect 'of the State, and of

every State where the moral leprosy of slavery covers the people with its

noisome scales; a deadening lethargy benumbs the limbs of the body

politic; a stupor settles on the arts of life; agriculture reluctantly

drags the plough and harrow to the field, only when scourged by

necessity; the axe drops from the woodman's nerveless hand the moment his

fire is scantily supplied with fuel; and the fen, undrained, sends up its

noxious exhalations, to rack with cramps and agues the frame already too

much enervated by a moral epidemic to creep beyond the sphere of the

material miasm."

The Plaindealer was uniformly conducted with eminent ability; but its

editor was too far in advance of his contemporaries to find general

acceptance, or even toleration. In addition to pecuniary embarrassments,

his health once more failed, and in the autumn of 1837 he was compelled

to suspend the publication of his paper. One of the last articles which

he wrote for it shows the extent to which he was sometimes carried by the

intensity and depth of his abhorrence of oppression, and the fervency of

his adoration of liberty. Speaking of the liability of being called upon

to aid the master in the subjection of revolted slaves, and in replacing

their cast-off fetters, he thus expresses himself: "Would we comply with

such a requisition? No! Rather would we see our right arm lopped from

our body, and the mutilated trunk itself gored with mortal wounds, than

raise a finger in opposition to men struggling in the holy cause of

freedom. The obligations of citizenship are strong, but those of

justice, humanity, and religion, stronger. We earnestly trust that the

great contest of opinion which is now going on in this country may

terminate in the enfranchisement of the slaves, without recourse to the

strife of blood; but should the oppressed bondmen, impatient of the tardy

progress of truth, urged only in discussion, attempt to burst their

chains by a more violent and shorter process, they should never encounter

our arm nor hear our voice in the ranks of their opponents. We should

stand a sad spectator of the conflict; and, whatever commiseration we

might feel for the discomfiture of the oppressors, we should pray that

the battle might end in giving freedom to the oppressed."

With the Plain dealer, his connection with the public, in a great

measure, ceased. His steady and intimate friend, personal as well as

political, Theodore Sedgwick, Jun., a gentleman who has, on many

occasions, proved himself worthy of his liberty-loving ancestry, thus

speaks of him in his private life at this period: "Amid the reverses of

fortune, harassed by pecuniary embarrassments, during the tortures of a

disease which tore away his life piecemeal, hee ever maintained the same

manly and unaltered front, the same cheerfulness of disposition, the same

dignity of conduct. No humiliating solicitation, no weak complaint,

escaped him." At the election in the fall of 1838, the noble-spirited

democrat was not wholly forgotten. A strenuous effort, which was well-

nigh successful, was made to secure his nomination as a candidate for

Congress. It was at this juncture that he wrote to a friend in the city,

from his residence at New Rochelle, one of the noblest letters ever

penned by a candidate for popular favor. The following extracts will

show how a true man can meet the temptations of political life:--

"What I am most afraid of is, that some of my friends, in their too

earnest zeal, will place me in a false position on the subject of

slavery. I am an Abolitionist. I hate slavery in all its forms,

degrees, and influences; and I deem myself bound, by the highest moral

and political obligations, not to let that sentiment of hate lie dormant

and smouldering in my own breast, but to give it free vent, and let it

blaze forth, that it may kindle equal ardor through the whole sphere of

my influence. I would not have this fact disguised or mystified for any

office the people have it in their power to give. Rather, a thousand

times rather, would I again meet the denunciations of Tammany Hall, and

be stigmatized with all the foul epithets with which the anti-abolition

vocabulary abounds, than recall or deny one tittle of my creed.

Abolition is, in my sense, a necessary and a glorious part of democracy;

and I hold the right and duty to discuss the subject of slavery, and to

expose its hideous evils in all their bearings,--moral, social, and

political,--as of infinitely higher importance than to carry fifty sub-

treasury bills. That I should discharge this duty temperately; that I

should not let it come in collision with other duties; that I should not

let my hatred of slavery transcend the express obligations of the

Constitution, or violate its clear spirit, I hope and trust you think

sufficiently well of me to believe. But what I fear is, (not from you,

however,) that some of my advocates and champions will seek to recommend

me to popular support by representing me as not an Abolitionist, which is

false. All that I have written gives the lie to it. All I shall write

will give the lie to it.

"And here, let me add, (apart from any consideration already adverted

to,) that, as a matter of mere policy, I would not, if I could, have my

name disjoined from abolitionism. To be an Abolitionist now is to be an

incendiary; as, three years ago, to be an anti-monopolist was to be a

leveller and a Jack Cade. See what three short years have done in

effecting the anti-monopoly reform; and depend upon it that the next

three years, or, if not three, say three times three, if you please, will

work a greater revolution on the slavery question. The stream of public

opinion now sets against us; but it is about to turn, and the

regurgitation will be tremendous. Proud in that day may well be the man

who can float in triumph on the first refluent wave, swept onward by the

deluge which he himself, in advance of his fellows, has largely shared in

occasioning. Such be my fate; and, living or dead, it will, in some

measure, be mine! I have written my name in ineffaceable letters on the

abolition record; and whether the reward ultimately come in the shape of

honors to the living man, or a tribute to the memory of a departed one, I

would not forfeit my right to it for as many offices as has in his gift,

if each of them was greater than his own."

After mentioning that he had understood that some of his friends had

endeavored to propitiate popular prejudice by representing him as no

Abolitionist, he says:--

"Keep them, for God's sake, from committing any such fooleries for the

sake of getting me into Congress. Let others twist themselves into what

shapes they please, to gratify the present taste of the people; as for

me, I am not formed of such pliant materials, and choose to retain,

undisturbed, the image of my God! I do not wish to cheat the people of

their votes. I would not get their support, any more than their money,

under false pretences. I am what I am; and if that does not suit them,

I am content to stay at home."

God be praised for affording us, even in these latter days, the sight of

an honest man! Amidst the heartlessness, the double-dealing, the

evasions, the prevarications, the shameful treachery and falsehood, of

political men of both parties, in respect to the question of slavery, how

refreshing is it to listen to words like these! They renew our failing

faith in human nature. They reprove our weak misgivings. We rise up

from their perusal stronger and healthier. With something of the spirit

which dictated them, we renew our vows to freedom, and, with manlier

energy, gird up our souls for the stern struggle before us.

As might have been expected, and as he himself predicted, the efforts of

his friends to procure his nomination failed; but the same generous

appreciators of his rare worth were soon after more successful in their

exertions in his behalf. He received from President Van Buren the

appointment of the mission to Guatemala,--an appointment which, in

addition to honorable employment in the service of his country, promised

him the advantages of a sea voyage and a change of climate, for the

restoration of his health. The course of Martin Van Buren on the subject

of slavery in the District of Columbia forms, in the estimation of many

of his best friends, by no means the most creditable portion of his

political history; but it certainly argues well for his magnanimity and

freedom from merely personal resentment that he gave this appointment to

the man who had animadverted upon that course with the greatest freedom,

and whose rebuke of the veto pledge, severe in its truth and justice,

formed the only discord in the paean of partisan flattery which greeted

his inaugural. But, however well intended, it came too late. In the

midst of the congratulations of his friends on the brightening prospect

before him, the still hopeful and vigorous spirit of William Leggett was

summoned away by death. Universal regret was awakened. Admiration of

his intellectual power, and that generous and full appreciation of his

high moral worth which had been in too many instances withheld from the

living man by party policy and prejudice, were now freely accorded to the

dead. The presses of both political parties vied with each other in

expressions of sorrow at the loss of a great and true man. The

Democracy, through all its organs, hastened to canonize him as one of the

saints of its calendar. The general committee, in New York, expunged

their resolutions of censure. The Democratic Review, at that period the

most respectable mouthpiece of the democratic party, made him the subject

of exalted eulogy. His early friend and co-editor, William Cullen

Bryant, laid upon his grave the following tribute, alike beautiful and

true:--

"The earth may ring, from shore to shore,

With echoes of a glorious name,

But he whose loss our tears deplore

Has left behind him more than fame.

"For when the death-frost came to lie

On Leggett's warm and mighty heart,

And quenched his bold and friendly eye,

His spirit did not all depart.

"The words of fire that from his pen

He flung upon the lucid page

Still move, still shake the hearts of men,

Amid a cold and coward age.

"His love of Truth, too warm, too strong,

For Hope or Fear to chain or chill,

His hate of tyranny and wrong,

Burn in the breasts they kindled still."

So lived and died William Leggett. What a rebuke of party perfidy, of

political meanness, of the common arts and stratagems of demagogues,

comes up from his grave! How the cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsons

at the thought of his incorruptible integrity! How heartless and hollow

pretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their hands

to whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit in

chains round the crib of governmental patronage, putting on the spaniel,

and putting off the man, and making their whole lives a miserable lie,

shrink back from a contrast with the proud and austere dignity of his

character! What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a man

who could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of his

friends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils of

poverty, in the hope of bequeathing, like the dying testator of Ford,

"A fame by scandal untouched,

To Memory and Time's old daughter, Truth."

The praises which such men are now constrained to bestow upon him are

their own condemnation. Every stone which they pile upon his grave is

written over with the record of their hypocrisy.

We have written rather for the living than the dead. As one of that

proscribed and hunted band of Abolitionists, whose rights were so bravely

defended by William Leggett, we should, indeed, be wanting in ordinary

gratitude not to do honor to his memory; but we have been actuated at the

present time mainly by a hope that the character, the lineaments of which

we have so imperfectly sketched, may awaken a generous emulation in the

hearts of the young democracy of our country. Democracy such as William

Leggett believed and practised, democracy in its full and all-

comprehensive significance, is destined to be the settled political faith

of this republic. Because the despotism of slavery has usurped its name,

and offered the strange incense of human tears and blood on its profaned

altars, shall we, therefore, abandon the only political faith which

coincides with the Gospel of Jesus, and meets the aspirations and wants

of humanity? No. The duty of the present generation in the United

States is to reduce this faith to practice, to make the beautiful ideal a

fact.

