Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[83] opposite accounts of the case would be startling, but then G. believes them both equally, which arranges the affair satisfactorily.¹

It is a thousand pities that New Organization is not to do over again, for besides Garrison's heresies about Non-Resistance, Church, Sabbath, Ministry, Perfectionism, and Thomsonianism (do you know what that is?)—which last Phelps industriously² bruited about to disgust the country doctors, an influential class with us—they would now have homoeopathy, hydropathy, and animal magnetism to add to the list. The rest of us, however,³ are inclined to hope that Dr. Warren knows as much about the matter as any of these new lights, and that Garrison may get over it.

He is now at Northampton, with Geo. Benson, his wife's brother, at a Community to which Prof. Adam belongs. He⁴ went there for rest, and the way he rests himself is to lecture⁵ every night in the neighboring towns, and on Sundays in Northampton in the open air! D. L. Child, however, who took Boston in his way to New York to take the Standard, reports that he⁶ looks well and seems well, with the exception of his enemy in the chest. He is also engaged, or is to be, in making selections⁷ for the volume of his works. I hope he will have grace to select the best and to omit the mediocre. Literary taste, however, is not his forte. I wish he had left the selections to Mrs. Chapman. When Caroline Weston expressed her regrets that certain things were inserted in the volume of his poems by Johnson, he⁸ replied, with a smile, ‘Ah, you know there are all sorts of tastes in the world.’ To which she answered, that was true enough; but when a man was collecting his writings in a permanent form, that there was but one kind of taste to be consulted, and that was the best.⁹

The Northampton Community had chosen a beautiful site on Mill River, some two or three miles from the town, in the suburb now known as Florence and as a