em about this preacher.

What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane representatives
to Congress for, of late years?--to declare with effect what kind
of sentiments? All their speeches put together and boiled down,--and
probably they themselves will confess it,--do not match for manly
directness and force, and for simple truth, the few casual remarks of
crazy John Brown, on the floor of the Harper's Ferry engine-house,--that
man whom you are about to hang, to send to the other world, though not
to represent you there. No, he was not our representative in any sense.
He was too fair a specimen of a man to represent the like of us. Who,
then, were his constituents? If you read his words understandingly you
will find out. In his case there is no idle eloquence, no made, nor
maiden speech, no compliments to the oppressor. Truth is his inspirer,
and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to
lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a
Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

And the New York Herald reports the conversation verbatim! It does not
know of what undying words it is made the vehicle.

I have no respect for the penetration of any man who can read the report
of that conversation, and still call the principal in it insane. It has
the ring of a saner sanity than an ordinary discipline and habits
of life, than an ordinary organization, secure. Take any sentence of
it,--"Any questions that I can honorably answer, I will; not otherwise.
So far as I am myself concerned, I have told everything truthfully. I
value my word, sir." The few who talk about his vindictive spirit, while
they really admire his heroism, have no test by which to detect a noble
man, no amalgam to combine with his pure gold. They mix their own dross
with it.

It is a relief to turn from these slanders to the testimony of his more
truthful, but frightened jailers and hangmen. Governor Wise speaks
far more justly and appreciatingly of him than any Northern editor, or
politician, or public personage, that I chance to have heard from. I
know that you can afford to hear him again on this subject. He says:
"They are themselves mistaken who take him to be madman.... He is cool,
collected, and indomitable, and it is but just to him to say, that he
was humane to his prisoners.... And he inspired me with great trust in
his integrity as a man of truth. He is a fanatic, vain and garrulous,"
(I le