Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/405

 STEPHEN SYMONDS FOSTER. 369

are not half developed, and the prophet of the future htts creuied upon ine foundations of the present, a greater monument than the present has upbuilded from the past.

Three generations have come, and are scattered, and the fourth is with us, since the birth of the John's river industries ; and yet, some of the gray-haired relics of the old time remain, still adding to the monumental pile their own hands have helped to rear ; and they are volumes of ancient history. Any day, upon Whitefield's village street, you may meet one of the venerable " order of the silver hair," and he will talk to you as familiarly of 1805, as if it were of the last town-meeting day, and he will put the wilderness almost all back upon these cleared fields for you, and give you a narrative of the rise and progress of the Cohos since 1815. None of your feeble folk is " The Col.," " tremulous and lean," but with frosty and ruddy face he meets the sun at his rising, goes forth to the field with more years counted upon his whitened head than the nineteenth century can boast, and sunset only calls him home, and then he will talk politics with you until bed-time. But for most of "ye olden time folk" you must search in the sacred corner yonder, where their records are written on marble slabs.

Amid all the changes which time has wrought, our restless river still glides along, singing the song of its noontide birth up among the rocky passes, all un- caring whether the Indian roams its banks, or the white man dams its waters ; whether it be called by the " Ah-na-wand-ok," of the wild days of ^\^on-a-lan- cet, the "Stark's River " of the scouting times of the rangers, or the John's stream of "these later years."

��STEPHEN SYMONDS FOSTER.

��BY PARKER PILLSBURV.

A BECOMING biography of him whose name stands at the head of this paper must be almost a complete history of the anti-slavery enterprise.

But such an article might not seem appropriate to the Granite Monthlv, so eminendy a New Hampshire institution ; while slavery was ever held as belong- ing preeminently to the South.

But Stephen Foster was of New Hampshire. And long before slavery was abolished, or had appealed to the arbitrament of war as a Forlorn Hope, he had seen and demonstrated that his native state had profounder interests in it than any of its wisest sages, statesmen, clergymen, or churchmen, had ever dreamed.

Though among the least of her sister states, the war of the Rebellion drew away from her noblest, bravest, strongest sons, more than thirty thousand ; and over four thousand perished in battle, or by disease and exposure inseparable from war, so often more dreadful than death at the cannon's mouth ! All this, not to speak of other thousands who escaped death, but pruned of limbs, plucked of eyes, and scarred and disabled for life by the iron hail-stones of the bloody field. All this, not counting the sighs and tears, bereavements and losses of mothers, sisters, widows and orphans. All this, not reckoning finan- cial, moral, nor spiritual impoverishment and desolation, not to be restored, even by the incoming generation !

And so slavery became a New Hampshire institution after all ; and Stephen Foster, being native to the state, and super-eminently an anti-slavery man, and of intellectual and moral gifts and graces of which any state might be proud.

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