_A colossal statue did the Athenians raise to Aesop; and a poor pariah slave they planted upon an everlasting pedestal._ I have not scrupled to introduce the word _pariah_, because in that way only could I decipher to the reader by what particular avenue it was that the sublimity which I fancy in the passage reached my heart. This sublimity originated in the awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge, between the pollution of slavery,--the being a man, yet without right or lawful power belonging to a man,--between this unutterable degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when, upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man, the cymbals and kettledrums of kings as drowning the whispers of his ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet joining in one choral gratulation to the regenerated slave. I assign the elements of what I did in reality feel at that time, which to the reader may seem extravagant, and by no means of what it was reasonable to feel. But, in order that full justice may be done to my childish self, I must point out to the reader another source of what strikes me as real grandeur. Horace, that exquisite master of the lyre, and that most shallow of critics, it is needless to say that in those days I had not read. Consequently I knew nothing of his idle canon, that the opening of poems must be humble and subdued. But my own sensibility told me how much of additional grandeur accrued to these two lines as being the immediate and all-pompous _opening_ of the poem. The same feeling I had received from the crashing overture to the grand chapter of Daniel--"Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords." But, above all, I felt this effect produced in the two opening lines of "Macbeth:"-- "WHEN--(but watch that an emphasis of thunder dwells upon that word 'when')-- WHEN shall we three meet again-- In thunder, lightning, or in rain?" What an orchestral crash bursts upon the ear in that all-shattering question! And one syllable of apologetic preparation, so as to meet the suggestion of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating the whole tremendous alarum. The passage in Phaedrus differs thus far from that in "Macbeth," that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word _ingentem_, and to the antithesis between the two parties so enormously divided,--Aesop the slave and the Athenians,--must be read as an _appoggiatura_, or hurried note of introduction flying forward as if on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the second line--"Servumque collocârunt ETERNA IN BASI." This passage from Phaedrus, which might be briefly designated _The Apotheosis of the Slave_, gave to me my first grand and jubilant sense of the moral sublime.