Old Portraits and Modern Sketches: Part 1 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf
History
Old Portraits and Modern Sketches: Part 1 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Biography
expressions of sorrow at the loss of a great and true man. The
Democracy, through all its organs, hastened to canonize him as one of the
saints of its calendar. The general committee, in New York, expunged
their resolutions of censure. The Democratic Review, at that period the
most respectable mouthpiece of the democratic party, made him the subject
of exalted eulogy. His early friend and co-editor, William Cullen
Bryant, laid upon his grave the following tribute, alike beautiful and
true:--
"The earth may ring, from shore to shore,
With echoes of a glorious name,
But he whose loss our tears deplore
Has left behind him more than fame.
"For when the death-frost came to lie
On Leggett's warm and mighty heart,
And quenched his bold and friendly eye,
His spirit did not all depart.
"The words of fire that from his pen
He flung upon the lucid page
Still move, still shake the hearts of men,
Amid a cold and coward age.
"His love of Truth, too warm, too strong,
For Hope or Fear to chain or chill,
His hate of tyranny and wrong,
Burn in the breasts they kindled still."
So lived and died William Leggett. What a rebuke of party perfidy, of
political meanness, of the common arts and stratagems of demagogues,
comes up from his grave! How the cheek of mercenary selfishness crimsons
at the thought of his incorruptible integrity! How heartless and hollow
pretenders, who offer lip service to freedom, while they give their hands
to whatever work their slaveholding managers may assign them; who sit in
chains round the crib of governmental patronage, putting on the spaniel,
and putting off the man, and making their whole lives a miserable lie,
shrink back from a contrast with the proud and austere dignity of his
character! What a comment on their own condition is the memory of a man
who could calmly endure the loss of party favor, the reproaches of his
friends, the malignant assaults of his enemies, and the fretting evils of
poverty, in the hope of bequeathing, like the dying testator of Ford,
"A fame by scandal untouched,
To Memory and Time's old daughter, Truth."
The praises which such men are now constrained to bestow upon him are
their own condemnation. Every stone which they pile upon his grave is
written over with the record of their hypocrisy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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