Page:Narrative of Henry Box Brown.pdf/10

 the lion seizes the kid cast into its den, "You are already mine," and was about to wrap its sable mantle around the form of our self-martyred hero — bound fast upon the altars of freedom, as the Hindoo widow is bound upon the altar of a husband's love; when the bright angel of liberty, whose dazzling form he had so long and so anxiously watched, as he pored over the scheme hid in the recesses of his own fearless brain, while yet a slave, and whose shining eyes had bewitched his soul, until he had said in the language of one of old to Jesus, "I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest;" when this blessed goddess stood at his side, and, as Jesus said to one lying cold in death's embrace, "I say unto thee, arise," said to him, as she took him by the hand and lifted him from his travelling tomb, "thy warfare is over, thy work is accomplished, a free man art thou, my guidance has availed thee, arise and breathe the air of freedom."

Did Lazarus astonish his weeping sisters, and the surrounding multitude, as he emerged from his house of elay, cladin the habiliments of the grave, and did joy unfeigned spread throughout that gazing throng? How much more astonishing seemed the birth of Mr. Brown, as he "came forth" from a box, clothed not in the habiliments of the grave, but in those of slavery, worse than the "silent house of death," as his acts had testified; and what greater joy thrilled through the wondering witnesses, as the lid was removed from the travelling carriage of our friend's electing, and straightway arose therefrom a living man, a being made in God's own image, a son of Jehovah, whom the piety and republicanism of this nation had doomed to pass through this terrible ordeal, before the wand of the goddess of liberty could complete his transformation from a slave to a free man! But we will desist from further comments, Here is the plain narrative of our friend, and is it asking too much of you, whose sympathies may be aroused by