Monday, March 18, 2019

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers: Eclipse of The Sun, September 8, 1838

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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