ECLIPSE OF THE SUN.
We had a fine opportunity, on our way from Plymouth to
Concord, to witness this grand conjunction of the mighty orbs of the sky — this
conflict of the “greater and lesser lights” — the lesser obscuring the greater,
as is sometimes the case among sublunary bodies, by force of position. The
glorious sun was indeed “sick almost to doomsday,” — and it was pitiful to see
his regal distress, and with what dignity and decency he drew around him his
robe of clouds, to hide his disaster and shame from the smoked-glass gaze of
mortals. The atmosphere and the landscape sombered at his obscuration, and he
looked, as the foul intrusion overshadowed his disk, like a noble nature seized
upon, darkened, marred and smothered to blackness and darkness, by the Genius
of slavery. The envious eclipse passes off, and the released luminary shines on
gloriously again in mid heaven. Slavery is perpetual eclipse— sickness to “doomsday”
— eternal obscuration. May God in his mercy rectify the erring orbs of life, to
prevent and remove such fatal moral conjunctions.
All animate creation seemed to apprehend and notice
instinctively the malady of the heavens. The few birds that remain extant at
this unmusical season, gave token of their apprehension of night-fall by
betaking themselves to the topmost boughs of the trees — to get as late a
good-night as they could, from the blessed luminary whose good morrow they hail
with such choral gladness, in that joyous season when “the time of the singing
of birds is come.” The cricket and the grasshopper, in the fields by the road
side, set up, as night came down, their twilight hum, and blew their “drowsy
bugle.” A drove of cattle, through which we passed, on the way to Brighton —
like a coffle from the city of Washington to Alabama — halted, as the drover
told us, as if the hour for putting up for night had come. And our own good
steed, refreshed by the coolness of the temperature, and warned by the
deepening shadows, set up his evening trot, in full remembrance, as well as his
master, of Concord hospitality — for he has a “memory like a horse” — and had
every visible and ostensible reason to believe, that stable-time and release
from the harness were at hand. Would that the poor human cattle of the republic
could realize such a season! But neither night nor eclipse brmgs respite to
them. They Are Slaves.
At the height of the obscuration, the sky wore the
appearance of real sunset — a sunset far up from the horizon, with blue sky
below, between it and the hills. The passing off of the eclipse was [invisible],
by reason of the thick, hard, night-looking clouds, and the sun did not
reappear to give assurance of his recovery. May it not be emblematic of the
extinction of slavery in this country amid the gloomy shadowings and night of
insurrection, which our friend, the Observer, deprecates with such deep
shuddering—while the prospect cf eternal slavery he can lcok on with
most se (ne compr sure.
The “specious” twilight of the eclipse gradually put on evening's
bona fide enshroudings, and settled into but we forget that our eclipse
was seen by all our readers, and will leave them, with the wish, that the sun
may rise upon them again on the morrow, all unmarred and unscathed by his
conflict with the “dirty planet,” and light them all on the way to a day cf
antislavery gratitude and duty.
SOURCE: Collection from the Miscellaneous Writings
of Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, Second Edition, p. 25-6 which states it was
published in the Herald of Freedom of September 22, 1838.
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