"Every American," says Leggett, "who in any way countenances slavery is

derelict to his duty, as a Christian, a patriot, a man; and every one

does countenance and authorize it who suffers any opportunity of

expressing his deep abhorrence of its manifold abominations to pass

unimproved." The whole world has an interest in this matter. The

influence of our democratic despotism is exerted against the liberties of

Europe. Political reformers in the Old World, who have testified to

their love of freedom by serious sacrifices, hold but one language on

this point. They tell us that American slavery furnishes kings and

aristocracies with their most potent arguments; that it is a perpetual

drag on the wheel of political progress.

We have before us, at this time, a letter from Seidensticker, one of the

leaders of the patriotic movement in behalf of German liberty in 1831.

It was written from the prison of Celle, where he had been confined for

eight years. The writer expresses his indignant astonishment at the

speeches of John C. Calhoun, and others in Congress, on the slavery

question, and deplores the disastrous influence of our great

inconsistency upon the cause of freedom throughout the world,--an

influence which paralyzes the hands of the patriotic reformer, while it

strengthens those of his oppressor, and deepens around the living martyrs

and confessors of European democracy the cold shadow of their prisons.

Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, the President of the British Free Suffrage

Union, and whose philanthropy and democracy have been vouched for by the

Democratic Review in this country, has the following passage in an

address to the citizens of the United States: "Although an admirer of the

institutions of your country, and deeply lamenting the evils of my own

government, I find it difficult to reply to those who are opposed to any

extension of the political rights of Englishmen, when they point to

America, and say that where all have a control over the legislation but

those who are guilty of a dark skin, slavery and the slave trade remain,

not only unmitigated, but continue to extend; and that while there is an

onward movement in favor of its extinction, not only in England and

France, but in Cuba and Brazil, American legislators cling to this

enormous evil, without attempting to relax or mitigate its horrors."

How long shall such appeals, from such sources, be wasted upon us? Shall

our baleful example enslave the world? Shall the tree of democracy,

which our fathers intended for "the healing of the nations," be to them

like the fabled upas, blighting all around it?

The men of the North, the pioneers of the free West, and the non-

slaveholders of the South must answer these questions. It is for them to

say whether the present wellnigh intolerable evil shall continue to

increase its boundaries, and strengthen its hold upon the government, the

political parties, and the religious sects of our country. Interest and

honor, present possession and future hope, the memory of fathers, the

prospects of children, gratitude, affection, the still call of the dead,

the cry of oppressed nations looking hitherward for the result of all

their hopes, the voice of God in the soul, in revelation, and in His

providence, all appeal to them for a speedy and righteous decision. At

this moment, on the floor of Congress, Democracy and Slavery have met in

a death-grapple. The South stands firm; it allows no party division on

the slave question. One of its members has declared that "the slave

States have no traitors." Can the same be said of the free? Now, as in

the time of the fatal Missouri Compromise, there are, it is to be feared,

political peddlers among our representatives, whose souls are in the

market, and whose consciences are vendible commodities. Through their

means, the slave power may gain a temporary triumph; but may not the very

baseness of the treachery arouse the Northern heart? By driving the free

States to the wall, may it not compel them to turn and take an aggressive

attitude, clasp hands over the altar of their common freedom, and swear

eternal hostility to slavery?

Be the issue of the present contest what it may, those who are faithful

to freedom should allow no temporary reverse to shake their confidence in

the ultimate triumph of the right. The slave will be free. Democracy in

America will yet be a glorious reality; and when the topstone of that

temple of freedom which our fathers left unfinished shall be brought

forth with shoutings and cries of grace unto it, when our now drooping-

Liberty lifts up her head and prospers, happy will be he who can say,

with John Milton, "Among those who have something more than wished her

welfare, I too have my charter and freehold of rejoicing to me and my

heirs."

NATHANIEL PEABODY ROGERS.

"And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,

Has vanished from his kindly hearth."

So, in one of the sweetest and most pathetic of his poems touching the

loss of his literary friends, sang Wordsworth. We well remember with

what freshness and vividness these simple lines came before us, on

hearing, last autumn, of the death of the warm-hearted and gifted friend

whose name heads this article; for there was much in his character and

genius to remind us of the gentle author of Elia. He had the latter's

genial humor and quaintness; his nice and delicate perception of the

beautiful and poetic; his happy, easy diction, not the result, as in the

case of that of the English essayist, of slow and careful elaboration,

but the natural, spontaneous language in which his conceptions at once

embodied themselves, apparently without any consciousness of effort. As

Mark Antony talked, he wrote, "right on," telling his readers often what

"they themselves did know," yet imparting to the simplest commonplaces of

life interest and significance, and throwing a golden haze of poetry over

the rough and thorny pathways of every-day duty. Like Lamb, he loved his

friends without stint or limit. The "old familiar faces" haunted him.

Lamb loved the streets and lanes of London--the places where he oftenest

came in contact with the warm, genial heart of humanity--better than the

country. Rogers loved the wild and lonely hills and valleys of New

Hampshire none the less that he was fully alive to the enjoyments of

society, and could enter with the heartiest sympathy into all the joys

and sorrows of his friends and neighbors.

In another point of view, he was not unlike Elia. He had the same love

of home, and home friends, and familiar objects; the same fondness for

common sights and sounds; the same dread of change; the same shrinking

from the unknown and the dark. Like him, he clung with a child's love to

the living present, and recoiled from a contemplation of the great change

which awaits us. Like him, he was content with the goodly green earth

and human countenances, and would fain set up his tabernacle here. He

had less of what might be termed self-indulgence in this feeling than

Lamb. He had higher views; he loved this world not only for its own

sake, but for the opportunities it afforded of doing good. Like the

Persian seer, he beheld the legions of Ormuzd and Ahriman, of Light and

Darkness, contending for mastery over the earth, as the sunshine and

shadow of a gusty, half-cloudy day struggled on the green slopes of his

native mountains; and, mingled with the bright host, he would fain have

fought on until its banners waved in eternal sunshine over the last

hiding-place of darkness. He entered into the work of reform with the

enthusiasm and chivalry of a knight of the crusades. He had faith in

human progress,--in the ultimate triumph of the good; millennial lights

beaconed up all along his horizon. In the philanthropic movements of the

day; in the efforts to remove the evils of slavery, war, intemperance,

and sanguinary laws; in the humane and generous spirit of much of our

modern poetry and literature; in the growing demand of the religious

community, of all sects, for the preaching of the gospel of love and

humanity, he heard the low and tremulous prelude of the great anthem of

universal harmony. "The world," said he, in a notice of the music of the

Hutchinson family, "is out of tune now. But it will be tuned again, and

all will become harmony." In this faith he lived and acted; working, not

always, as it seemed to some of his friends, wisely, but bravely,

truthfully, earnestly, cheering on his fellow-laborers, and imparting to

the dullest and most earthward looking of them something of his own zeal

and loftiness of purpose.

"Who was he?" does the reader ask? Naturally enough, too, for his name

has never found its way into fashionable reviews; it has never been

associated with tale, or essay, or poem, to our knowledge. Our friend

Griswold, who, like another Noah, has launched some hundreds of American

poets and prose writers on the tide of immortality in his two huge arks

of rhyme and reason, has either overlooked his name, or deemed it

unworthy of preservation. Then, too, he was known mainly as the editor

of a proscribed and everywhere-spoken-against anti-slavery paper. It had

few readers of literary taste and discrimination; plain, earnest men and

women, intent only upon the thought itself, and caring little for the

clothing of it, loved the _Herald of Freedom_ for its honestness and

earnestness, and its bold rebukes of the wrong, its all-surrendering

homage to what its editor believed to be right. But the literary world

of authors and critics saw and heard little or nothing of him or his

writings. "I once had a bit of scholar-craft," he says of himself on one

occasion, "and had I attempted it in some pitiful sectarian or party or

literary sheet, I should have stood a chance to get quoted into the

periodicals. Now, who dares quote from the _Herald of Freedom_?" He

wrote for humanity, as his biographer justly says, not for fame. "He

wrote because he had something to say, and true to nature, for to him

nature was truth; he spoke right on, with the artlessness and simplicity

of a child."

He was born in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the sixth month of 1794,--

a lineal descendant from John Rogers, of martyr-memory. Educated at

Dartmouth College, he studied law with Hon. Richard Fletcher, of

Salisbury, New Hampshire, now of Boston, and commenced the practice of it

in 1819, in his native village. He was diligent and successful in his

profession, although seldom known as a pleader. About the year 1833, he

became interested in the anti-slavery movement. His was one of the few

voices of encouragement and sympathy which greeted the author of this

sketch on the publication of a pamphlet in favor of immediate

emancipation. He gave us a kind word of approval, and invited us to his

mountain home, on the banks of the Pemigewasset,--an invitation which,

two years afterwards, we accepted. In the early autumn, in company with

George Thompson, (the eloquent reformer, who has since been elected a

member of the British Parliament from the Tower Hamlets,) we drove up the

beautiful valley of the White Mountain tributary of the Merrimac, and,

just as a glorious sunset was steeping river, valley, and mountain in its

hues of heaven, were welcomed to the pleasant home and family circle of

our friend Rogers. We spent two delightful evenings with him. His

cordiality, his warm-hearted sympathy in our object, his keen wit,

inimitable humor, and childlike and simple mirthfulness, his full

appreciation of the beautiful in art and nature, impressed us with the

conviction that we were the guests of no ordinary man; that we were

communing with unmistakable genius, such an one as might have added to

the wit and eloquence of Ben Jonson's famous club at the _Mermaid_, or

that which Lamb and Coleridge and Southey frequented at the _Salutation

and Cat_, of Smithfield. "The most brilliant man I have met in America!"

said George Thompson, as we left the hospitable door of our friend.

