And
before the bluff, kind-hearted man the shadow seemed less
dark. Beriah Green had a school in Oneida County, New
York, with a score of mischievous boys. "I'm going to bring
a black boy here to educate," said Beriah Green, as only a
crank and an abolitionist would have dared to say. "Oho!"
laughed the boys. "Ye-es," said his wife; and Alexander
came. Once before, the black boy had sought a school, had
travelled, cold and hungry, four hundred miles up into free
New Hampshire, to Canaan. But the godly farmers hitched
ninety yoke of oxen to the abolition schoolhouse and dragged
it into the middle of the swamp. The black boy trudged away.
The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,--
the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others
that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself;
when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and
millionaires and--sometimes--Negroes, became throbbing souls
whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half
gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen
Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou
known Life?" And then all helplessly we peered into those
Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World of Worlds, how shall
man make you one?"
So in that little Oneida school there came to those school-
boys a revelation of thought and longing beneath one black
skin, of which they had not dreamed before.
Pages:
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288