Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/179

Rh in the morning, but we slept none. He seemed to be as little disposed to sleep as I was, and we talked; or rather he did, for I said little. I found that he was a thorough astronomer; he pointed out the different constellations and their movements. 'Now,' he said, 'it is midnight,' as he pointed to the finger-marks of his great clock in the sky. The whispering of the wind on the prairie was full of voices to him, and the stars as they shone in the firmament of God seemed to inspire him. 'How admirable is the symmetry of the heaven; how grand and beautiful! Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God. Not so with us poor creatures. If one star is more brilliant than others, it is continually shooting in some erratic way into space.'

"He criticized both parties in Kansas. Of the pro-slavery men he said that slavery besotted everything, and made men more brutal and coarse—nor did the free state men escape his sharp censure. He said that we had many noble and true men, but too many broken-down politicians from the older states, who would rather pass resolutions than act, and who criticized all who did real work. A professional politician, he went on, you never could trust; for even if he had convictions, he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage. One of the most interesting things in his conversation that night, and one that marked him as a theorist, was his treatment of our forms of social and political life. He thought that society ought