Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/104

96 of Gideon, which was his later reliance. But it was not the "will of Providence" as we have seen, that Brown should then settle in Virginia, since his increasing financial straits and final bankruptcy overthrew all plans of purchasing the one thousand acres for which he had already bargained.

The slough of despond through which John Brown passed in the succeeding years, from 1842 to 1846, was never fully betrayed by this stern, self-repressing Puritan. Yet the loss of a fortune and the shattering of a dream, the bankruptcy and imprisonment, and the death of five children, while around him whirled the struggle of the churches with slavery and Abolition mobs, all dropped a sombre brooding veil of stern inexorable fate over his spirit—a veil which never lifted. The dark mysterious tragedy of life gripped him with awful intensity—the iron entered his soul. He became sterner and more silent. He brooded and listened for the voice of the avenging God, and girded up his loins in readiness.

"My husband always believed," said his wife in after years, "that he was to be an instrument in the hands of Providence, and I believed it too. . . . Many a night he had lain awake and prayed concerning it."

It began to dawn upon him that he had sinned in the selfish pursuit of petty ends: that he must be about his Father's business of giving the death-blow to that "sum of all villanies—slavery." He