"Aesopo statuam ingentem posuere Attici;
Servumque collocarunt eterna in basi:"

_A colossal statue did the Athenians raise to Aesop; and a poor pariah
slave they planted upon an everlasting pedestal._ I have not scrupled
to introduce the word _pariah_, because in that way only could I
decipher to the reader by what particular avenue it was that the
sublimity which I fancy in the passage reached my heart. This sublimity
originated in the awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge,
between the pollution of slavery,--the being a man, yet without right
or lawful power belonging to a man,--between this unutterable
degradation and the starry altitude of the slave at that moment when,
upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the armies of the
earth might be conceived as presenting arms to the emancipated man,
the cymbals and kettledrums of kings as drowning the whispers of his
ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that wept over slavery yet
joining in one choral gratulation to the regenerated slave. I assign
the elements of what I did in reality feel at that time, which to the
reader may seem extravagant, and by no means of what it was reasonable
to feel. But, in order that full justice may be done to my childish
self, I must point out to the reader another source of what strikes
me as real grandeur. Horace, that exquisite master of the lyre, and
that most shallow of critics, it is needless to say that in those days
I had not read. Consequently I knew nothing of his idle canon, that
the opening of poems must be humble and subdued. But my own sensibility
told me how much of additional grandeur accrued to these two lines as
being the immediate and all-pompous _opening_ of the poem. The same
feeling I had received from the crashing overture to the grand chapter
of Daniel--"Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of