But like those same mountain-torrents, there
is rather too much slope to his channel, and the rainbow sprays and
evaporations go double-quick-time to heaven, while the body of his water
falls headlong to the plain. We would have more pause and deliberation,
occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head — more frequent
expansions of the stream, still, bottomless, mountain tarns, perchance inland
seas, and at length the deep ocean itself.
We cannot do better than enrich our pages with a few extracts from such
articles as we have at hand. Who can help sympathizing with his righteous
impatience, when invited to hold his peace or endeavor to convince the
understandings of the people by well ordered arguments?
“Bandy compliments and arguments with the
somnambulist, on ‘table rock,’ when all the waters of Lake
Superior are thundering in the great horse-shoe, and deafening the very war
of the elements! Would you not shout to him with a clap of thunder through a
speaking-trumpet, if you could command it — if possible to reach his
senses in his appaling extremity! Did
Jonah
argufy with the city of Nineveh —
‘yet forty days,’ cried the vagabond prophet, ‘and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’
That was his salutation. And did the ‘Property and Standing’
turn up their noses at him, and set the mob on to him? Did the clergy
discountenance him, and call him extravagant, misguided, a divider
of churches, a disturber of parishes? What would have become of that city,
if they had done this? Did they ‘approve his principles’
but dislike his ‘measures’ and his
‘spirit’!!
“Slavery must be cried down, denounced down, ridiculed down, and
pro-slavery with it, or rather before it. Slavery will go when pro-slavery
starts. The sheep will follow when the bell-wether leads. Down, then, with
the bloody system, out of the land with it, and out of the world with it
— into the Red Sea with it. Men shan’t be enslaved in
this country any longer. Women and children shan’t be flogged
here any longer. If you undertake to hinder us, the worst is your own.”
— “But this is all fanaticism. Wait and see.”
He thus raises the anti-slavery ‘war-whoop’ in New Hampshire,
when an important convention is to be held, sending the summons
“To none but the whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross-the-Rubicon
spirits.” — “From rich ‘old Cheshire,’ from
Rockingham, with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea.”
— “From where the sun sets behind Kearsarge, even to where he
rises gloriously over Moses Norris’s own town of
Pittsfield; and from Amoskeag to Ragged Mountains — Coos
— Upper Coos, home of the everlasting hills, send out your bold
advocates of human rights — wherever they lay, scattered by lonely
lake, or Indian stream, or ‘Grant,’ or ‘Location’
— from the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the
adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St.
