The best poets of America, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, were in full sympathy with this cause, and their best poetry was their songs for freedom. Shall we ever forget the caustic humor of "Hosea Biglow" and "Birdofredum Sawin"? And how lofty a flight of inspiration did the same bard take, when he chanted in verses nobler, as it seems to us, than anything since Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality," the Return of the Heroes who had wrought salvation for the dear land "bright beyond compare" among the nations! What heroism, what tenderness, what stern rebuke, what noble satire, have attended every event in this long struggle, from the lyre of Whittier! Nothing in Campbell excels the ring of some of his trumpet-calls, nothing in Cowper the pathos of his elegies over the martyrs of freedom. The best men and the best women were always to be found at the meetings of the Antislavery Society. There were to be seen such upright lawyers as Ellis Gray Loring and Samuel E. Sewall and John A. Andrew, such eminent writers as Emerson, such great preachers as Theodore Parker and Beecher, such editors as Bryant and Greeley. To this cause did William Ellery Channing devote his last years and best thoughts. If the churches as organizations stood aloof, being only "timidly good," as organizations are apt to be, the purest of their body were sure to be found in this great company of latter-day saints. Antislavery men had their faults. They were often unjust to their opponents, though unintentionally so. They were sometimes narrow and bitter; and with them, as with all very earnest people, any difference of opinion as to methods seemed to involve moral obliquity. But they were doing the great work of the age,--the most necessary work of all,--and much might be pardoned to their passionate love of justice and humanity. In their meetings could be heard many of the ablest speakers of the time, and one, the best of all. He held the silver bow of Apollo, and dreadful was its clangor when he launched its shafts against spiritual wickedness in high places. Those deadly arrows were sometimes misdirected, and occasionally they struck the good men who were meaning to do their duty. Such errors, we suppose, are incident to all who are speaking and acting in such terrible earnest; in the great day of accounts many mistakes will have to be rectified. But surely among the goodly company of apostles and prophets, and in the noble army of martyrs there assembled, few will be found more free from the sins of selfish interest and personal ambition than those who in Congress, in the pulpit, on the platform, or with the pen, fought the great battle of American freedom.