Page:Poems written during the progress of the abolition question in the United States.djvu/16

viii the same thrilling correspondence of sound to sense—the same electrifying estro joined to high and powerful conceptions of moral beauty and sublimity, which have become thus strong and exalted, because the writer 'lives as a life what he apprehends as a truth.'

It is to be regretted, as a loss to American Literature, that one so highly gifted as a poet should devote so little time to poetic labors. But he may derive satisfaction from the idea, that his labors for the honor of our nation, in a far nobler sense, will ultimately give freedom and life to her literature—now withering beneath the soul-enslaving censorship of a public, who exact of an author that he shall not unreservedly name the very name of Freedom.

Alas for eloquence, poetry and piety, when the orator, yielding his soul to the management of covetousness and oppressive ambition, is compelled to check the indignant burst of soul with which, in his childhood and youth, he had learned to speak of traffic in slaves :—and when the poet and