th any
hope of success in treating the subject. Scholarship, genius and
devotion have hastened with poetry and eloquence, story and song to
this simple altar of human virtue, and have retired dissatisfied and
distressed with the thinness and poverty of their offerings, as I
shall with mine.

The difficulty in doing justice to the life and character of such a
man is not altogether due to the quality of the zeal, or of the
ability brought to the work, nor yet to any imperfections in the
qualities of the man himself; the state of the moral atmosphere about
us has much to do with it. The fault is not in our eyes, nor yet in
the object, if under a murky sky we fail to discover the object.
Wonderfully tenacious is the taint of a great wrong. The evil, as well
as "the good that men do, lives after them." Slavery is indeed gone;
but its long, black shadow yet falls broad and large over the face of
the whole country. It is the old truth oft repeated, and never more
fitly than now, "a prophet is without honor in his own country and
among his own people." Though more than twenty years have rolled
between us and the Harper's Ferry raid, though since then the armies
of the nation have found it necessary to do on a large scale what John
Brown attempted to do on a small one, and the great captain who fought
his way through slavery has filled with honor the Presidential chair,
we yet stand too near the days of slavery, and the life and times of
John Brown, to see clearly the true martyr and hero that he was and
rightly to estimate the value of the man and his works. Like the great
and good of all ages--the men born in advance of their times, the men
whose bleeding footprints attest the immense cost of reform, and show
us the long and dreary spaces, between the luminous points in the
progress of mankind,--this our noblest American hero must wait the
polishing wheels of after-coming centuries to make his glory more
manifest, and his worth more generally acknowledged. Such instances
are abundant and familiar. If we go back four and twenty centuries, to
the stately city of Athens, and search among her architectural
splendor and her miracles of art for the Socrates of to-day, and as he
stands in history, we shall find ourselves perplexed and disappointed.
In Jerusalem Jesus himself was only the "carpenter's son"--a young man
wonderfully destitute of worldly prudence--a pestilent fellow,
"inexcusably and perpetually interfering in the world