difficulty of travel was ever able to deter him from doing what his
humanity had bidden him do. From place to place, through nineteen
States, he had traveled, sowing as he went the seeds of his holy
purpose, and watering them with his life's blood. Not Livingstone nor
Stanley on the dark continent exceeded in sheer physical exertion and
endurance the labors of this wonderful man. He belongs in the category
of great explorers, only the irresistible passion and purpose, which
pushed him forward, had humanity, not geography, as their goal. Where,
in the lives of either Stanley or Livingstone do we find a record of
more astonishing activity and achievement than what is contained in
these sentences, written by Garrison of Lundy, in the winter of 1828?
"Within a few months he has traveled about twenty-four hundred miles, of
which upwards of nineteen hundred were performed _on foot!_ during which
time he has held nearly fifty public meetings. Rivers and mountains
vanish in his path; midnight finds him wending his solitary way over an
unfrequented road; the sun is anticipated in his rising. Never was moral
sublimity of character better illustrated." Such was the marvelous man,
whose visit to Boston, in the month of March, of the year 1828, dates
the beginning of a new epoch in the history of America. The event of
that year was not the "Bill of Abominations," great as was the national
excitement which it produced; nor was it yet the then impending
political struggle between Jackson and Adams, but the unnoticed meeting
of Lundy and Garrison. Great historic movements are born not in the
whirlwinds, the earthquakes, and the pomps of human splendor and power,
but in the agonies and enthusiasms of grand, heroic spirits. Up to this
time Garrison had had, as the religious revivalist would say, no
"realizing sense" of the enormity of slave-holding. Occasionally an
utterance had dropped from his pen which indicated that his heart was
right on the subject, but which evinced no more than the ordinary
opposition to its existence, nor any profound convictions as to his own