Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/116

Rh length he lays him down to sleep, and, I suppose, such dreams as haunt such heads. But when he wakes next mom, all the winds of indignation, wrath, and honest scorn, are let loose. Before night, they are blowing all over this commonwealth—ay, before another night they have gone to the Mississippi, and wherever the lightning messenger can tell the tale. So have I read in an old mediaeval legend, that one summer afternoon there came up a "shape, all hot from Tartarus," from hell below, but garmented and garbed to represent a civil-suited man, masked with humanity. He walked quiet and decorous through Milan's stately streets, and scattered from his hand an invisible dust. It touched the walls ; it lay on the streets; it ascended to the cross on the minster's utmost top. It went down to the beggar's den. Peacefully he walked through the streets, vanished and went home. But the nezt morning, the pestilence was in Milan, and ere a week had sped half her population were in their graves; and half the other half, crying that hell was clutching at their hearts, fled from the reeking City of the Plague!

Why did the Commissioner do all this P He knew the consequences that must follow. He knew what Boston was. We have no monument to Hancock and Adams; but still we keep their graves; and Boston, the dear old mother that bore them, yet in her bosom hides the honoured bones of men whom armies could not terrify, nor England bribe. Their spirit only sleeps. Tread roughly, tread roughly on the spot—their spirit rises from the ground I He knew that here were men who never will be silent when wrong is done. He knew Massachusetts; he knew Boston; he knew that the Fugitive Slave Bill had only raked the ashes over fires which were burning still, and that a breath might scatter those ashes to the winds of heaven, and bid the slumbering embers flame. Had he determined already what should happen to Anthony Burns? He knew what had befallen Thomas Sims. Did he wish another inhabitant of Boston whipped to death? I have studied the records of crime— it is a part of my ministry. I do not find that any college professor has ever been hanged for murder in all the Anglo-Saxon