He was his devoted worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In his daily intercourse with him in his library during his campaigns he had frequently met his beautiful daughter, and had fallen deeply and madly in love with her. This secret passion he had kept hidden in his sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as though she had been a white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house with her was all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and turned the music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would live on that scene for months, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings he dared not express.
In his music he made his greatest success. There was a fiery sweep to his passion, and a deep oriental rhythm in his cadence that held the imagination of his hearers in a spell. It is needless to say it was in this music he breathed his secret love.
At first he had not dared to hope for the day when he could declare this secret or take his place in the list of her admirers and fight for his chance. But of late, a great hope had filled his soul and illumined the world. As he had listened to Lowell’s impassioned appeals for human brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and prejudice, and the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which he trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow man, his soul was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this scholar and scientific thinker, at least, was a free man. He was sure that he had risen above the limitations of provincialisms, racial or national prejudices.
He had begun to dream of the day he would ask this Godlike man for the privilege of addressing his daughter.
The great meeting at Cooper Union had brought this dream to a sudden resolution. Lowell had outdone himself that night. With merciless invective he had denounced the inhuman barbarism of the South in these lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered his appeals as water the breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence sweep back on his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of man on every inch of this earth’s soil.
“I demand this perfect equality,” he cried, “absolutely without reservation or subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the life-blood of Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. Without this we are a living lie, a stench in the nostrils of God and humanity!”
A cheer from a thousand negro throats rent the air as he thus closed. The crowd surged over the platform and for ten minutes it was impossible to restore order or continue the programme. Young Harris pressed his patron’s hand and kissed it while tears of pride and gratitude rained down his face.
This speech made a national sensation. It was printed in full in all the partisan papers where it was hoped capital might be made of it for the next political campaign, and the National Campaign Committee of which he was a member ordered a million copies of it printed for distribution among the negroes.
When Lowell and Harris reached Boston, as they parted at the depot Harris said, “Will you be at home to-morrow, Mr. Lowell?”
“Yes, why?”