as that white children should know their ages, while the colored
children were ignorant of theirs; and the songs of the slaves grated on
his inmost soul, because a something told him that harmony in sound, and
music of the spirit, could not consociate with miserable degradation.

To such a mind, the ordinary processes of logical deduction are like
proving that two and two make four. Mastering the intermediate steps
by an intuitive glance, or recurring to them as Ferguson resorted to
geometry, it goes down to the deeper relation of things, and brings out
what may seem, to some, mere statements, but which are new and brilliant
generalizations, each resting on a broad and stable basis. Thus, Chief
Justice Marshall gave his decisions, and then told Brother Story to look
up the authorities--and they never differed from him. Thus, also, in his
"Lecture on the Anti-Slavery Movement," delivered before the Rochester
Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, Mr. Douglass presents a mass of thought,
which, without any showy display of logic on his part, requires an
exercise of the reasoning faculties of the reader to keep pace with him.
And his "Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered," is full of new
and fresh thoughts on the dawning science of race-history.

If, as has been stated, his intellection is slow, when unexcited, it is
most prompt and rapid when he is thoroughly aroused.{17} Memory, logic,
wit, sarcasm, invective pathos and bold imagery of rare structural
beauty, well up as from a copious fountain, yet each in its proper
place, and contributing to form a whole, grand in itself, yet complete
in the minutest proportions. It is most difficult to hedge him in a
corner, for his positions are taken so deliberately, that it is rare to
find a point in them undefended aforethought. Professor Reason tells me
the following: "On a recent visit of a public nature, to Philadelphia,
and in a meeting composed mostly of his colored brethren, Mr. Douglass
proposed a comparison of views in the matters of the relations and
duties of 'our people;' he holding that prejudice was the result
of condition, and could be conquered by the efforts of the degraded
themselves. A gentleman present, distinguished for logical acumen and
subtlety, and who had devoted no small portion of the last twenty-five
years to the study and elucidation of this very question, held the
opposite view, that prejudice is innate and unconquerable. He terminated
a series of wel