a month passed by without a new poem of liberty by
Whittier. Soon these poems that were published in the newspapers were
recited in the schools by the children, quoted in the pulpits by the
preachers, and used by the orators as feathers for their arrows. Once
Wendell Phillips concluded an impassioned oration by reciting one of
Whittier's stanzas, when a man in the audience shouted, "That arrow
went home!" to which Wendell Phillips answered, "Yes, and I have a
quiver full of arrows, every one of which was made by a man of
peace,--John Greenleaf Whittier." If Emerson's philosophy was like the
diffused white daylight that makes clear the landscape for an army,
Whittier's occasional poems like "Ichabod" were thunderbolts that
blasted forever all compromise and expediency.

Sometimes what the essayist fails to achieve ridicule easily
accomplishes. James Russell Lowell was the satirist of the abolition
movement. With biting scorn and irony he laughed men out of narrowness,
ignorance, and selfishness. During the last epoch in his career Lowell
achieved world-wide fame as a diplomat, and was universally admired as
the all round man of letters. But now that he has gone, in retrospect,
the historian perceives that the first era of Lowell's career was the
influential era. He was the Milton of the anti-slavery epoch, as Lincoln
was its Cromwell. His influence in England, in developing an
anti-slavery sentiment there, was, if possible, more influential than in
the home country. The great English editor, William Stead, tells us
that he owes to Lowell's message the influences that made him an editor
and a reformer. In the critical moments of his life he found in Lowell
the inspiration and support that he found in no other books, save in
Carlyle's "Cromwell" and the Bible. "In Russia, in Ireland, in Rome, and
in prison, Lowell's poems have been my constant companions." The poet
used the story of Moses emancipating the Hebrew slaves as an
illustration of the abolitionist as the unknown leader whom God would
raise up to lead the three million black men out of Southern slavery.
"What God did for the Egyptian bondsmen, he believed God would do;
because what God was, God is. He goes on:--

"From what a Bible can a man choose his text to-day! A Bible which needs
no translation; and which no priestcraft can close from the laity,--the
open volume of the world, upon which, with a pen of sunshine and
destroying fire, the inspired Present is ev