Part 24

Hope and Confidence.

O! What a strange thing is the human heart! With its youth, and its joy and fear! It doats upon creatures that day-dreams impart,-- Full sorely it grieves when their beauties depart, And weeps bitter tears over their bier.

The veriest gleamings that dart into birth, Reveal to its being of light: The dimliest shadows that flit upon earth, Allure it, with promise of pleasure and mirth In a country, where never is night.

It leaves the sure things of its own real home, To pursue the mere phantoms of thought! Well knowing, that certain, there soon must come, An end to the visions, that so gladsome, It bewilder'd, has eagerly sought.

It fleeth the wholesome prose of life, With its riches all sure and told: And scorning the beauties, that calmly in strife Truth fashions, it longs for the things all rife With glitter, and color, and gold.

It buildeth its home 'neath an ever calm sky, Near streams wherein crown-jewels sleep,-- And there it reposeth: while soothingly nigh, Some loved one, perchance, doth most wooingly sigh, As the zephyrs all full-laden creep.

Thus it musingly wasteth its strength, in dreams Of bliss, that can never prove true: And ever it revels amid what seems, A paradise smiling with Hope's warm beams, And flowers all spangled with dew.

But, even as flowers are broken and fade, And yield up their perfumes--their souls,-- So vanish the colors of which dreams are made,-- So perish the structures on which Hope is staid, And the treasures to which the heart holds.

In vain does it follow the wandering forms That promise, yet always recede:-- Too briefly the sunshine is darken'd by storms: Hope minstrels it onward, yet never informs Of the dangers unseen, that impede.

The Heart trusts the outward: "Of man 'tis the whole." Thus Confidence clings to decay! It feels the sweet homage that riches control,-- And laughs in contempt at the wealth of the soul: And behold! now, friends wait for their prey.

It trusteth in glory, and beauty, and youth,-- In love-vows that ne'er are to die: But soon the Death-king, in whose heart is no ruth, Enfolds it,--and mounting aloft, of Truth Thus sings, as turns glassy the eye.

"There's nothing so lovely and bright below, As the shapes of the purified mind! Nought surer to which the weak heart can grow, On which it can rest, as it onward doth go, Than that Truth which its own tendrils bind.

"Yes! Truth opes within a pure sun-tide of bliss, And shows in its ever calm flood, A transcript of regions, where no darkness is, Where HOPE its conceptions may realize, And CONFIDENCE sleep in 'The Good.'"

A Letter that Speaks for Itself.

To T---- M----.

Disinterested benevolence, my dear sir, has nothing at all to do with abolitionism. Nay, I doubt very much if there is such a thing as disinterested benevolence; but be this as it may, there is no occasion for it in the anti-slavery ranks.

It is selfishness,--sheer selfishness, that has thus far carried on the war with slavery and wrong in all times; and selfishness must break the chains of the American slave.

Self-love has fixed the chain around the arm of every leader and every soldier in the American anti-slavery army. Where would William Lloyd Garrison have been to-day, if any combination of circumstances could have shut in his soul's deep hatred of oppression, and prevented its finding utterance in burning words? He would have been dead and rotten. It is necessary to his own existence that he should work,--work for the slave; and in his work he gratifies all the strongest instincts of his nature, more completely than even the grossest sensualist can gratify his, by unlimited indulgence.

Gerritt Smith, too. Suppose he was compelled to hoard his princely fortune, or spend it as most others do! O dear! what a dyspeptic we should have in six months; and all the hydropathic institutes in the country could never keep him alive five years.

John P. Hale would soon be done with his rotund person and jovial face, if he could no longer send the sharp arrows of his wit and sarcasm into the consciences of his human-whipping neighbors.

It is a necessity of all great nations to hate meanness, and nothing under God's heaven ever was so mean as American slavery. Think of it. Men who swagger around with pistols and bowie-knifes to avenge their insulted honor, if any one should question it,--imagine one turning up his sleeves to horsewhip an old woman for burning his steak, or pocketing her wages, earned at the wash-tub!

No one with a soul above that of a pig-louse, could help loathing the system, the instant he saw it in its native meanness. Then, in order to keep his own self-respect,--to gratify the love of the good and true in his own soul, he must express that loathing.

No disinterestedness about doing right, for nobody can be so much interested in the act as the doer of it.

Wrong-doing is the only possible self-abnegation, of which the whole range of thought admits.

All the humiliation and agony of the Saviour himself, were necessary to himself. Nothing less could have expressed the infinite love of the Divine nature; and in working out a most perfect righteousness for those he loved, he also wrought out a most perfect happiness for himself.

The eternal law of God links the happiness of all the creatures made in His image in an electric chain, united in the Divine love; and He, who has "a fellow-feeling for our infirmities," has given us a fellow-feeling with the sufferings of each other. So that no soul in which the Divine image is not totally obscured, can know of the misery of another, without a sympathetic throb of sorrow.

The true heart in Maine cannot know that the slave-mother in Georgia is weeping for her children, torn from her arms by avarice, without feeling her anguish palpitating in its inmost core.

It is the pulsations of the sympathetic heart which stretches out the hand to interfere between her and her aggressor; and abolitionists are just seeking a soft pillow that they may "sleep o' nights."