Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

[114] was devoted also to the movement with which, as has been already stated, he heartily sympathized, against carrying the mails on the Sabbath. His orthodoxy ¹ betrayed itself in this and in other ways, and an incidental reference to the ‘novel, illogical, subtle, and ² inconclusive arguments’ of a discourse of Rev. John Pierpont's, to which he had listened some months before, elicited a letter from that gentleman, who felt that injustice had been done him. Mr. Garrison not only printed the letter, but gave copious extracts from the discourse, with comments, at the same time declaring that he enthusiastically admired everything in Mr. Pierpont but his theology. ‘As a beautiful, finished, and elegant writer, I know not his superior in the twenty-four States; and his taste in poetry and literature is before any other man's.’ Mr. Pierpont having thanked him for his manliness in sending him a copy of the Journal containing the strictures in question, the editor replied: ‘I have never said aught in print against any individual without transmitting to him a copy of my remarks—and I never shall.’

That he went regularly to church each Sunday is to be inferred from this paragraph in the Journal:

‘We have suffered for two or three Sabbaths excessively³ from the cold—and so have many others. Two stoves, and no fire, led us to conclude that the Irishman's plan had been adopted, who, on learning one stove saved half the wood, said he would buy two and save the whole. Provision, we are glad to learn, has been made for warming the meeting-house, and people may now attend worship without suffering from the cold.’

Mr. Garrison's muse was active during these fall and winter months, and no less than fifteen pieces of verse by ‘A. O. B.’—sonnets, blank verse, etc.—appeared in the poetry column between October and March, besides a longer poem on his birthday (supposed to be his twenty-fourth, but really his twenty-third), which followed an editorial on the same theme. One of the sonnets was inscribed to his spectacles, and celebrated