e world to
a higher level, some mighty change for which the ages have waited in
anxious expectancy, takes place before our eyes, and, in seeking to trace
it back to its origin, we are often surprised to find the initial link in
the chain of causes to be some comparatively obscure individual, the
divine commission and significance of whose life were scarcely understood
by his contemporaries, and perhaps not even by himself. The little one
has become a thousand; the handful of corn shakes like Lebanon. "The
kingdom of God cometh not by observation;" and the only solution of the
mystery is in the reflection that through the humble instrumentality
Divine power was manifested, and that the Everlasting Arm was beneath the
human one.

The abolition of human slavery now in process of consummation throughout
the world furnishes one of the most striking illustrations of this truth.
A far-reaching moral, social, and political revolution, undoing the evil
work of centuries, unquestionably owes much of its original impulse to
the life and labors of a poor, unlearned workingman of New Jersey, whose
very existence was scarcely known beyond the narrow circle of his
religious society.

It is only within a comparatively recent period that the journal and
ethical essays of this remarkable man have attracted the attention to
which they are manifestly entitled. In one of my last interviews with
William Ellery Channing, he expressed his very great surprise that they
were so little known. He had himself just read the book for the first
time, and I shall never forget how his countenance lighted up as he
pronounced it beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography in
the language. He wished to see it placed within the reach of all classes
of readers; it was not a light to be hidden under the bushel of a sect.
Charles Lamb, probably from his friends, the Clarksons, or from Bernard
Barton, became acquainted with it, and on more than one occasion, in his
letters and Essays of Elia, refers to it with warm commendation. Edward
Irving pronounced it a godsend. Some idea of the lively interest which
the fine literary circle gathered around the hearth of Lamb felt in the
beautiful simplicity of Woolman's pages may be had from the Diary of
Henry Crabb Robinson, one of their number, himself a man of wide and
varied culture, the intimate friend of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.
In his notes for First Month, 1824, he says, after a refer