A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.Thoreau, Henry David
History
A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-slavery and reform papers.
Thoreau, Henry David
Brown, John, 1800-1859; Québec (Province) -- Description and travel; Slavery -- United States
We had occasionally, for several years, met with a number of this
spirited journal, edited, as abolitionists need not to be informed, by
Nathaniel P. Rogers, once a counsellor at law in Plymouth, still farther
up the Merrimack, but now, in his riper years, come down the hills thus
far, to be the Herald of Freedom to these parts. We had been refreshed
not a little by the cheap cordial of his editorials, flowing like his
own mountain-torrents, now clear and sparkling, now foaming and gritty,
and always spiced with the essence of the fir and the Norway pine; but
never dark nor muddy, nor threatening with smothered murmurs, like the
rivers of the plain. The effect of one of his effusions reminds us of
what the hydropathists say about the electricity in fresh spring-water,
compared with that which has stood over night, to suit weak nerves. We
do not know of another notable and public instance of such pure,
youthful, and hearty indignation at all wrong. The Church itself must
love it, if it have any heart, though he is said to have dealt rudely
with its sanctity. His clean attachment to the right, however, sanctions
the severest rebuke we have read.
Mr. Rogers seems to us to have occupied an honorable and manly position
in these days, and in this country, making the press a living and
breathing organ to reach the hearts of men, and not merely “fine paper
and good type,” with its civil pilot sitting aft, and magnanimously
waiting for the news to arrive,—the vehicle of the earliest news, but
the _latest intelligence_,—recording the indubitable and last results,
the marriages and deaths, alone. This editor was wide awake, and
standing on the beak of his ship; not as a scientific explorer under
government, but a Yankee sealer rather, who makes those unexplored
continents his harbors in which to refit for more adventurous cruises.
He was a fund of news and freshness in himself,—had the gift of speech,
and the knack of writing; and if anything important took place in the
Granite State, we might be sure that we should hear of it in good
season. No other paper that we know kept pace so well with one forward
wave of the restless public thought and sentiment of New England, and
asserted so faithfully and ingenuously the largest liberty in all
things. There was beside more unpledged poetry in his prose than in the
verses of many an accepted rhymer; and we were occasionally advertised
by a mellow hunter’s note from his trumpet, that, unlike most reformers,
his feet were still where they should be, on the turf, and that he
looked out from a serener natural life into the turbid arena of
politics. Nor was slavery always a sombre theme with him, but invested
with the colors of his wit and fancy, and an evil to be abolished by
other means than sorrow and bitterness of complaint. He will fight this
fight with what cheer may be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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