In 1838, he gave up his law practice, left his fine outlook at Plymouth

upon the mountains of the North, Moosehillock and the Haystacks, and took

up his residence at Concord, for the purpose of editing the _Herald of

Freedom_, an anti-slavery paper which had been started some three or four

years before. John Pierpont, than whom there could not be a more

competent witness, in his brief and beautiful sketch of the life and

writings of Rogers, does not overestimate the ability with which the

Herald was conducted, when he says of its editor: "As a newspaper writer,

we think him unequalled by any living man; and in the general strength,

clearness, and quickness of his intellect, we think all who knew him well

will agree with us that he was not excelled by any editor in the

country." He was not a profound reasoner: his imagination and brilliant

fancy played the wildest tricks with his logic; yet, considering the way

by which he reached them, it is remarkable that his conclusions were so

often correct. The tendency of his mind was to extremes. A zealous

Calvinistic church-member, he became an equally zealous opponent of

churches and priests; a warm politician, he became an ultra non-resistant

and no-government man. In all this, his sincerity was manifest. If, in

the indulgence of his remarkable powers of sarcasm, in the free antics of

a humorous fancy, upon whose graceful neck he had flung loose the reins,

he sometimes did injustice to individuals, and touched, in irreverent

sport, the hem of sacred garments, it had the excuse, at least, of a

generous and honest motive. If he sometimes exaggerated, those who best,

knew him can testify that he "set down naught in malice."

We have before us a printed collection of his writings,--hasty

editorials, flung off without care or revision, the offspring of sudden

impulse frequently; always free, artless, unstudied; the language

transparent as air, exactly expressing the thought. He loved the common,

simple dialect of the people,--the "beautiful strong old Saxon,--the talk

words." He had an especial dislike of learned and "dictionary words."

He used to recommend Cobbett's Works to "every young man and woman who

has been hurt in his or her talk and writing by going to school."

Our limits will not admit of such extracts from the Collection of his

writings as would convey to our readers an adequate idea of his thought

and manner. His descriptions of natural scenery glow with life. One can

almost see the sunset light flooding the Franconia Notch, and glorifying

the peaks of Moosehillock, and hear the murmur of the west wind in the

pines, and the light, liquid voice of Pemigewasset sounding up from its

rocky channel, through its green hem of maples, while reading them. We

give a brief extract from an editorial account of an autumnal trip to

Vermont:

"We have recently journeyed through a portion of this, free State; and it

is not all imagination in us that sees, in its bold scenery, its

uninfected inland position, its mountainous but fertile and verdant

surface, the secret of the noble predisposition of its people. They are

located for freedom. Liberty's home is on their Green Mountains. Their

farmer republic nowhere touches the ocean, the highway of the world's

crimes, as well as its nations. It has no seaport for the importation of

slavery, or the exportation of its own highland republicanism. Should

slavery ever prevail over this nation, to its utter subjugation, the last

lingering footsteps of retiring Liberty will be seen, not, as Daniel

Webster said, in the proud old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, about

Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall; but she will be found wailing, like

Jephthah's daughter, among the 'hollows' and along the sides of the Green

Mountains.

"Vermont shows gloriously at this autumn season. Frost has gently laid

hands on her exuberant vegetation, tinging her rock-maple woods without

abating the deep verdure of her herbage. Everywhere along her peopled

hollows and her bold hillslopes and summits the earth is alive with

green, while her endless hard-wood forests are uniformed with all the

hues of early fall, richer than the regimentals of the kings that

glittered in the train of Napoleon on the confines of Poland, when he

lingered there, on the last outposts of summer, before plunging into the

snow-drifts of the North; more gorgeous than the array of Saladin's life-

guard in the wars of the Crusaders, or of 'Solomon in all his glory,'

decked in, all colors and hues, but still the hues of life. Vegetation

touched, but not dead, or, if killed, not bereft yet of 'signs of life.'

'Decay's effacing fingers' had not yet 'swept the hills' 'where beauty

lingers.' All looked fresh as growing foliage. Vermont frosts don't seem

to be 'killing frosts.' They only change aspects of beauty. The mountain

pastures, verdant to the peaks, and over the peaks of the high, steep

hills, were covered with the amplest feed, and clothed with countless

sheep; the hay-fields heavy with second crop, in some partly cut and

abandoned, as if in very weariness and satiety, blooming with

honeysuckle, contrasting strangely with the colors on the woods; the fat

cattle and the long-tailed colts and close-built Morgans wallowing in it

up to the eyes, or the cattle down to rest, with full bellies, by ten in

the morning. Fine but narrow roads wound along among the hills, free

almost entirely of stone, and so smooth as to be safe for the most rapid

driving, made of their rich, dark, powder-looking soil. Beautiful

villages or scattered settlements breaking upon the delighted view, on

the meandering way, making the ride a continued scene of excitement and

admiration. The air fresh, free, and wholesome; the road almost dead

level for miles and miles, among mountains that lay over the land like

the great swells of the sea, and looking in the prospect as though there

could be no passage."

To this autumnal limning, the following spring picture may be a fitting

accompaniment:--

"At last Spring is here in full flush. Winter held on tenaciously and

mercilessly, but it has let go. The great sun is high on his northern

journey, and the vegetation, and the bird-singing, and the loud frog-

chorus, the tree budding and blowing, are all upon us; and the glorious

grass--super-best of earth's garniture--with its ever-satisfying green.

The king-birds have come, and the corn-planter, the scolding bob-o-link.

'Plant your corn, plant your corn,' says he, as he scurries athwart the

ploughed ground, hardly lifting his crank wings to a level with his back,

so self-important is he in his admonitions. The earlier birds have gone

to housekeeping, and have disappeared from the spray. There has been

brief period for them, this spring, for scarcely has the deep snow gone,

but the dark-green grass has come, and first we shall know, the ground

will be yellow with dandelions.

"I incline to thank Heaven this glorious morning of May 16th for the

pleasant home from which we can greet the Spring. Hitherto we have had

to await it amid a thicket of village houses, low down, close together,

and awfully white. For a prospect, we had the hinder part of an ugly

meeting-house, which an enterprising neighbor relieved us of by planting

a dwelling-house, right before our eyes, (on his own land, and he had a

right to,) which relieved us also of all prospect whatever. And the

revival spirit of habitation which has come over Concord is clapping up a

house between every two in the already crowded town; and the prospect is,

it will be soon all buildings. They are constructing, in quite good

taste though, small, trim, cottage-like. But I had rather be where I can

breathe air, and see beyond my own features, than be smothered among the

prettiest houses ever built. We are on the slope of a hill; it is all

sand, be sure, on all four sides of us, but the air is free, (and the

sand, too, at times,) and our water, there is danger of hard drinking to

live by it. Air and water, the two necessaries of life, and high, free

play-ground for the small ones. There is a sand precipice hard by, high

enough, were it only rock and overlooked the ocean, to be as sublime as

any of the Nahant cliffs. As it is, it is altogether a safer haunt for

daring childhood, which could hardly break its neck by a descent of some

hundreds of feet.

"A low flat lies between us and the town, with its State-house, and body-

guard of well-proportioned steeples standing round. It was marshy and

wet, but is almost all redeemed by the translation into it of the high

hills of sand. It must have been a terrible place for frogs, judging

from what remains of it. Bits of water from the springs hard by lay here

and there about the low ground, which are peopled as full of singers as

ever the gallery of the old North Meeting-house was, and quite as

melodious ones. Such performers I never heard, in marsh or pool. They

are not the great, stagnant, bull-paddocks, fat and coarse-noted like

Parson, but clear-water frogs, green, lively, and sweet-voiced. I

passed their orchestra going home the other evening, with a small lad,

and they were at it, all parts, ten thousand peeps, shrill, ear-piercing,

and incessant, coming up from every quarter, accompanied by a second,

from some larger swimmer with his trombone, and broken in upon, every now

and then, but not discordantly, with the loud, quick hallo, that

resembles the cry of the tree-toad. 'There are the Hutchinsons,' cried

the lad. 'The Rainers,' responded I, glad to remember enough of my

ancient Latin to know that Rana, or some such sounding word, stood for

frog. But it was a 'band of music,' as the Miller friends say. Like

other singers, (all but the Hutchinsons,) these are apt to sing too much,

all the time they are awake, constituting really too much of a good

thing. I have wondered if the little reptiles were singing in concert,

or whether every one peeped on his own hook, their neighbor hood only

making it a chorus. I incline to the opinion that they are performing

together, that they know the tune, and each carries his part, self-

selected, in free meeting, and therefore never discordant. The hour rule

of Congress might be useful, though far less needed among the frogs than

among the profane croakers of the fens at Washington."

Here is a sketch of the mountain scenery of New Hampshire, as seen from

the Holderness Mountain, or North Hill, during a visit which he made to

his native valley in the autumn of 1841:--

"The earth sphered up all around us, in every quarter of the horizon,

like the crater of a vast volcano, and the great hollow within the

mountain circle was as smoky as Vesuvius or Etna in their recess of

eruption. The little village of Plymouth lay right at our feet, with its

beautiful expanse of intervale opening on the eye like a lake among the

woods and hills, and the Pemigewasset, bordered along its crooked way

with rows of maples, meandering from upland to upland through the

meadows. Our young footsteps had wandered over these localities. Time

had cast it all far back that Pemigewasset, with its meadows and border

trees; that little village whitening in the margin of its inter vale; and

that one house which we could distinguish, where the mother that watched

over and endured our wayward childhood totters at fourscore!

"To the south stretched a broken, swelling upland country, but champaign

from the top of North Hill, patched all over with grain-fields and green

wood-lots, the roofs of the farm-houses shining in the sun. Southwest,

the Cardigan Mountain showed its bald forehead among the smokes of a

thousand fires, kindled in the woods in the long drought. Westward,

Moosehillock heaved up its long back, black as a whale; and turning the

eye on northward, glancing down the while on the Baker's River valley,

dotted over with human dwellings like shingle-bunches for size, you

behold the great Franconia Range, its Notch and its Haystacks, the

Elephant Mountain on the left, and Lafayette (Great Haystack) on the

right, shooting its peak in solemn loneliness high up into the desert

sky, and overtopping all the neighboring Alps but Mount Washington

itself. The prospect of these is most impressive and satisfactory. We

don't believe the earth presents a finer mountain display. The Haystacks

stand there like the Pyramids on the wall of mountains. One of them

eminently has this Egyptian shape. It is as accurate a pyramid to the

eye as any in the old valley of the Nile, and a good deal bigger than any

of those hoary monuments of human presumption, of the impious tyranny of

monarchs and priests, and of the appalling servility of the erecting

multitude. Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh does not more finely resemble a

sleeping lion than the huge mountain on the left of the Notch does an

elephant, with his great, overgrown rump turned uncivilly toward the gap

where the people have to pass. Following round the panorama, you come to

the Ossipees and the Sandwich Mountains, peaks innumerable and nameless,

and of every variety of fantastic shape. Down their vast sides are

displayed the melancholy-looking slides, contrasting with the fathomless

woods.

