Nevertheless, and notwithstanding these aberrations, my friend--the
truest friend I ever had in my life, on some accounts, for he was not
afraid to tell me of my faults when he saw them, and the man after all,
to whom I am under greater obligations than to any other, living or
dead, for bringing me acquainted with myself--held on his upward course
for the last thirty years of his life without faltering, and without any
visible perturbation, like the planets, if not like the stars, along
their appointed path, never so as to astonish perhaps, but almost always
so as to convince, whatever might be the manner of his approach, and
whether in prose or poetry.
But we are anticipating. At the time of our first acquaintance, he
certainly entertained very different views upon the subjects which have
made him so conspicuous within the last twenty-five years.
Instead of being an Abolitionist, or a Garrisonian, and insisting upon
immediate, universal, and unconditional emancipation, he was a
colonizationist, rather tolerant of the evil, as it existed in the
South, and very patient under the wrongs of our black brethren; and so
was I.
Instead of being a teetotaler, he was hardly what the temperance men of
our day would call a temperance man; for he had wine upon his table when
he gave dinners, and never shrank from the interchange of courtesies,
nor refused a pledge,--though I did, even then.
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