little sister Abby in silk, soft lace, and blue ribbon, appeared on the platform to sing their quaint ballads of freedom!  Fresh from the hills of New Hampshire, they looked so sturdy, so vigorous, so pure, so true that they seemed fitting representatives of all the cardinal virtues, and even a howling mob could not resist their influence.  Perhaps, after one of their ballads, the mob would listen five minutes to Wendell Phillips or Garrison until he gave them some home thrusts, when all was uproar again.  The Northern merchants who made their fortunes out of Southern cotton, the politicians who wanted votes, and the ministers who wanted to keep peace in the churches, were all as much opposed to the anti-slavery agitation as were the slaveholders themselves.  These were the classes the mob represented, though seemingly composed of gamblers, liquor dealers, and demagogues.  For years the anti-slavery struggle at the North was carried on against statecraft, priestcraft, the cupidity of the moneyed classes, and the ignorance of the masses, but, in spite of all these forces of evil, it triumphed at last.

I was in Boston at the time that Lane and Wright, some metaphysical Englishmen, and our own Alcott held their famous philosophical conversations, in which Elizabeth Peabody took part.  I went to them regularly.  I was ambitious to absorb all the wisdom I could, but, really, I could not give an intelligent report of the points under discussion at any sitting.  Oliver Johnson asked me, one day, if I enjoyed them.  I thought, from a twinkle in his eye, that he thought I did not, so I told him I was ashamed to confess that I did not know what they were talking about.  He said, “Neither do I,—­very few of their hearers do,—­so you need not be surprised that they are incomprehensible to you, nor think less of your own capacity.”

I was indebted to Mr. Johnson for several of the greatest pleasures I enjoyed in Boston.  He escorted me to an entire course of Theodore Parker’s lectures, given in Marlborough Chapel.  This was soon after the great preacher had given his famous sermon on “The Permanent and Transient in Religion,” when he was ostracised, even by the Unitarians, for his radical utterances, and not permitted to preach in any of their pulpits.  His lectures were deemed still more heterodox than that sermon.  He shocked the orthodox churches of that day—­more, even, than Ingersoll has in our times.

The lectures, however, were so soul-satisfying to me that I was surprised at the bitter criticisms I heard expressed.  Though they were two hours long, I never grew weary, and, when the course ended, I said to Mr. Johnson: 

“I wish I could hear them over again.”

“Well, you can,” said he, “Mr. Parker is to repeat them in Cambridgeport, beginning next week.”  Accordingly we went there and heard them again with equal satisfaction.