The Days of a Man 1859 



Why is a pump like Viscount Castlereagh? 

 It is a slender thing of wood 

 Which up and down its awkward arm doth sway 

 And coolly spouts and spouts and spouts away 

 In one wealc, washy, everlasting flood. 



The But my keenest literary satisfaction was derived 



"Atlantic ^ f r om The Atlantic Monthly, which my father took 



Monthly Curing the entire war period, and to which, for that 

 matter, one of us has ever since been a subscriber. 

 For during all these years it has retained its unique 

 original character as a journal of high ideals in 

 literature and politics. The Atlantic essays of 

 Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, and above all Thoreau, 

 had a good deal to do with shaping my intellectual 

 tastes and in strengthening my fundamental ideals 

 of democracy. 



j 



Intro- My first reactions to politics I date very clearly 



duction back to a sermon delivered in Gainesville in 1859 



politics ky Uriah M. Fiske, a Unitarian clergyman from 



Boston. Mr. Fiske was an Abolitionist. Referring 



to the Dred Scott Decision of the United States 



Supreme Court, confirming the Fugitive Slave Law, 



he said: "When this verdict was rendered there was 



joy in State Street and in Wall Street and in 



Hell." x This set me to thinking and to asking 



questions of my mother. 



The rumblings which preceded the Civil War, as 

 well as its final outbreak, I remember distinctly still 

 more keenly the struggle itself, overshadowing the 

 land like a black cloud which would never be lifted. 



1 Another of Mr. Fiske's striking epigrams was also fixed in my mind: 

 "The Almighty can accept his creatures without a passport from the church 

 below." 



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