triumph of the good; millennial lights
beaconed up all along his horizon. In the philanthropic movements of the
day; in the efforts to remove the evils of slavery, war, intemperance,
and sanguinary laws; in the humane and generous spirit of much of our
modern poetry and literature; in the growing demand of the religious
community, of all sects, for the preaching of the gospel of love and
humanity, he heard the low and tremulous prelude of the great anthem of
universal harmony. "The world," said he, in a notice of the music of the
Hutchinson family, "is out of tune now. But it will be tuned again, and
all will become harmony." In this faith he lived and acted; working, not
always, as it seemed to some of his friends, wisely, but bravely,
truthfully, earnestly, cheering on his fellow-laborers, and imparting to
the dullest and most earthward looking of them something of his own zeal
and loftiness of purpose.

"Who was he?" does the reader ask? Naturally enough, too, for his name
has never found its way into fashionable reviews; it has never been
associated with tale, or essay, or poem, to our knowledge. Our friend
Griswold, who, like another Noah, has launched some hundreds of American
poets and prose writers on the tide of immortality in his two huge arks
of rhyme and reason, has either overlooked his name, or deemed it
unworthy of preservation. Then, too, he was known mainly as the editor
of a proscribed and everywhere-spoken-against anti-slavery paper. It had
few readers of literary taste and discrimination; plain, earnest men and
women, intent only upon the thought itself, and caring little for the
clothing of it, loved the _Herald of Freedom_ for its honestness and
earnestness, and its bold rebukes of the wrong, its all-surrendering
homage to what its editor believed to be right. But the literary world
of authors and critics saw and heard little or nothing of him or his
writings. "I once had a bit of scholar-craft," he says of himself on one
occasion, "and had I attempted it in some pitiful sectarian or party or
literary sheet, I should have stood a chance to get quoted into the
periodicals. Now, who dares quote from the _Herald of Freedom_?" He
wrote for humanity, as his biographer justly says, not for fame. "He
wrote because he had something to say, and true to nature, for to him
nature was truth; he spoke right on, with the artlessness and simplicity
of a child."

He was born in Plymouth, New Hampshi