"But the lakes,--you see lakes, as well as woods and mountains, from the

top of North Hill. Newfound Lake in Hebron, only eight miles distant,

you can't see; it lies too deep among the hills. Ponds show their small

blue mirrors from various quarters of the great picture. Worthen's Mill-

Pond and the Hardhack, where we used to fish for trout in truant,

barefooted days, Blair's Mill-Pond, White Oak Pond, and Long Pond, and

the Little Squam, a beautiful dark sheet of deep, blue water, about two

miles long, stretched an id the green hills and woods, with a charming

little beach at its eastern end, and without an island. And then the

Great Squam, connected with it on the east by a short, narrow stream, the

very queen of ponds, with its fleet of islands, surpassing in beauty all

the foreign waters we have seen, in Scotland or elsewhere,--the islands

covered with evergreens, which impart their hue to the mass of the lake,

as it stretches seven miles on east from its smaller sister, towards the

peerless Winnipesaukee. Great Squam is as beautiful as water and island

can be. But Winnipesaukee, it is the very 'Smile of the Great Spirit.'

It looks as if it had a thousand islands; some of them large enough for

little towns, and others not bigger than a swan or a wild duck swimming

on its surface of glass."

His wit and sarcasm were generally too good-natured to provoke even their

unfortunate objects, playing all over his editorials like the thunderless

lightnings which quiver along the horizon of a night of summer calmness;

but at times his indignation launched them like bolts from heaven. Take

the following as a specimen. He is speaking of the gag rule of Congress,

and commending Southern representatives for their skilful selection of a

proper person to do their work:--

"They have a quick eye at the South to the character, or, as they would

say, the points of a slave. They look into him shrewdly, as an old

jockey does into a horse. They will pick him out, at rifle-shot

distance, among a thousand freemen. They have a nice eye to detect

shades of vassalage. They saw in the aristocratic popinjay strut of a

counterfeit Democrat an itching aspiration to play the slaveholder. They

beheld it in 'the cut of his jib,' and his extreme Northern position made

him the very tool for their purpose. The little creature has struck at

the right of petition. A paltrier hand never struck at a noble right.

The Eagle Right of Petition, so loftily sacred in the eyes of the

Constitution that Congress can't begin to 'abridge' it, in its pride of

place, is hawked at by this crested jay-bird. A 'mousing owl' would have

seen better at midnoon than to have done it. It is an idiot blue-jay,

such as you see fooling about among the shrub oaks and dwarf pitch pines

in the winter. What an ignominious death to the lofty right, were it to

die by such a hand; but it does not die. It is impalpable to the

'malicious mockery' of such vain blows.' We are glad it is done--done by

the South--done proudly, and in slaveholding style, by the hand of a

vassal. What a man does by another he does by himself, says the maxim.

But they will disown the honor of it, and cast it on the despised 'free

nigger' North."

Or this description--not very flattering to the "Old Commonwealth"--of

the treatment of the agent of Massachusetts in South Carolina:--

"Slavery may perpetrate anything, and New England can't see it. It can

horsewhip the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and spit in her

governmental face, and she will not recognize it as an offence. She sent

her agent to Charleston on a State embassy. Slavery caught him, and sent

him ignominiously home. The solemn great man came back in a hurry. He

returned in a most undignified trot. He ran; he scampered,--the stately

official. The Old Bay State actually pulled foot, cleared, dug, as they

say, like any scamp with a hue and cry after him. Her grave old Senator,

who no more thought of having to break his stately walk than he had of

being flogged at school for stealing apples, came back from Carolina upon

the full run, out of breath and out of dignity. Well, what's the result?

Why, nothing. She no more thinks of showing resentment about it than she

would if lightning had struck him. He was sent back 'by the visitation

of God;' and if they had lynched him to death, and stained the streets of

Charleston with his blood, a Boston jury, if they could have held inquest

over him, would have found that he 'died by the visitation of God.' And

it would have been crowner's quest law, Slavery's crowners."

Here is a specimen of his graceful blending of irony and humor. He is

expostulating with his neighbor of the New Hampshire Patriot, assuring

him that he cannot endure the ponderous weight of his arguments, begging

for a little respite, and, as a means of obtaining it, urging the editor

to travel. He advises him to go South, to the White Sulphur Springs, and

thinks that, despite of his dark complexion, he would be safe there from

being sold for jail fees, as his pro-slavery merits would more than

counterbalance his colored liabilities, which, after all, were only prima

facie evidence against him. He suggests Texas, also, as a place where

"patriots" of a certain class "most do congregate," and continues as

follows:--

"There is Arkansas, too, all glorious in new-born liberty, fresh and

unsullied, like Venus out of the ocean,--that newly discovered star, in

the firmament banner of this Republic. Sister Arkansas, with her bowie-

knife graceful at her side, like the huntress Diana with her silver bow,

--oh it would be refreshing and recruiting to an exhausted patriot to go

and replenish his soul at her fountains. The newly evacuated lands of

the Cherokee, too, a sweet place now for a lover of his country to visit,

to renew his self-complacency by wandering among the quenched hearths of

the expatriated Indians; a land all smoking with the red man's departing

curse,--a malediction that went to the centre. Yes, and Florida,--

blossoming and leafy Florida, yet warm with the life-blood of Osceola and

his warriors, shed gloriously under flag of truce. Why should a patriot

of such a fancy for nature immure himself in the cells of the city, and

forego such an inviting and so broad a landscape? Ite viator. Go forth,

traveller, and leave this mouldy editing to less elastic fancies. We

would respectfully invite our Colonel to travel. What signifies?

Journey--wander--go forth--itinerate--exercise--perambulate--roam."

He gives the following ludicrous definition of Congress:--

"But what is Congress? It is the echo of the country at home,--the

weathercock, that denotes and answers the shifting wind,--a thing of

tail, nearly all tail, moved by the tail and by the wind, with small

heading, and that corresponding implicitly in movement with the broad

sail-like stern, which widens out behind to catch the rum-fraught breath

of 'the Brotherhood.' As that turns, it turns; when that stops, it stops;

and in calmish weather looks as steadfast and firm as though it was

riveted to the centre. The wind blows, and the little popularity-hunting

head dodges this way and that, in endless fluctuation. Such is Congress,

or a great portion of it. It will point to the northwest heavens of

Liberty, whenever the breezes bear down irresistibly upon it, from the

regions of political fair weather. It will abolish slavery at the

Capitol, when it has already been doomed to abolition and death

everywhere else in the country. 'It will be in at the death.'"

Replying to the charge that the Abolitionists of the North were "secret"

in their movements and designs, he says:--

"'In secret!' Why, our movements have been as prominent and open as the

house-tops from the beginning. We have striven from the outset to write

the whole matter cloud-high in the heavens, that the utmost South might

read it. We have cast an arc upon the horizon, like the semicircle of

the polar lights, and upon it have bent our motto, 'Immediate

Emancipation,' glorious as the rainbow. We have engraven it there, on

the blue table of the cold vault, in letters tall enough for the reading

of the nations. And why has the far South not read and believed before

this? Because a steam has gone up--a fog--from New England's pulpit and

her degenerate press, and hidden the beaming revelation from its vision.

The Northern hierarchy and aristocracy have cheated the South."

He spoke at times with severity of slaveholders, but far oftener of those

who, without the excuse of education and habit, and prompted only by a

selfish consideration of political or sectarian advantage, apologized for

the wrong, and discountenanced the anti-slavery movement. "We have

nothing to say," said he, "to the slave. He is no party to his own

enslavement,--he is none to his disenthralment. We have nothing to say

to the South. The real holder of slaves is not there. He is in the

North, the free North. The South alone has not the power to hold the

slave. It is the character of the nation that binds and holds him. It

is the Republic that does it, the efficient force of which is north of

Mason and Dixon's line. By virtue of the majority of Northern hearts and

voices, slavery lives in the South!"

In 1840, he spent a few weeks in England, Ireland, and Scotland. He has

left behind a few beautiful memorials of his tour. His Ride over the

Border, Ride into Edinburgh, Wincobank hall, Ailsa Craig, gave his paper

an interest in the eyes of many who had no sympathy with his political

and religious views.

Scattered all over his editorials, like gems, are to be found beautiful

images, sweet touches of heartfelt pathos,--thoughts which the reader

pauses over with surprise and delight. We subjoin a few specimens, taken

almost at random from the book before us:--

"A thunder-storm,--what can match it for eloquence and poetry? That rush

from heaven of the big drops, in what multitude and succession, and how

they sound as they strike! How they play on the old home roof and the

thick tree-tops! What music to go to sleep by, to the tired boy, as he

lies under the naked roof! And the great, low bass thunder, as it rolls

off over the hills, and settles down behind them to the very centre, and

you can feel the old earth jar under your feet!"

"There was no oratory in the speech of the _Learned Blacksmith_, in the

ordinary sense of that word, no grace of elocution, but mighty thoughts

radiating off from his heated mind, like sparks from the glowing steel of

his own anvil."

"The hard hands of Irish labor, with nothing in them,--they ring like

slabs of marble together, in response to the wild appeals of O'Connell,

and the British stand conquered before them, with shouldered arms.

Ireland is on her feet, with nothing in her hands, impregnable,

unassailable, in utter defencelessness,--the first time that ever a

nation sprung to its feet unarmed. The veterans of England behold them,

and forbear to fire. They see no mark. It will not do to fire upon men;

it will do only to fire upon soldiers. They are the proper mark of the

murderous gun, but men cannot be shot."

