“In this country where freedom of thought does not shiver at the cold shadow of Spielberg (unless we name this prison of ‘public opinion’ so), there is no danger to be apprehended from an excess of it. It is only where there is no freedom that anarchy is to be dreaded. The mere sense of freedom is of too fine and holy a nature to consist with injustice and wrong. We would fain have our journal, in some sort at least, a journal of progress, one that shall keep pace with the spirit of the age, and sometimes go near its deeper heart. Yet, while we shall aim at that gravity which is becoming of a manly literature, we shall hope also to satisfy that lighter and sprightlier element of the soul, without whose due culture the character is liable to degenerate into a morose bigotry and selfish precisianism. To be one exponent of a young spirit which shall aim at power through gentleness, the only means for its secure attainment, and in which freedom shall be attempered to love by a reverence for all beauty wherever it may exist, is our humble hope....” Here was a literary creed, expressed in no very exact formulas, and really declarative of little more than an individual purpose that the _Pioneer_ should contain good and not dull or imitative literature. A good beginning was made, for the three numbers which were published contained poems and papers by Dr. Parsons, Story, Poe, Hawthorne, Jones Very, John Neal, John S. Dwight, and the two editors. Lowell continued his studies in the Old English Dramatists, printed several poems, and wrote apparently much of the criticism, but there were no papers of a directly didactic character; it was clear that the editor relied on criticism for a medium of aggressive preaching of sound literary doctrine. Here also Lowell had his opportunity to fly the flag of anti-slavery, and he did it with a fine chivalry in a notice of Longfellow’s “Poems on Slavery,” when he used the occasion to pay glowing tribute to the earlier fighters. Garrison, “the half-inspired Luther of this reform, a man too remarkable to be appreciated in his generation, but whom the future will recognize as a great and wonderful spirit;” Whittier, “the fiery Koerner of this spiritual warfare, who, Scævola-like, has sacrificed on the altar of duty that right hand which might have made him acknowledged as the most passionate lyrist of his time;” the “tenderly-loving Maria Child, the author of that dear book, ‘Philothea,’ a woman of genius, who lives with humble content in the intellectual Coventry to which her conscientiousness has banished her--a fate the hardest for genius to bear. Nor ought the gentle spirit of Follen, a lion with a lamb’s heart, to be forgotten, whose fiery fate, from which the mind turns horror-stricken, was perhaps to his mild nature less dreadful than that stake and fagot of public opinion, in dragging him to which many whom he loved were not inactive, for silence at such times is action.”