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[314] delight. At home, he drew unfailing enjoyment from the piano, both indirectly profiting by the musical education of his children, and performing himself in a rude way with one hand, while spelling out his psalm-tunes,1 accompanying the notes with his voice as he went along. An ‘aeolian attachment’ to his daughter's instrument gave an organ effect and support which somewhat smoothed the imperfections of the exercise, while calling up the associations of church and congregation.

The reading habit of his boyhood could not be2 maintained by my father amid the unremitting cares and occupations of his life-work. The list of authors already mentioned as his early favorites cannot be greatly3 extended; but in prose, Algernon Sydney and Jonathan Dymond; in poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, Coleridge, Shelley, Montgomery (to say nothing of Whittier), should be added. About the year 1850, certain publishers began with some regularity to send books to the Liberator for review; and it is pathetic to observe the scrupulous acknowledgment of them, generally with a notice, however brief, when the readers of the paper might have grudged both the space used in this way, and the diversion from much more urgent editorial writing. The books in question were, as a rule, of a rather poor grade, on religious or reformatory topics; yet it must have been a pastime to read them under a sense of discharging one duty by way of exemption from another. The value of the criticism depended very much upon the material. That of the Life of Channing, cited above,4 will rank as a specimen of the best; the reflections suggested by the writings of Thomas Paine are in the5 same category. Very frequently the review had to be controversial.

A college education would have been likely to confirm my father's evident literary bias from the start. He made an ineffectual effort to unite literature and polemics in6 the original scheme of the Liberator, but he soon found he could do no more than make selections, and that

1 Ante, 1.30.

2 Ante, 1.42, 56.

3 Ante, 1.42.

4 Ante, 3.239.

5 Ante, 3.145.

6 Ante, 1.219.

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