“was deeply grieved at the gross abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul.”  With apostolic faith and zeal he had for a decade been striving to free the captive, and to tie up his bruised spirit.  Sadly, but with a great love, he had gone about the country on his self-imposed task.  To do this work he had given up the business of a saddler, in which he had prospered, had sacrificed his possessions, and renounced the ease that comes with wealth; had courted unheard-of hardships, and wedded himself for better and worse to poverty and unremitting endeavor.  Nothing did he esteem too dear to relinquish for the slave.  Neither wife nor children did he withhold.  Neither the summer’s heat nor the winter’s cold was able to daunt him or turn him from his object.  Though diminutive and delicate of body, no distance or 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 or the nation’s duty in regard to its extinction.  His first reference to the question appeared in connection with a notice made by him in the Free Press of a spirited poem, entitled “Africa,” in which the authoress sings of: