Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

[315] neither freshly nor systematically. His poetical talent had a better chance for expression, but it too was conditioned by the reformer's needs, and took on a quite different development from what might have been the case had the higher education, pecuniary ease, and leisure for letters been his. The total product was considerable in amount, the lyrical portion being relatively small, though it could boast some successes as being singable and often¹ sung. A lack of imagination is perceptible here, among other limitations; and nearly every piece bore the stamp of the moralist. The sonnet proved attractive above all other forms of verses, suiting well my father's habit of condensation.² Some of this variety found immediate recognition. The sonnet on ‘The Free Mind,’ composed in³ Baltimore jail, was reprinted in at least two literary collections, one being “The Boston Book” (Boston: Geo. W. Light, 1841, p. 272), the other as thus related by the Rev. Jacob M. Manning, who called it ‘the immortal sonnet.’ ‘It may not be uninteresting to you to know,’ he wrote to my father in 1860, ‘that the circumstance⁴ which first settled me in my abhorrence of slavery, was learning and declaiming, while a school-boy in Western New York, a sonnet entitled The Free Mind, written by you while in a Southern prison. I found the piece in Dr.⁵ Cheever's “Commonplace Book of poetry.” ’

This sonnet maintains its place in the anthologies of more recent years—either alone, as in “The Cambridge Book of poetry and song” (New York, 1882), or with other examples, as in the “Library of religious poetry” (New York, 1885), and in “Harper's Cyclopaedia of British and American Poetry” (New York, 1881). To the numerous collections of this sort which my father owned and enjoyed reading, he purposed adding one of his own,