it boldly on his chart.  There at such and such a point in the voyage for the golden fleece, were the rocks and the soul-devouring dragons of the way.  Therefore, oh! my soul, beware.  What, indeed, would this argonaut of the press take in exchange for his soul?  Certainly not speedy wealth nor preferment.  Ah! he could not praise where he ought to reprobate; could not reprobate where praise should be the meed.  He had no money and little learning, but he had a conscience and he knew that he must be true to that conscience, come to him either weal or woe.  Want renders most men vulnerable, but to it, he appeared, at this early age, absolutely invulnerable.  Should he and that almost omnipotent inquisitor, public opinion, ever in the future come into collision upon any principle of action, a keen student of human nature might forsee that the young recusant could never be starved into silence or conformity to popular standards.  And with this stern, sad lesson treasured up in his heart, Garrison graduated from another room in the school-house of experience.  All the discoveries of the young journalist were not of this grim character.  He made another discovery altogether different, a real gem of its kind.  The drag-net of a newspaper catches all sorts of poets and poetry, good, bad, and indifferent—­oftener the bad and indifferent, rarely the good.  The drag-net of the Free Press was no exception to this rule; but, one day, it fetched up from the depths of the hard commonplaces of our New England town life a genuine pearl.  We will let Mr. Garrison tell the story in his own way: 

“Going up-stairs to my office, one day, I observed a letter lying near the door, to my address; which, on opening, I found to contain an original piece of poetry for my paper, the Free Press.  The ink was very pale, the handwriting very small; and, having at that time a horror of newspaper original poetry—­which has rather increased than diminished with the lapse of time—­my first impulse was to tear it in pieces, without reading it; the chances of rejection, after its perusal, being as ninety-nine to one; ... but summoning resolution to read it, I was equally surprised and gratified to find it above mediocrity, and so gave it a place in my journal....  As I was anxious to find out the writer, my post-rider, one day, divulged the secret, stating that he had dropped the letter in the manner described, and that it was written by a Quaker lad, named Whittier, who was daily at work on the shoemaker’s bench, with hammer and lapstone, at East Haverhill.  Jumping into a vehicle, I lost no time in driving to see the youthful rustic bard, who came into the room with shrinking diffidence, almost unable to speak, and blushing like a maiden.  Giving him some words of encouragement, I addressed myself more particularly to his parents, and urged them with great earnestness to grant him every possible facility for the development of his remarkable genius.”