This text is part of:
[78]
Garrison became much attached to Boston, and greatly enjoyed the advantages and opportunities which city life afforded him. While remaining firm in the Baptist faith, he yet delighted to listen to the preaching of Lyman Beecher, in Hanover-Street Church, to William Ellery Channing, in Federal Street, and to John Pierpont, in Hollis Street; and though he grieved that the two last-named divines were so unsound in their theological views, and wandered so far from the true faith, he had unbounded admiration for their intellectual ability, and profound respect for their personal character.
Occasionally, too, he would go to Dr. Malcolm's church, for the sake of seeing the lovely face of Miss Emily Marshall, whose fame as the belle of Boston at that day was national, and whose goodness of heart and simple, unaffected ways were universally admitted and praised.
Many young men were led to worship at Dr. Malcolm's by the same attraction, and it was a matter of daily occurrence for them to promenade up and down Franklin Street, where her parents lived, in the hope of getting a glimpse of her, even at her window.1
The public holidays also presented new scenes of interest and enjoyment to the young printer, and when, a few years later, he was incarcerated in Baltimore jail, he employed some of his leisure hours in recounting in verse his recollections of ‘training days’ on Boston
1 ‘There are a few old people still living who will justify me in saying that centuries are likely to come and go before society will again gaze, spell-bound, upon a woman so richly endowed with beauty as was Miss Emily Marshall. I well know the peril which lies in superlatives,—they were made for the use of very young persons; but in speaking of this gracious lady, even the cooling influences of more than half a century do not enable me to avoid them. She was simply perfect in face and figure, and perfectly charming in manners. . . . And this perfect personation of loveliness was beloved by women no less than she was admired by men. . . She stood before us a reversion to that faultless type of structure which artists have imagined in the past, and that ideal loveliness of feminine disposition which poets have placed in the mythical golden age’ (Josiah Quincy, of the Class of 1821. Harvard College, in “Figures of the past.” pp. 334-337). Miss Marshall married a son of Harrison Gray Otis (Muzzey's Reminiscences and memorials. pp. 39-41).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.