ticability of the most radical
abolitionism; for, they were all of them born to the doom of slavery,
some of them remained slaves until adult age, yet they all have not
only won equality to their white fellow citizens, in civil, religious,
political and social rank, but they have also illustrated and adorned
our common country by their genius, learning and eloquence.

The characteristics whereby Mr. Douglass has won first rank among these
remarkable men, and is still rising toward highest rank among living
Americans, are abundantly laid bare in the book before us. Like the
autobiography of Hugh Miller, it carries us so far back into early
childhood, as to throw light upon the question, "when positive and
persistent memory begins in the human being." And, like Hugh Miller, he
must have been a shy old-fashioned child, occasionally oppressed by what
he could not well account for, peering and poking about among the layers
of right and wrong, of tyrant and thrall, and the wonderfulness of that
hopeless tide of things which brought power to one race, and unrequited
toil to another, until, finally, he stumbled upon{6} his "first-found
Ammonite," hidden away down in the depths of his own nature, and which
revealed to him the fact that liberty and right, for all men, were
anterior to slavery and wrong. When his knowledge of the world was
bounded by the visible horizon on Col. Lloyd's plantation, and while
every thing around him bore a fixed, iron stamp, as if it had always
been so, this was, for one so young, a notable discovery.

To his uncommon memory, then, we must add a keen and accurate insight
into men and things; an original breadth of common sense which enabled
him to see, and weigh, and compare whatever passed before him, and
which kindled a desire to search out and define their relations to other
things not so patent, but which never succumbed to the marvelous nor the
supernatural; a sacred thirst for liberty and for learning, first as a
means of attaining liberty, then as an end in itself most desirable; a
will; an unfaltering energy and determination to obtain what his soul
pronounced desirable; a majestic self-hood; determined courage; a deep
and agonizing sympathy with his embruted, crushed and bleeding fellow
slaves, and an extraordinary depth of passion, together with that rare
alliance between passion and intellect, which enables the former, when
deeply roused, to excite, develop and sustain the latter.

With