Notes to the Elegiac Poem

NOTES.
One from his couch of sloth and pampered ease, 
Plucked the soft feather for the wingèd dart.
Page 13.
    No reader conversant with the history of the Anti-Slavery movement, and the heartless attack on MR. ROGERS, by his former associates, will for a moment doubt who is meant in the text. But for others, it may be necessary to name that amateur Reformer and refined Gladiator, to whom Radicalism presents a field for pleasant recreation — a kind of intellectual cock-fight — MR. EDMUND QUINCY; a man whose unfeeling and cruel treatment of his former friend, was as unprovoked as it was brutal.

    And even a Woman, dipt in her own heart
    The shaft for venom. — Pages 13-14.

    On Maria Weston Chapman, more than on any soul besides, lies the deed, whose bitter treachery and malignant bigotry, hastened the death of our lamented Brother. With the unforgivingness of a savage — though a Non-Resistant in theory — she poisoned in secret the arrows which another shot, from which the sensitive and delicate nature of ROGERS received a death-wound. [In the printed copy in the collection of Little Compton Historical Society, the elderly hand of George S. Burleigh attempted to cross out this paragraph and added the words “too strong” after it.]

            He, who till that hour
    Had felt thy pulses in his bosom bound,
    Sped the keen arrow. — Page 14.
    The love and admiration, almost boundless, which Mr. Rogers felt for Mr. Garrison, and which seemed to be reciprocated, so fully that the latter spoke of themselves as the Siamese Twins, could yet be no security against the envy and hate of his friend, when a poor question of policy, touching up the forms of Anti-Slavery action, divided their opinions. What a terrible revulsion must a nature like that of Mr. Rogers experience, when the twin-brother of his heart started up an unrelenting Foe, pouring fierce denunciations upon him, from the treasures of that immaculate bosom that never forgave an enemy.
    Let this be said in some extenuation for Mr. Garrison, that his strong nature, so long used to the stern weapons of destructiveness, did in blindness, what his better heart would have revolted at.

    Breathe, fair-haired Sister-Band, a song of love.
Page 17.
The lovely children of Mr. Rogers inherit the fine musical gift which he posessed. Three of the sisters, with a brother, have charmed the public with the sweet harmony of their voices, as all who know them in private life, have been charmed by the loving simplicity of their hearts. Yet not the innocent sweetness of the children, could wring a kindly notice from the unenviable few who flung their shafts at the Father.

    And you, ye Brother-band — Page 19.
The Hutchinsons — that ‘nest of Brothers with a Sister in it.’ Mr. Rogers was first to predict their popularity, and lend them encouragement, in terms which seemed extravagant to many; but hte love and admiration of two worlds has set the seal of truth upon his predictions. Here, as elsewhere, his quick perceptions, and most delicate taste, saw at a glance, what slower natures reach after long searching.

Like the “Old Man” to whom his touch hath lent 
Life and a soul — Page 20.
    The “Old Man of the Mountain,” a picturesque cliff at the Franconia Notch. The well-known and admirable letters in the character of this ‘Old Man’ were from the pen of Mr. Rogers. These, like many of his writings, abound in grand and graphic descriptions of New Hampshire scenery — wild, bold and full of poetry as the cliffs and woods themselves.