To Miss Anne Whitney.
Wayland, June, 1879.
I am glad you had such a pleasant evening with
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Garrison.
He has been a singularly fortunate man. Fortunate in accomplishing his purposes; fortunate in drawing around him the best spirits of his time; fortunate in having an amiable, sympathizing wife; fortunate in having excellent, devoted children, whose marriages have suited him, and who have lived in proximity to him; fortunate in having his energies developed by struggle in early life; fortunate in later years in being at ease in his worldly circumstances; and most fortunate of all in dying before his mind became weakened.
Death will be to him merely passing out of one room filled with friends into another room still more full of friends.
It is wonderful how one mortal may affect the destiny of a multitude.
I remember very distinctly the first time I ever saw Garrison.
I little thought then that the whole pattern of my life-web would be changed by that introduction.
I was then all absorbed in poetry and painting, soaring aloft on Psyche-wings into the ethereal regions of mysticism.
He got hold of the strings of my conscience and pulled me into reforms.
It is of no use to imagine what might have been, if I had never met him. Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new. But the new surroundings were all alive, and they brought a moral discipline worth ten times the sacrifice they cost.
But why use the word sacrifice?
I was never conscious of any sacrifice.
A new stimulus seized my whole being, and carried me whithersoever it would.
“I could not otherwise, so help me God!”
How the same circumstances changed the whole coloring of life for Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips!
The hour of nations' expiation had come, and men and women must needs
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obey the summons to accomplish the work through means they could not foresee. 