My address is not quite completed, but nearly so. It is simply a serious, straightforward anti-slavery arraignment of the guilt of the nation, and showing why the present national visitation has come upon us. I have written it without a metaphor, or a single flight of the imagination, or anything to relieve its sombre aspect. To old abolitionists it would be trite, but to the mass of my audience it will, perhaps, be ‘as good as new.’ . . . One gets weary, however, in the constant affirmation of these moral truisms, which would seem to be as plain to every mind as the midday sun is to the vision. Ms.
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Mass., and delivered an address before the Adelphic Union1 Society of Williams College, which had extended the first invitation of the kind ever received by him. “My ‘college oration’ is almost completed,” Ms. he wrote to Oliver Johnson, on July 31, “and will be entirely so to-day.
I have written it out in full, as you and McKim advised, and so I feel great relief in knowing certainly what I am going to say. But, oh!
the bondage and drawback of reading it, as though I had never seen it before!—for I cannot remember two sentences consecutively.
Such confinement in delivery will be extremely irksome to me, and, I fear, tedious to the audience; but I am ‘in for it,’ and must do the best I can.”
J. M. McKim. To his son Wendell he wrote, on Aug. 1:
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