The North Star (Rochester)/1848/01/14/Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE.
The following is extracted from a letter from an English friend:
Hail to thee, bright and beautiful Star! Over the wide ocean wave we trace thy first, faint beams; and our hearts beat high with hope and joy. Mayest thou shine, like a gem of purest water, upon the darkened skies of that land from whose hills and fields of virgin greenness the mists of slavery have so long arisen; hanging, like a blank and lowering cloud, where else the light of freedom, intellect and religion would have shone with transcendent lustre. Often may the menacing clouds of calumny and hatred threaten to obscure thy beams and dim thy radiance; but shine thou on, unchangingly, in the pure heavens of truth and love. Receive thy light alone from the Eternal Fountain: then will the thousands who have rejoiced in thee, look calmly on the threatening cloud, and await its vanishing, in the firm faith that they shall again behold thee, in renewed beauty and unsullied brightness. So shalt thou be to the mental eye of oppressed millions that which thine antetype in the blue heavens above hath been so long to his outward gaze. Point thou, ever and unchangeably, to a land of freedom, that thus thy gentle beam may keep alive in his soul one spark of that manhood which the floods of oppression and the waves of tyranny have so long striven to quench.
And not to the slave alone shall thy beams glance hope and confidence; to the warm and faithful hearts that beat so ardently for his well being; to the true champions of freedom who fight her bloodless battles with the sacred weapons of truth and justice—be thou, as the conflict deepens, a cheering, guiding Star. May it be theirs to rejoice in thy beams so long as the warfare rages; and to hail, at length, the dawn of the long anticipated morning, when the rising sun of freedom shall light the horizon of the enfranchised slave, and he shall tread, erect in his long-wtthheld manhood, the shores of his nativity, and walk through the length and breadth of a land of liberty, "rejoicing is the joy" of the present, and with a heart filled with adoring gratitude in the memory of these by-gone times, when darkness was around him like a funeral pall, and his trembling and timid glance was alone chested by the constant beams of the distant North Star!