"It is coming to that (abolition of war) the world over; and when it does

come to it, oh what a long breath of relief the tired world will draw, as

it stretches itself for the first time out upon earth's greensward, and

learns the meaning of repose and peaceful sleep!"

"He who vests his labor in the faithful ground is dealing directly with

God; human fraud or weakness do not intervene between him and his

requital. No mechanic has a set of customers so trustworthy as God and

the elements. No savings bank is so sure as the old earth."

"Literature is the luxury of words. It originates nothing, it does

nothing. It talks hard words about the labor of others, and is reckoned

more meritorious for it than genius and labor for doing what learning can

only descant upon. It trades on the capital of unlettered minds. It

struts in stolen plumage, and it is mere plumage. A learned man

resembles an owl in more respects than the matter of wisdom. Like that

solemn bird, he is about all feathers."

"Our Second Advent friends contemplate a grand conflagration about the

first of April next. I should be willing there should be one, if it

could be confined to the productions of the press, with which the earth

is absolutely smothered. Humanity wants precious few books to read, but

the great living, breathing, immortal volume of Providence. Life,--real

life,--how to live, how to treat one another, and how to trust God in

matters beyond our ken and occasion,--these are the lessons to learn, and

you find little of them in libraries."

"That accursed drum and fife! How they have maddened mankind! And the

deep bass boom of the cannon, chiming in in the chorus of battle, that

trumpet and wild charging bugle,--how they set the military devil in a

man, and make him into a soldier! Think of the human family falling upon

one another at the inspiration of music! How must God feel at it, to see

those harp-strings he meant should be waked to a love bordering on

divine, strung and swept to mortal hate and butchery!"

"Leave off being Jews," (he is addressing Major Noah with regard to his

appeal to his brethren to return to Judaea,) "and turn mankind. The

rocks and sands of Palestine have been worshipped long enough.

Connecticut River or the Merrimac are as good rivers as any Jordan that

ever run into a dead or live sea, and as holy, for that matter. In

Humanity, as in Christ Jesus, as Paul says, 'there is neither Jew nor

Greek.' And there ought to be none. Let Humanity be reverenced with the

tenderest devotion; suffering, discouraged, down-trodden, hard-handed,

haggard-eyed, care-worn mankind! Let these be regarded a little. Would

to God I could alleviate all their sorrows, and leave them a chance to

laugh! They are, miserable now. They might be as happy as the blackbird

on the spray, and as full of melody."

"I am sick as death at this miserable struggle among mankind for a

living. Poor devils! were they born to run such a gauntlet after the

means of life? Look about you, and see your squirming neighbors,

writhing and twisting like so many angleworms in a fisher's bait-box, or

the wriggling animalculae seen in the vinegar drop held to the sun. How

they look, how they feel, how base it makes them all!"

"Every human being is entitled to the means of life, as the trout is to

his brook or the lark to the blue sky. Is it well to put a human 'young

one' here to die of hunger, thirst, and nakedness, or else be preserved

as a pauper? Is this fair earth but a poor-house by creation and intent?

Was it made for that?--and these other round things we see dancing in

the firmament to the music of the spheres, are they all great shining

poor-houses?"

"The divines always admit things after the age has adopted them. They

are as careful of the age as the weathercock is of the wind. You might

as well catch an old experienced weathercock, on some ancient Orthodox

steeple, standing all day with its tail east in a strong out wind, as the

divines at odds with the age."

But we must cease quoting. The admirers of Jean Paul Richter might find

much of the charm and variety of the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces" in

this newspaper collection. They may see, perhaps, as we do, some things

which they cannot approve of, the tendency of which, however intended, is

very questionable. But, with us, they will pardon something to the

spirit of liberty, much to that of love and humanity which breathes

through all.

Disgusted and heart-sick at the general indifference of Church and clergy

to the temporal condition of the people,--at their apologies for and

defences of slavery, war, and capital punishment,--Rogers turned

Protestant, in the full sense of the term. He spoke of priests and

"pulpit wizards" as freely as John Milton did two centuries ago,

although with far less bitterness and rasping satire. He could not

endure to see Christianity and Humanity divorced. He longed to see the

beautiful life of Jesus--his sweet humanities, his brotherly love, his

abounding sympathies--made the example of all men. Thoroughly

democratic, in his view all men were equal. Priests, stripped of their

sacerdotal tailoring, were in his view but men, after all. He pitied

them, he said, for they were in a wrong position,--above life's comforts

and sympathies,--"up in the unnatural cold, they had better come down

among men, and endure and enjoy with them." "Mankind," said he, "want

the healing influences of humanity. They must love one another more.

Disinterested good will make the world as it should be."

His last visit to his native valley was in the autumn of 1845. In a

familiar letter to a friend, he thus describes his farewell view of the

mountain glories of his childhood's home:--

"I went a jaunt, Thursday last, about twenty miles north of this valley,

into the mountain region, where what I beheld, if I could tell it as I

saw it, would make your outlawed sheet sought after wherever our Anglo-

Saxon tongue is spoken in the wide world. I have been many a time among

those Alps, and never without a kindling of wildest enthusiasm in my

woodland blood. But I never saw them till last Thursday. They never

loomed distinctly to my eye before, and the sun never shone on them from

heaven till then. They were so near me, I could seem to hear the voice

of their cataracts, as I could count their great slides, streaming adown

their lone and desolate sides,--old slides, some of them overgrown with

young woods, like half-healed scars on the breast of a giant. The great

rains had clothed the valleys of the upper Pemigewasset in the darkest

and deepest green. The meadows were richer and more glorious in their

thick 'fall feed' than Queen Anne's Garden, as I saw it from the windows

of Windsor Castle. And the dark hemlock and hackmatack woods were yet

darker after the wet season, as they lay, in a hundred wildernesses, in

the mighty recesses of the mountains. But the peaks,--the eternal, the

solitary, the beautiful, the glorious and dear mountain peaks, my own

Moosehillock and my native Haystacks,--these were the things on which eye

and heart gazed and lingered, and I seemed to see them for the last time.

It was on my way back that I halted and turned to look at them from a

high point on the Thornton road. It was about four in the afternoon. It

had rained among the hills about the Notch, and cleared off. The sun,

there sombred at that early hour, as towards his setting, was pouring his

most glorious light upon the naked peaks, and they casting their mighty

shadows far down among the inaccessible woods that darken the hollows

that stretch between their bases. A cloud was creeping up to perch and

rest awhile on the highest top of Great Haystack. Vulgar folks have

called it Mount Lafayette, since the visit of that brave old Frenchman in

1825 or 1826. If they had asked his opinion, he would have told them the

names of mountains couldn't be altered, and especially names like that,

so appropriate, so descriptive, and so picturesque. A little hard white

cloud, that looked like a hundred fleeces of wool rolled into one, was

climbing rapidly along up the northwestern ridge, that ascended to the

lonely top of Great Haystack. All the others were bare. Four or five of

them,--as distinct and shapely as so many pyramids; some topped out with

naked cliff, on which the sun lay in melancholy glory; others clothed

thick all the way up with the old New Hampshire hemlock or the daring

hackmatack,--Pierpont's hackmatack. You could see their shadows

stretching many and many a mile, over Grant and Location, away beyond the

invading foot of Incorporation,--where the timber-hunter has scarcely

explored, and where the moose browses now, I suppose, as undisturbed as

he did before the settlement of the State. I wish our young friend and

genius, Harrison Eastman, had been with me, to see the sunlight as it

glared on the tops of those woods, and to see the purple of the

mountains. I looked at it myself almost with the eye of a painter. If a

painter looked with mine, though, he never could look off upon his canvas

long enough to make a picture; he would gaze forever at the original.

"But I had to leave it, and to say in my heart, Farewell! And as I

travelled on down, and the sun sunk lower and lower towards the summit of

the western ridge, the clouds came up and formed an Alpine range in the

evening heavens above it,--like other Haystacks and Moosehillocks,--so

dark and dense that fancy could easily mistake them for a higher Alps.

There were the peaks and the great passes; the Franconia Notches among

the cloudy cliffs, and the great White Mountain Gap."

His health, never robust, had been gradually failing for some time

previous to his death. He needed more repose and quiet than his duties

as an editor left him; and to this end he purchased a small and pleasant

farm in his loved Pennigewasset valley, in the hope that he might there

recruit his wasted energies. In the sixth month of the year of his

death, in a letter to us, he spoke of his prospects in language which

even then brought moisture to our eyes:--

"I am striving to get me an asylum of a farm. I have a wife and seven

children, every one of them with a whole spirit. I don't want to be

separated from any of them, only with a view to come together again. I

have a beautiful little retreat in prospect, forty odd miles north, where

I imagine I can get potatoes and repose,--a sort of haven or port. I am

among the breakers, and 'mad for land.' If I get this home,--it is a mile

or two in among the hills from the pretty domicil once visited by

yourself and glorious Thompson,--I am this moment indulging the fancy

that I may see you at it before we die. Why can't I have you come and

see me? You see, dear W., I don't want to send you anything short of a

full epistle. Let me end as I begun, with the proffer of my hand in

grasp of yours extended. My heart I do not proffer,--it was yours

before,--it shall be yours while I am N. P. ROGERS."

Alas! the haven of a deeper repose than he had dreamed of was close at

hand. He lingered until the middle of the tenth month, suffering much,

yet calm and sensible to the last. Just before his death, he desired his

children to sing at his bedside that touching song of Lover's, _The

Angel's Whisper_. Turning his eyes towards the open window, through

which the leafy glory of the season he most loved was visible, he

listened to the sweet melody. In the words of his friend Pierpont,--

"The angel's whisper stole in song upon his closing ear;

From his own daughter's lips it came, so musical and clear,

That scarcely knew the dying man what melody was there--

The last of earth's or first of heaven's pervading all the air."

