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health, and wholly expressive of purity, animation, and gentleness.
I did not now wonder at the citizen who, seeing a print of Garrison at a shop window without a name to it, went in and1 bought it, and framed it as the most saintlike of countenances.
The end of the story is, that when the citizen found whose portrait he had been hanging up in his parlor, he took the print out of the frame and huddled it away.
Garrison has a good deal of a Quaker air; and his speech is deliberate like a Quaker's, but gentle as a woman's. The only thing that I did not like was his excessive agitation when he came in, and his thanks to me for desiring to meet one so odious' as himself.
I was, however, as I told him, nearly as odious as himself at that time; so it was fit that we should be acquainted.
On mentioning afterward to his introducer my impression of something like a want of manliness in Garrison's agitation, he replied that I could not know what it was to be an object of insult and hatred to the whole of society for a series of years; that Garrison could bear what he met with from street to street, and from town to town; but that a kind look and shake of the hand from a stranger unmanned him for the moment.
How little did the great man know our feelings towards him on our meeting; how we, who had done next to nothing, were looking up to him who is achieving the work of an age, and, as a stimulus, that of a nation!2
His conversation was more about peace principles than the great subject.
It was of the most practical cast.
Every conversation I had with him confirmed my opinion that sagacity is the most striking attribute of his conversation.
It has none of the severity, the harshness, the bad taste of his writing; it is as gladsome as his countenance, and as gentle as his voice.
Through the whole of his deportment breathes the evidence of a heart at ease; and this it is, I think, more than all his distinct claims, which attaches his personal friends to him with an almost idolatrous affection.
Miss Martineau's narrative has already slipt away from the first meeting and first impressions, but it is as well to dispose here of what follows, or most of it:
I do not pretend to like or to approve the tone of Garrison's3 printed censures.
I could not use such language myself towards
