But to speak of his composition. It is a genuine Yankee style, without fiction,—real guessing and calculating to some purpose, and reminds us occasionally, as does all free, brave, and original writing, of its great master in these days, Thomas Carlyle. It has a life above grammar, and a meaning which need not be parsed to be understood. But like those same mountain-torrents, there is rather too much slope to his channel, and the rainbow sprays and evaporations go double-quick-time to heaven, while the body of his water falls headlong to the plain. We would have more pause and deliberation, occasionally, if only to bring his tide to a head,—more frequent expansions of the stream,—still, bottomless, mountain tarns, perchance inland seas, and at length the deep ocean itself. Some extracts will show in what sense he was a poet as well as a reformer. He thus raises the anti-slavery “war-whoop” in New Hampshire, when an important convention is to be held, sending the summons,— “To none but the whole-hearted, fully-committed, cross-the-Rubicon spirits.... From rich ‘old Cheshire,’ from Rockingham, with her horizon setting down away to the salt sea ... from where the sun sets behind Kearsarge, even to where he rises gloriously over _Moses Norris’s_ own town of _Pittsfield_,—and from Amoskeag to Ragged Mountains,—Coos—Upper Coos, home of the everlasting hills,—send out your bold advocates of human rights, wherever they lay, scattered by lonely lake, or Indian stream, or ‘Grant’ or ‘Location,’ from the trout-haunted brooks of the Amoriscoggin, and where the adventurous streamlet takes up its mountain march for the St. Lawrence. “Scattered and insulated men, wherever the light of philanthropy and liberty has beamed in upon your solitary spirits, come down to us like your streams and clouds; and our own Grafton, all about among your dear hills, and your mountain-flanked valleys,—whether you _home_ along the swift Ammonoosuck, the cold Pemigewassett, or the ox-bowed Connecticut.... “We are slow, brethren, dishonorably slow, in a cause like ours. Our feet should be as ‘hinds’ feet.’ ‘Liberty lies bleeding.’ The leaden-colored wing of slavery obscures the land with its baleful shadow. Let us come together, and inquire at the hand of the Lord, what is to be done.” And again; on occasion of a New England Convention, in the Second-Advent Tabernacle, in Boston, he desires to try one more blast, as it were, “on Fabyan’s White Mountain horn.”