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

[423] More than we hoped in that dark time
     When, faint with watching, few and worn,
We saw no welcome day-star climb
     The cold gray pathway of the morn!

O weary hours! O night of years!
     What storms our darkling pathway swept,
Where, beating back our thronging fears,
     By Faith alone our march we kept.

How jeered the scoffing crowd behind,
     How mocked before the tyrant train,
As, one by one, the true and kind
     Fell fainting in our path of pain!

They died,—their brave hearts breaking slow,—
     But, self-forgetful to the last,
In words of cheer and bugle blow
     Their breath upon the darkness passed.

A mighty host, on either hand,
     Stood waiting for the dawn of day
To crush like reeds our feeble band;
     The morn has come,—and where are they?

Where indeed were they? Otis, as Wendell Phillips¹ remarked, was gone. The editor who stirred up ‘the² Atlas mob,’ was gone. Mayor Lyman was in his grave; so was the judge before whom Garrison was arraigned as³ a rioter; so was the sheriff who had committed him to jail on that charge. And in the broader field of contest, what haughty leaders of the pro-slavery phalanx had passed away! Filled with this retrospect, and naturally assuming the historical-biographical part of the appointed exercises, no wonder that Mr. Garrison spoke with good cheer of the contrast between 1835 and 1855, and found ‘all the signs of the times encouraging,’ though admitting⁴ that ‘more than a million slaves are to be delivered who were not in existence twenty years ago.’ We shall seek in vain in his speech any prescience or intimation of the impending Civil War. As little will it be found in those