He sleeps in the Concord burial-ground, under the shadow of oaks; the

very spot he would have chosen, for he looked upon trees with something

akin to human affection. "They are," he said, "the beautiful handiwork

and architecture of God, on which the eye never tires. Every one is

a feather in the earth's cap, a plume in her bonnet, a tress on her

forehead,--a comfort, a refreshing, and an ornament to her." Spring has

hung over him her buds, and opened beside him her violets. Summer has

laid her green oaken garland on his grave, and now the frost-blooms of

autumn drop upon it. Shall man cast a nettle on that mound? He loved

humanity,--shall it be less kind to him than Nature? Shall the bigotry

of sect, and creed, and profession, drive its condemnatory stake into his

grave? God forbid. The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressed

had relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses of

commentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, rather

than to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave the

constant assent of his practice. He sought not his own. His heart

yearned with pity and brotherly affection for all the poor and suffering

in the universe. Of him, the angel of Leigh Hunt's beautiful allegory

might have written, in the golden book of remembrance, as he did of the

good Abou Ben Adhem, "He loved his fellow-men."

ROBERT DINSMORE.

The great charm of Scottish poetry consists in its simplicity, and

genuine, unaffected sympathy with the common joys and sorrows of daily

life. It is a home-taught, household melody. It calls to mind the

pastoral bleat on the hillsides, the kirkbells of a summer Sabbath, the

song of the lark in the sunrise, the cry of the quail in the corn-land,

the low of cattle, and the blithe carol of milkmaids "when the kye come

hame" at gloaming. Meetings at fair and market, blushing betrothments,

merry weddings, the joy of young maternity, the lights and shades of

domestic life, its bereavements and partings, its chances and changes,

its holy death-beds, and funerals solemnly beautiful in quiet kirkyards,

--these furnish the hints of the immortal melodies of Burns, the sweet

ballads of the Ettrick Shepherd and Allan Cunningham, and the rustic

drama of Ramsay. It is the poetry of home, of nature, and the

affections.

All this is sadly wanting in our young literature. We have no songs;

American domestic life has never been hallowed and beautified by the

sweet and graceful and tender associations of poetry. We have no Yankee

pastorals. Our rivers and streams turn mills and float rafts, and are

otherwise as commendably useful as those of Scotland; but no quaint

ballad or simple song reminds us that men and women have loved, met, and

parted on their banks, or that beneath each roof within their valleys the

tragedy and comedy of life have been enacted. Our poetry is cold and

imitative; it seems more the product of over-strained intellects than the

spontaneous outgushing of hearts warm with love, and strongly

sympathizing with human nature as it actually exists about us, with the

joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, the

opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is

that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian

Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected

to homeopathic dilution. It assumes to be prophetical, and its

utterances are oracular. It tells of strange, vague emotions and

yearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual "groanings which cannot be

uttered." If it "babbles o' green fields" and the common sights and

sounds of nature, it is only for the purpose of finding some vague

analogy between them and its internal experiences and longings. It

leaves the warm and comfortable fireside of actual knowledge and human

comprehension, and goes wailing and gibbering like a ghost about the

impassable doors of mystery:--

"It fain would be resolved

How things are done,

And who the tailor is

That works for the man I' the sun."

How shall we account for this marked tendency in the literature of a

shrewd, practical people? Is it that real life in New England lacks

those conditions of poetry and romance which age, reverence, and

superstition have gathered about it in the Old World? Is it that

"Ours are not Tempe's nor Arcadia's vales,"

but are more famous for growing Indian corn and potatoes, and the

manufacture of wooden ware and pedler notions, than for romantic

associations and legendary interest? That our huge, unshapely shingle

structures, blistering in the sun and glaring with windows, were

evidently never reared by the spell of pastoral harmonies, as the walls

of Thebes rose at the sound of the lyre of Amphion? That the habits of

our people are too cool, cautious, undemonstrative, to furnish the warp

and woof of song and pastoral, and that their dialect and figures of

speech, however richly significant and expressive in the autobiography of

Sam Slick, or the satire of Hosea Biglow and Ethan Spike, form a very

awkward medium of sentiment and pathos? All this may be true. But the

Yankee, after all, is a man, and as such his history, could it be got at,

must have more or less of poetic material in it; moreover, whether

conscious of it or not, he also stands relieved against the background of

Nature's beauty or sublimity. There is a poetical side to the

commonplace of his incomings and outgoings; study him well, and you may

frame an idyl of some sort from his apparently prosaic existence. Our

poets, we must needs think, are deficient in that shiftiness, ready

adaptation to circumstances, and ability of making the most of things,

for which, as a people, we are proverbial. Can they make nothing of our

Thanksgiving, that annual gathering of long-severed friends? Do they

find nothing to their purpose in our apple-bees, buskings, berry-

pickings, summer picnics, and winter sleigh-rides? Is there nothing

available in our peculiarities of climate, scenery, customs, and

political institutions? Does the Yankee leap into life, shrewd, hard,

and speculating, armed, like Pallas, for a struggle with fortune? Are

there not boys and girls, school loves and friendship, courtings and

match-makings, hope and fear, and all the varied play of human passions,

--the keen struggles of gain, the mad grasping of ambition,--sin and

remorse, tearful repentance and holy aspirations? Who shall say that we

have not all the essentials of the poetry of human life and simple

nature, of the hearth and the farm-field? Here, then, is a mine

unworked, a harvest ungathered. Who shall sink the shaft and thrust in

the sickle?

And here let us say that the mere dilettante and the amateur ruralist may

as well keep their hands off. The prize is not for them. He who would

successfully strive for it must be himself what he sings,--part and

parcel of the rural life of New England,--one who has grown strong amidst

its healthful influences, familiar with all its details, and capable of

detecting whatever of beauty, humor, or pathos pertain to it,--one who

has added to his book-lore the large experience of an active

participation in the rugged toil, the hearty amusements, the trials, and

the pleasures he describes.

We have been led to these reflections by an incident which has called up

before us the homespun figure of an old friend of our boyhood, who had

the good sense to discover that the poetic element existed in the simple

home life of a country farmer, although himself unable to give a very

creditable expression of it. He had the "vision," indeed, but the

"faculty divine" was wanting; or, if he possessed it in any degree, as

Thersites says of the wit of Ajax, "it would not out, but lay coldly in

him like fire in the flint."

While engaged this morning in looking over a large exchange list of

newspapers, a few stanzas of poetry in the Scottish dialect attracted our

attention. As we read them, like a wizard's rhyme they seemed to have

the power of bearing us back to the past. They had long ago graced the

columns of that solitary sheet which once a week diffused happiness over

our fireside circle, making us acquainted, in our lonely nook, with the

goings-on of the great world. The verses, we are now constrained to

admit, are not remarkable in themselves, truth and simple nature only;

yet how our young hearts responded to them! Twenty years ago there were

fewer verse-makers than at present; and as our whole stock of light

literature consisted of Ellwood's _Davideis_ and the selections of

_Lindley Murray's English Reader_, it is not improbable that we were in a

condition to overestimate the contributions to the poet's corner of our

village newspaper. Be that as it may, we welcome them as we would the

face of an old friend, for they somehow remind us of the scent of

haymows, the breath of cattle, the fresh greenery by the brookside, the

moist earth broken by the coulter and turned up to the sun and winds of

May. This particular piece, which follows, is entitled _The Sparrow_,

and was occasioned by the crushing of a bird's-nest by the author while

ploughing among his corn. It has something of the simple tenderness of

Burns.

"Poor innocent and hapless Sparrow

Why should my mould-board gie thee sorrow!

This day thou'll chirp and mourn the morrow

Wi' anxious breast;

The plough has turned the mould'ring furrow

Deep o'er thy nest!

"Just I' the middle o' the hill

Thy nest was placed wi' curious skill;

There I espied thy little bill

Beneath the shade.

In that sweet bower, secure frae ill,

Thine eggs were laid.

"Five corns o' maize had there been drappit,

An' through the stalks thy head was pappit,

The drawing nowt could na be stappit

I quickly foun';

Syne frae thy cozie nest thou happit,

Wild fluttering roun'.

"The sklentin stane beguiled the sheer,

In vain I tried the plough to steer;

A wee bit stumpie I' the rear

Cam' 'tween my legs,

An' to the jee-side gart me veer

An' crush thine eggs.

"Alas! alas! my bonnie birdie!

Thy faithful mate flits round to guard thee.

Connubial love!--a pattern worthy

The pious priest!

What savage heart could be sae hardy

As wound thy breast?

"Ah me! it was nae fau't o' mine;

It gars me greet to see thee pine.

It may be serves His great design

Who governs all;

Omniscience tents wi' eyes divine

The Sparrow's fall!

"How much like thine are human dools,

Their sweet wee bairns laid I' the mools?

The Sovereign Power who nature rules

Hath said so be it

But poor blip' mortals are sic fools

They canna see it.

"Nae doubt that He who first did mate us

Has fixed our lot as sure as fate is,

An' when He wounds He disna hate us,

But anely this,

He'll gar the ills which here await us

Yield lastin' bliss."

In the early part of the eighteenth century a considerable number of

Presbyterians of Scotch descent, from the north of Ireland, emigrated to

the New World. In the spring of 1719, the inhabitants of Haverhill, on

the Merrimac, saw them passing up the river in several canoes, one of

which unfortunately upset in the rapids above the village. The following

fragment of a ballad celebrating this event has been handed down to the

present time, and may serve to show the feelings even then of the old

English settlers towards the Irish emigrants:--

"They began to scream and bawl,

As out they tumbled one and all,

And, if the Devil had spread his net,

He could have made a glorious haul!"

The new-comers proceeded up the river, and, landing opposite to the

Uncanoonuc Hills, on the present site of Manchester, proceeded inland to

Beaver Pond. Charmed with the appearance of the country, they resolved

here to terminate their wanderings. Under a venerable oak on the margin

of the little lake, they knelt down with their minister, Jamie McGregore,

and laid, in prayer and thanksgiving, the foundation of their settlement.

In a few years they had cleared large fields, built substantial stone and

frame dwellings and a large and commodious meeting-house; wealth had

accumulated around them, and they had everywhere the reputation of a

shrewd and thriving community. They were the first in New England to

cultivate the potato, which their neighbors for a long time regarded as a

pernicious root, altogether unfit for a Christian stomach. Every lover

of that invaluable esculent has reason to remember with gratitude the

settlers of Londonderry.

