Though such a mode of emancipation is totally abhorrent to my feelings, and though I would earnestly deprecate any attempt at insurrection on the part of our slave population, yet I confess to the weakness of being so far human in my feelings as to sympathize deeply with these unhappy beings who have been thwarted in their endeavor to convert themselves from chattels into men by the peaceful method of simply changing their geographical position. Under these feelings, and believing you to be a man with sufficient confidence in the justness of your own opinions not to fear to publish sentiments which may chance to go beyond or even directly contravene your own, I wrote the following lines.” There is a prophetic ring to the verses which indicates how surely Lowell’s poetic spirit had absorbed the underlying truth of abolitionism. The poem is far less declamatory, more profoundly indignant than the Texas verses which he had printed in the same paper. The intimation which he gave in his prefatory note, that his sentiment might be unacceptable even to so hearty and honest a hater of slavery as Mr. Buckingham, plainly points to the doubt expressed whether a higher allegiance might not demand a revolt from the constitution and union if they were found to be the impregnable defence of slavery,--a doubt which was already certainty in the minds of the most radical of the abolitionists; but the stage of doubt was as far as Lowell ever went, and this may be taken as the utmost expression which he ever reached.[50] The poem was vigorous enough to make an impression, and successive numbers of the _Courier_ show two long-winded writers knocking away at the spectre of Dissolution which the poem had raised.[51] Although the summer of 1845 does not seem to have yielded much in the way of verse or prose, Lowell had quite definitely taken ground as a man of letters. There was no more talk of the law, and he even dropped lines of correspondence which had marked his old carelessness of occupation. “You hint in your last letter,” he wrote to E. M. Davis in October, that it must be very easy for me to write, because writing is my profession, while in truth this is precisely what makes it hard. You must recollect that it is vacation time with me when the pen is out of my hand. Before I became an author I used to write multitudes of letters to my friends. Then, wherever I set my foot, thoughts rose up before me short winged and chirping as the flights of grasshoppers which spring from the path of one who walks in September stubble-fields. The post-office was my safety-valve, which eased me in a trice of all my too explosive thoughts, humors, and moods. Now my thoughts take a higher and wider flight, and are not so easily followed and defined by the eye. I confess that my opinions seem to me of less importance.”[52]