Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/23



mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature, and sung her sweetest songs. Her greatest destiny—unsensed and despised though it be,—is to give back to the first of continents the gifts which Africa of old gave to America's fathers' fathers.

Of all inspiration which America owes to Africa, however, the greatest by far is the score of heroic, men whom the sorrows of these dark children called to unselfish devotion and heroic self-realization: Benezet, Garrison and Harriet Stowe; Sumner, Douglass and Lincoln—these and others, but above all, John Brown.

John Brown was a stalwart, rough-hewn man, mightily yet tenderly carven. To his making went the stern justice of a Cromwellian "Ironside," the freedom-loving fire of a Welsh Celt, and the thrift