Their moral acclimation in Ireland had not been without its effect upon

their character. Side by side with a Presbyterianism as austere as that

of John Knox had grown up something of the wild Milesian humor, love of

convivial excitement and merry-making. Their long prayers and fierce

zeal in behalf of orthodox tenets only served, in the eyes of their

Puritan neighbors, to make more glaring still the scandal of their marked

social irregularities. It became a common saying in the region round

about that "the Derry Presbyterians would never give up a pint of

doctrine or a pint of rum." Their second minister was an old scarred

fighter, who had signalized himself in the stout defence of Londonderry,

when James II. and his Papists were thundering at its gates. Agreeably

to his death-bed directions, his old fellow-soldiers, in their leathern

doublets and battered steel caps, bore him to his grave, firing over him

the same rusty muskets which had swept down rank after rank of the men of

Amalek at the Derry siege.

Erelong the celebrated Derry fair was established, in imitation of those

with which they had been familiar in Ireland. Thither annually came all

manner of horse-jockeys and pedlers, gentlemen and beggars, fortune-

tellers, wrestlers, dancers and fiddlers, gay young farmers and buxom

maidens. Strong drink abounded. They who had good-naturedly wrestled

and joked together in the morning not unfrequently closed the day with a

fight, until, like the revellers of Donnybrook,

"Their hearts were soft with whiskey,

And their heads were soft with blows."

A wild, frolicking, drinking, fiddling, courting, horse-racing, riotous

merry-making,--a sort of Protestant carnival, relaxing the grimness of

Puritanism for leagues around it.

In the midst of such a community, and partaking of all its influences,

Robert Dinsmore, the author of the poem I have quoted, was born, about

the middle of the last century. His paternal ancestor, John, younger son

of a Laird of Achenmead, who left the banks of the Tweed for the green

fertility of Northern Ireland, had emigrated to New England some forty

years before, and, after a rough experience of Indian captivity in the

wild woods of Maine, had settled down among his old neighbors in

Londonderry. Until nine years of age, Robert never saw a school. He was

a short time under the tuition of an old British soldier, who had strayed

into the settlement after the French war, "at which time," he says in a

letter to a friend, "I learned to repeat the shorter and larger

catechisms. These, with the Scripture proofs annexed to them, confirmed

me in the orthodoxy of my forefathers, and I hope I shall ever remain an

evidence of the truth of what the wise man said, 'Train up a child in the

way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'" He

afterwards took lessons with one Master McKeen, who used to spend much of

his time in hunting squirrels with his pupils. He learned to read and

write; and the old man always insisted that he should have done well at

ciphering also, had he not fallen in love with Molly Park. At the age of

eighteen he enlisted in the Revolutionary army, and was at the battle of

Saratoga. On his return he married his fair Molly, settled down as a

farmer in Windham, formerly a part of Londonderry, and before he was

thirty years of age became an elder in the church, of the creed and

observances of which he was always a zealous and resolute defender. From

occasional passages in his poems, it is evident that the instructions

which he derived from the pulpit were not unlike those which Burns

suggested as needful for the unlucky lad whom he was commending to his

friend Hamilton:--

"Ye 'll catechise him ilka quirk,

An' shore him weel wi' hell."

In a humorous poem, entitled Spring's Lament, he thus describes the

consternation produced in the meeting-house at sermon time by a dog, who,

in search of his mistress, rattled and scraped at the "west porch

door:"--

"The vera priest was scared himsel',

His sermon he could hardly spell;

Auld carlins fancied they could smell

The brimstone matches;

They thought he was some imp o' hell,

In quest o' wretches."

He lived to a good old age, a home-loving, unpretending farmer,

cultivating his acres with his own horny hands, and cheering the long

rainy days and winter evenings with homely rhyme. Most of his pieces

were written in the dialect of his ancestors, which was well understood

by his neighbors and friends, the only audience upon which he could

venture to calculate. He loved all old things, old language, old

customs, old theology. In a rhyming letter to his cousin Silas,

he says:--

"Though Death our ancestors has cleekit,

An' under clods then closely steekit,

We'll mark the place their chimneys reekit,

Their native tongue we yet wad speak it,

Wi' accent glib."

He wrote sometimes to amuse his neighbors, often to soothe their sorrow

under domestic calamity, or to give expression to his own. With little

of that delicacy of taste which results from the attrition of fastidious

and refined society, and altogether too truthful and matter-of-fact to

call in the aid of imagination, he describes in the simplest and most

direct terms the circumstances in which he found himself, and the

impressions which these circumstances had made on his own mind. He calls

things by their right names; no euphuism or transcendentalism,--the

plainer and commoner the better. He tells us of his farm life, its

joys and sorrows, its mirth and care, with no embellishment, with no

concealment of repulsive and ungraceful features. Never having seen a

nightingale, he makes no attempt to describe the fowl; but he has seen

the night-hawk, at sunset, cutting the air above him, and he tells of it.

Side by side with his waving corn-fields and orchard-blooms we have the

barn-yard and pigsty. Nothing which was necessary to the comfort and

happiness of his home and avocation was to him "common or unclean."

Take, for instance, the following, from a poem written at the close of

autumn, after the death of his wife:--

"No more may I the Spring Brook trace,

No more with sorrow view the place

Where Mary's wash-tub stood;

No more may wander there alone,

And lean upon the mossy stone

Where once she piled her wood.

'T was there she bleached her linen cloth,

By yonder bass-wood tree

From that sweet stream she made her broth,

Her pudding and her tea.

That stream, whose waters running,

O'er mossy root and stone,

Made ringing and singing,

Her voice could match alone."

We envy not the man who can sneer at this simple picture. It is honest

as Nature herself. An old and lonely man looks back upon the young years

of his wedded life. Can we not look with him? The sunlight of a summer

morning is weaving itself with the leafy shadows of the bass-tree,

beneath which a fair and ruddy-checked young woman, with her full,

rounded arms bared to the elbow, bends not ungracefully to her task,

pausing ever and anon to play with the bright-eyed child beside her, and

mingling her songs with the pleasant murmurings of gliding water! Alas!

as the old man looks, he hears that voice, which perpetually sounds to us

all from the past--no more!

Let us look at him in his more genial mood. Take the opening lines of

his Thanksgiving Day. What a plain, hearty picture of substantial

comfort!

"When corn is in the garret stored,

And sauce in cellar well secured;

When good fat beef we can afford,

And things that 're dainty,

With good sweet cider on our board,

And pudding plenty;

"When stock, well housed, may chew the cud,

And at my door a pile of wood,

A rousing fire to warm my blood,

Blest sight to see!

It puts my rustic muse in mood

To sing for thee."

If he needs a simile, he takes the nearest at hand. In a letter to his

daughter he says:--

"That mine is not a longer letter,

The cause is not the want of matter,--

Of that there's plenty, worse or better;

But like a mill

Whose stream beats back with surplus water,

The wheel stands still."

Something of the humor of Burns gleams out occasionally from the sober

decorum of his verses. In an epistle to his friend Betton, high sheriff

of the county, who had sent to him for a peck of seed corn, he says:--

"Soon plantin' time will come again,

Syne may the heavens gie us rain,

An' shining heat to bless ilk plain

An' fertile hill,

An' gar the loads o' yellow grain,

Our garrets fill.

"As long as I has food and clothing,

An' still am hale and fier and breathing,

Ye 's get the corn--and may be aething

Ye'll do for me;

(Though God forbid)--hang me for naething

An' lose your fee."

And on receiving a copy of some verses written by a lady, he talks in a

sad way for a Presbyterian deacon:--

"Were she some Aborigine squaw,

Wha sings so sweet by nature's law,

I'd meet her in a hazle shaw,

Or some green loany,

And make her tawny phiz and 'a

My welcome crony."

The practical philosophy of the stout, jovial rhymer was but little

affected by the sour-featured asceticism of the elder. He says:--

"We'll eat and drink, and cheerful take

Our portions for the Donor's sake,

For thus the Word of Wisdom spake--

Man can't do better;

Nor can we by our labors make

The Lord our debtor!"

A quaintly characteristic correspondence in rhyme between the Deacon and

Parson McGregore, evidently "birds o' ane feather," is still in

existence. The minister, in acknowledging the epistle of his old friend,

commences his reply as follows:--

"Did e'er a cuif tak' up a quill,

Wha ne'er did aught that he did well,

To gar the muses rant and reel,

An' flaunt and swagger,

Nae doubt ye 'll say 't is that daft chiel

Old Dite McGregore!"

The reply is in the same strain, and may serve to give the reader some

idea of the old gentleman as a religious controversialist:--

"My reverend friend and kind McGregore,

Although thou ne'er was ca'd a bragger,

Thy muse I'm sure nave e'er was glegger

Thy Scottish lays

Might gar Socinians fa' or stagger,

E'en in their ways.

"When Unitarian champions dare thee,

Goliah like, and think to scare thee,

Dear Davie, fear not, they'll ne'er waur thee;

But draw thy sling,

Weel loaded frae the Gospel quarry,

An' gie 't a fling."

The last time I saw him, he was chaffering in the market-place of my

native village, swapping potatoes and onions and pumpkins for tea,

coffee, molasses, and, if the truth be told, New England rum. Threescore

years and ten, to use his own words,

"Hung o'er his back,

And bent him like a muckle pack,"

yet he still stood stoutly and sturdily in his thick shoes of cowhide,

like one accustomed to tread independently the soil of his own acres,--

his broad, honest face seamed by care and darkened by exposure to "all

the airts that blow," and his white hair flowing in patriarchal glory

beneath his felt hat. A genial, jovial, large-hearted old man, simple as

a child, and betraying, neither in look nor manner, that he was

accustomed to

"Feed on thoughts which voluntary move

Harmonious numbers."

