“The wild and mingling groans of writhing millions,
  Calling for vengeance on my guilty land.”

He commended the verses “to all those who wish to cherish female genius, and whose best feelings are enlisted in the cause of the poor oppressed sons of Africa.”  He was evidently impressed, but the impression belonged to the ordinary, transitory sort.  His next recorded utterance on the subject was also in the Free Press.  It was made in relation with some just and admirable strictures on the regulation Fourth of July oration, with its “ceaseless apostrophes to liberty, and fierce denunciations of tyranny.”  Such a tone was false and mischievous—­the occasion was for other and graver matter.  “There is one theme,” he declares, “which should be dwelt upon, till our whole country is free from the curse—­it is slavery.”  The emphasis and energy of the rebuke and exhortation lifts this second allusion to slavery, quite outside of merely ordinary occurrences.  It was not an ordinary personal occurrence for it served to reveal in its lightning-like flash the glow and glare of a conscience taking fire.  The fire slumbered until a few weeks before Lundy entered Boston, when there were again the glow and glare of a moral sense in the first stages of ignition on the enormity of slave institutions.  The act of South Carolina in making it illegal to teach a colored person to read and write struck this spark from his pen:  “There is something unspeakably pitiable and alarming,” he writes in the Philanthropist, “in the state of that society where it is deemed necessary, for self-preservation, to seal up the mind and debase the intellect of man to brutal incapacity....  Truly the alternatives of oppression are terrible.  But this state of things cannot always last, nor ignorance alone shield us from destruction.”  His interest in the question was clearly growing.  But it was still in the gristle of sentiment waiting to be transmuted into the bone and muscle of a definite and determined purpose, when first he met Lundy.  This meeting of the two men, was to Garrison what the fourth call of God was to Samuel, the Hebrew lad, who afterward became a prophet.  As the three previous calls of God and the conversations with Eli had prepared the Jewish boy to receive and understand the next summons of Jehovah, so had Garrison’s former experience and education made him ready for the divine message when uttered in his ears by Lundy.  All the sense of truth and the passion for righteousness of the young man replied to the voice, “Here am I.”  The hardening process of growth became immediately manifest in him.  Whereas before there was sentimental opposition to slavery, there began then an opposition, active and practical.  When Lundy convened many of the ministers of the city to expose to them the barbarism of slavery, Garrison sat in the room, and as Lundy himself records, “expressed his approbation of my doctrines.”  The young reformer must needs stand up and make public profession