He was his devoted worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In
his daily intercourse with him in his library during his campaigns he
had frequently met his beautiful daughter, and had fallen deeply and
madly in love with her. This secret passion he had kept hidden in his
sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as though she had been a
white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house with her was
all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and turned the
music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would live
on that scene for months, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings
he dared not express.
In his music he made his greatest success. There was a fiery sweep to
his passion, and a deep oriental rhythm in his cadence that held the
imagination of his hearers in a spell. It is needless to say it was in
this music he breathed his secret love.
At first he had not dared to hope for the day when he could declare this
secret or take his place in the list of her admirers and fight for his
chance. But of late, a great hope had filled his soul and illumined
the world. As he had listened to Lowell’s impassioned appeals for human
brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and prejudice, and
the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own
emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which
he trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow
man, his soul was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this
scholar and scientific thinker, at least, was a free man. He was sure
that he had risen above the limitations of provincialisms, racial or
national prejudices.
He had begun to dream of the day he would ask this Godlike man for the
privilege of addressing his daughter.
The great meeting at Cooper Union had brought this dream to a sudden
resolution. Lowell had outdone himself that night. With merciless
invective he had denounced the inhuman barbarism of the South in these
lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered his appeals as water the
breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence sweep back on
his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of man on
every inch of this earth’s soil.
“I demand this perfect equality,” he cried, “absolutely without
reservation or subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the
life-blood of Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. Without this
we are a living lie, a stench in the nostrils of God and humanity!”
A cheer from a thousand negro throats rent the air as he thus closed.
The crowd surged over the platform and for ten minutes it was impossible
to restore order or continue the programme. Young Harris pressed his
patron’s hand and kissed it while tears of pride and gratitude rained
down his face.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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