they came to him; he kept note-books and journals all
his life; he dreamed in the pine woods by day and walked beneath
the stars by night; he sat by the still waters and wandered in the
green fields; and the dreams and the visions and the fancies of
the moment he faithfully recorded. These disjointed musings and
disconnected thoughts formed the raw material of all he ever said
and wrote. From the accumulated stores of years he would draw
whatever was necessary to meet the needs of the hour; and it did
not matter to him if thought did not dovetail into thought with
all the precision of good intellectual carpentry. His edifices
were filled with chinks and unfinished apartments.

He saw things in a big way, but did not always see them as through
crystal, clearly; nor did he always take his staff in hand and
courageously go about to see all sides of things. He never thought
to a finish. His philosophy never acquired form and substance. His
thoughts are not linked in chain, but are just so many precious
pearls lightly strung on a silken thread.

In 1852 he wrote in his journal, "I waked last night and bemoaned
myself because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable
question of slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few
assured voices. But then in hours of sanity I recover myself, and
say, 'God must govern his own world, and knows his way out of this
pit without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it
but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to
wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the
brain of man, far retired in the heaven of invention, and which,
important to the republic of man, have no watchman or lover or
defender but me,'" thereby naively leaving to God the lesser task.

But he wrongs himself in his own journal, for he did bestir
himself and he did speak, and he did not leave the black men to
God while he looked after the white; he helped God all he could in
his own peculiar, irresolute way. At the same time no passage from
the journals throws more light on the pure soul of the great
dreamer. He was opposed to slavery and he felt for the negroes,
but their physical degradation did not appeal to him so much as
the intellectual degradation of those about him. To him it was a
loftier mission to release the minds of men than free their
bodies. With the naive and at the same time superb egoism which is
characteristic of great souls, he consoles himself