Peace to him! A score of modern dandies and sentimentalists could ill

supply the place of this one honest man. In the ancient burial-ground of

Windham, by the side of his "beloved Molly," and in view of the old

meeting-house, there is a mound of earth, where, every spring, green

grasses tremble in the wind and the warm sunshine calls out the flowers.

There, gathered like one of his own ripe sheaves, the farmer poet sleeps

with his fathers.

PLACIDO, THE SLAVE POET. (1845.)

I have been greatly interested in the fate of Juan Placido, the black

revolutionist of Cuba, who was executed in Havana, as the alleged

instigator and leader of an attempted revolt on the part of the slaves in

that city and its neighborhood.

Juan Placido was born a slave on the estate of Don Terribio de Castro.

His father was an African, his mother a mulatto. His mistress treated

him with great kindness, and taught him to read. When he was twelve

years of age she died, and he fell into other and less compassionate

hands. At the age of eighteen, on seeing his mother struck with a heavy

whip, he for the first time turned upon his tormentors. To use his own

words, "I felt the blow in my heart. To utter a loud cry, and from a

downcast boy, with the timidity of one weak as a lamb, to become all at

office like a raging lion, was a thing of a moment." He was, however,

subdued, and the next morning, together with his mother, a tenderly

nurtured and delicate woman, severely scourged. On seeing his mother

rudely stripped and thrown down upon the ground, he at first with tears

implored the overseer to spare her; but at the sound of the first blow,

as it cut into her naked flesh, he sprang once more upon the ruffian,

who, having superior strength, beat him until he was nearer dead than

alive.

After suffering all the vicissitudes of slavery,--hunger, nakedness,

stripes; after bravely and nobly bearing up against that slow, dreadful

process which reduces the man to a thing, the image of God to a piece of

merchandise, until he had reached his thirty-eighth year, he was

unexpectedly released from his bonds. Some literary gentlemen in Havana,

into whose hands two or three pieces of his composition had fallen,

struck with the vigor, spirit, and natural grace which they manifested,

sought out the author, and raised a subscription to purchase his freedom.

He came to Havana, and maintained himself by house-painting, and such

other employments as his ingenuity and talents placed within his reach.

He wrote several poems, which have been published in Spanish at Havana,

and translated by Dr. Madden, under the title of _Poems by a Slave_.

It is not too much to say of these poems that they will bear a comparison

with most of the productions of modern Spanish literature. The style is

bold, free, energetic. Some of the pieces are sportive and graceful;

such is the address to _The Cucuya_, or Cuban firefly. This beautiful

insect is sometimes fastened in tiny nets to the light dresses of the

Cuban ladies, a custom to which the writer gallantly alludes in the

following lines:--

"Ah!--still as one looks on such brightness and bloom,

On such beauty as hers, one might envy the doom

Of a captive Cucuya that's destined, like this,

To be touched by her hand and revived by her kiss!

In the cage which her delicate hand has prepared,

The beautiful prisoner nestles unscared,

O'er her fair forehead shining serenely and bright,

In beauty's own bondage revealing its light!

And when the light dance and the revel are done,

She bears it away to her alcove alone,

Where, fed by her hand from the cane that's most choice,

In secret it gleans at the sound of her voice!

O beautiful maiden! may Heaven accord

Thy care of the captive a fitting reward,

And never may fortune the fetters remove

Of a heart that is thine in the bondage of love!"

In his Dream, a fragment of some length, Placido dwells in a touching

manner upon the scenes of his early years. It is addressed to his

brother Florence, who was a slave near Matanzas, while the author was in

the same condition at Havana. There is a plaintive and melancholy

sweetness in these lines, a natural pathos, which finds its way to the

heart:--

"Thou knowest, dear Florence, my sufferings of old,

The struggles maintained with oppression for years;

We shared them together, and each was consoled

With the love which was nurtured by sorrow and tears.

"But now far apart, the sad pleasure is gone,

We mingle our sighs and our sorrows no more;

The course is a new one which each has to run,

And dreary for each is the pathway before.

"But in slumber our spirits at least shall commune,

We will meet as of old in the visions of sleep,

In dreams which call back early days, when at noon

We stole to the shade of the palm-tree to weep!

"For solitude pining, in anguish of late

The heights of Quintana I sought for repose;

And there, in the cool and the silence, the weight

Of my cares was forgotten, I felt not any woes.

"Exhausted and weary, the spell of the place

Sank down on my eyelids, and soft slumber stole

So sweetly upon me, it left not a trace

Of sorrow o'ercasting the light of the soul."

The writer then imagines himself borne lightly through the air to the

place of his birth. The valley of Matanzas lies beneath him, hallowed by

the graves of his parents. He proceeds:--

"I gazed on that spot where together we played,

Our innocent pastimes came fresh to my mind,

Our mother's caress, and the fondness displayed

In each word and each look of a parent so kind.

"I looked on the mountain, whose fastnesses wild

The fugitives seek from the rifle and hound;

Below were the fields where they suffered and toiled,

And there the low graves of their comrades are found.

"The mill-house was there, and the turmoil of old;

But sick of these scenes, for too well were they known,

I looked for the stream where in childhood I strolled

When a moment of quiet and peace was my own.

"With mingled emotions of pleasure and pain,

Dear Florence, I sighed to behold thee once more;

I sought thee, my brother, embraced thee again,

But I found thee a slave as I left thee before!"

Some of his devotional pieces evince the fervor and true feeling of the

Christian poet. His _Ode to Religion_ contains many admirable lines.

Speaking of the martyrs of the early days of Christianity, he says

finely:--

"Still in that cradle, purpled with their blood,

The infant Faith waxed stronger day by day."

I cannot forbear quoting the last stanza of this poem:--

"O God of mercy, throned in glory high,

On earth and all its misery look down:

Behold the wretched, hear the captive's cry,

And call Thy exiled children round Thy throne!

There would I fain in contemplation gaze

On Thy eternal beauty, and would make

Of love one lasting canticle of praise,

And every theme but Thee henceforth forsake!"

His best and noblest production is an ode _To Cuba_, written on the

occasion of Dr. Madden's departure from the island, and presented to that

gentleman. It was never published in Cuba, as its sentiments would have

subjected the author to persecution. It breathes a lofty spirit of

patriotism, and an indignant sense of the wrongs inflicted upon his race.

Withal, it has something of the grandeur and stateliness of the old

Spanish muse.

"Cuba!--of what avail that thou art fair,

Pearl of the Seas, the pride of the Antilles,

If thy poor sons have still to see thee share

The pangs of bondage and its thousand ills?

Of what avail the verdure of thy hills,

The purple bloom thy coffee-plain displays;

The cane's luxuriant growth, whose culture fills

More graves than famine, or the sword finds ways

To glut with victims calmly as it slays?

"Of what avail that thy clear streams abound

With precious ore, if wealth there's, none to buy

Thy children's rights, and not one grain is found

For Learning's shrine, or for the altar nigh

Of poor, forsaken, downcast Liberty?

Of what avail the riches of thy port,

Forests of masts and ships from every sea,

If Trade alone is free, and man, the sport

And spoil of Trade, bears wrongs of every sort?

"Cuba! O Cuba!---when men call thee fair,

And rich, and beautiful, the Queen of Isles,

Star of the West, and Ocean's gem most rare,

Oh, say to those who mock thee with such wiles:

Take off these flowers; and view the lifeless spoils

Which wait the worm; behold their hues beneath

The pale, cold cheek; and seek for living smiles

Where Beauty lies not in the arms of Death,

And Bondage taints not with its poison breath!"

The disastrous result of the last rising of the slaves--in Cuba is well

known. Betrayed, and driven into premature collision with their

oppressors, the insurrectionists were speedily crushed into subjection.

Placido was arrested, and after a long hearing was condemned to be

executed, and consigned to the Chapel of the Condemned.

How far he was implicated in the insurrectionary movement it is now

perhaps impossible to ascertain. The popular voice at Havana pronounced

him its leader and projector, and as such he was condemned. His own

bitter wrongs; the terrible recollections of his life of servitude; the

sad condition of his relatives and race, exposed to scorn, contumely, and

the heavy hand of violence; the impunity with which the most dreadful

outrages upon the persons of slaves were inflicted,--acting upon a mind

fully capable of appreciating the beauty and dignity of freedom,--

furnished abundant incentives to an effort for the redemption of his race

and the humiliation of his oppressors. The Heraldo, of Madrid speaks of

him as "the celebrated poet, a man of great natural genius, and beloved

and appreciated by the most respectable young men of Havana." It accuses

him of wild and ambitious projects, and states that he was intended to be

the chief of the black race after they had thrown off the yoke of

bondage.

He was executed at Havana in the seventh month, 1844. According to the

custom in Cuba with condemned criminals, he was conducted from prison to

the Chapel of the Doomed. He passed thither with singular composure,

amidst a great concourse of people, gracefully saluting his numerous

acquaintances. The chapel was hung with black cloth, and dimly lighted.

He was seated beside his coffin. Priests in long black robes stood

around him, chanting in sepulchral voices the service of the dead. It is

an ordeal under which the stoutest-hearted and most resolute have been

found to sink. After enduring it for twenty-four hours he was led out to

execution. He came forth calm and undismayed; holding a crucifix in his

hand, he recited in a loud, clear voice a solemn prayer in verse, which

he had composed amidst the horrors of the Chapel. The following is an

imperfect rendering of a poem which thrilled the hearts of all who heard

it:--

"God of unbounded love and power eternal,

To Thee I turn in darkness and despair!

Stretch forth Thine arm, and from the brow infernal

Of Calumny the veil of Justice tear;

And from the forehead of my honest fame

Pluck the world's brand of infamy and shame!

"O King of kings!--my fathers' God!--who only

Art strong to save, by whom is all controlled,

Who givest the sea its waves, the dark and lonely

Abyss of heaven its light, the North its cold,

The air its currents, the warm sun its beams,

Life to the flowers, and motion to the streams!

"All things obey Thee, dying or reviving

As thou commandest; all, apart from Thee,

From Thee alone their life and power deriving,

Sink and are lost in vast eternity!

Yet doth the void obey Thee; since from naught

This marvellous being by Thy hand was wrought.