gruesome elevation of the head of one of his patriotic heroes on
Temple Bar, 'It didn't matter: he had quite done with it.' And
we might say the same of the body which was hanged at Charlestown
in 1859. In his devoutly fatalistic way John Brown had presented
his body a living sacrifice to the cause of human freedom, and
had at last slowly reached the settled opinion that it was worth
more to the cause dead than alive. Such a soul, so masterful in
its treatment of the body, was likely to march on without it.
And it did in the years that followed, This Abolitionist raider,
with a rashness often sublime in its devotion, precipitated the
national crisis which issued in the Civil War and Emancipation.

There are lives of brave men which set us thinking for the most
part of human power and skill: we watch bold initiators of some
wise policy carrying their enterprise through with indomitable
courage and in-exhaustible patience, and we are lost in
admiration of the hero. But there are other brave lives which
leave us thinking more of unseen forces which impelled them than
of their own splendid qualities. They never seem masters of
destiny, but its intrepid servants. They shape events while they
hardly know how or why; they seem to be rather driven by fate
than to be seeking fame or power. They go out like Abraham, 'not
knowing whither they go,' only that, like him, they have heard a
call. Sometimes they sorely tax the loyalty of their admirers
with their eccentricities and their defiance of the conventions
of their age. Wisdom is only justified of these, her strange
children, in the next generation. Prominent among such lives is
that of John Brown. The conscience of the Northern States on the
question of slavery needed but some strong irritant to arouse it
to vigorous action, and, the hanging of John Brown sufficed.