But in this narrative the scenes of the plantation rise before us, with
a distinctness which approaches reality. We hear the sound of the horn
at daybreak, calling the sick and the weary to toil unrequited. Woman,
in her appealing delicacy and suffering, about to become a mother, is
fainting under the lash, or sinking exhausted beside her cotton row. We
hear the prayer for mercy answered with sneers and curses. We look on
the instruments of torture, and the corpses of murdered men. We see the
dogs, reeking hot from the chase, with their jaws foul with human blood.
We see the meek and aged Christian scarred with the lash, and bowed down
with toil, offering the supplication of a broken heart to his Father in
Heaven, for the forgiveness of his brutal enemy. We hear, and from our
inmost hearts repeat the affecting interrogatory of the aged slave,
_"How long, Oh Lord! how long!"_

The editor has written out the details of this painful narrative with
feelings of sorrow. If there be any who feel a morbid satisfaction in
dwelling upon the history of outrage and cruelty, he at least is not one
of them. His taste and habits incline him rather to look to the pure and
beautiful in our nature--the sunniest side of humanity--its kindly
sympathies--its holy affections--its charities and its love. But, it is
because he has seen that all which is thus beautiful and excellent in
mind and heart, perishes in the atmosphere of slavery: it is because
humanity in the slave sinks down to a level with the brute and in the
master gives place to the attributes of a fiend--that he has not felt at
liberty to decline the task. He cannot sympathize with that abstract and
delicate philanthropy, which hesitates to bring itself in contact with
the sufferer, and which shrinks from the effort of searching out the
extent of his afflictions. The emblem of Practical Philanthropy is the
Samaritan stooping over the wounded Jew. It must be no fastidious hand
which administers the oil and the wine, and binds up the