n both houses to secure an adjournment.
Though defeated, the motion drew out pretty generally the sentiments
of the members. Many of these voting against adjournment, admired the
martyr; but objected to leaving the business of the day, saying that
Brown himself would counsel continued attention to proper legislative
duties.

From the vantage ground of twenty-five years after, it is interesting
to read what leading exponents of public opinion said then. From the
South there came but one cry. It was to be expected. Nothing else
could have been tolerated. From the North there was a diversity of
language.

The _New York Tribune_ of December 3d said, and I can believe that
Greeley himself wrote the words: "John Brown, dead, will live in
millions of hearts, will be discussed around the homely hearth of
Toil, and dreamed of on the couch of Poverty.... Yes, John Brown,
dead, is verily a power like Samson in the falling temple of Dagon,
like Ziska, dead, with his skin stretched over a drum head still
routing the foe he bravely fought while living." The _New York Herald_
of the same date, voicing the sentiment of those who actively or
passively upheld slavery, alludes to the Hero as "Old John Brown, the
culprit, hanged for murder," etc., and states that the South was
correct. The _Boston Courier_ wishes Governor Banks to ask the
Legislature to make an appropriation of $40,000 to assist Virginia in
paying the bills incident to the Trial. If I am not mistaken, it was
this same Courier's editor, one Homer by name, who, some years before,
had placarded the city to excite a riot against Thompson, the English
Emancipationist, and who had been largely instrumental in fostering
trouble for Garrison and Phillips.

If we only knew that we were prophesying at the time! Little did the
Tribune writer think that his allusion to Ziska would prove almost
literally true. In two years from the death of John Brown the Twelfth
Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, the Fletcher Webster Regiment,
marched down the streets of Boston to the words:

"John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave,"

and like magic the whole Union Army took it up, nay more, those who
stood behind the army, young and old. Men and women sung it from Maine
to California. No one knows who wrote it--it was unwritten. It was the
popular idea, inspired by God, given vocal expression. There was
nothing to learn about it. Everybody knew it before he heard it. Once
raise