"

It still required bravery as well as kindliness to say of the despised
Quaker:--

"All honor and praise to the right-hearted bard
Who was true to The Voice when such service was hard;
Who himself was so free he dared sing for the slave,
When to look but a protest in silence was brave!
All honor and praise to the women and men
Who spoke out for the dumb and the down-trodden then!"

And greater bravery still was required in those days to dare introduce
the name of Parker into literature without denunciation or derision. Of
the church which had put its ban upon "the Orson of parsons" he said:--

"They had formerly damned the Pontifical See,
And the same thing, they thought, would do nicely for P.;
But he turned up his nose at their murmuring and shamming,
And cared (shall I say) not a d---- for their damning.
So they first read him out of their church, and next minute
Turned round and declared he had never been in it.
But the ban was too small, or the man was too big;
For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig
(He don't look like a man who would _stay_ treated shabbily,
Sophroniscus' son's head o'er the features of Rabelais);
He bangs and bethwacks them,--their backs he salutes
With the whole tree of knowledge torn up by the roots."

He concluded his long description of the great arch-heretic in these
words:--

"Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced
In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest.
There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest,
If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least;
His gestures all downright, and some, if you will,
As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill;
But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke,
Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak:
You forget the man wholly, you're thankful to meet
With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street;
And to hear, you're not over particular whence,
Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense."

The first of the Biglow Papers had appeared even before this,--as early
as 1846, during the progress of the Mexican war,--and had showed his
countrymen very plainly where he was to be found in the coming struggle.
These brilliant coruscations of wit were the first gleams of light which
irradiated the sombre anti-slavery struggle. The Abolitionists were men
too much in earnest to enliven their arguments with wit or humor, and