On August 1st, 1850 after seeing him a second time, Ariana wrote in her diary of Frank Sanborn’s visiting her in a lighthearted mood, saying he’d been advised he ought to enter the ministry. She laughed at that, she said, not because she feared he would fail in that, but because his work in life seemed so clear, at least to her. He would be a writer.

Ariana wrote Frank on August 7th, announcing she’d again be visiting her friend Cate and the other girls in her sewing circle, including Sanborn’s sister, Helen. She said she not only looked forward to seeing Cate and her friends, but also him. She said she loved sitting under the green arches of the oaks and maples, watching the play of faces, searching the souls of those around her.

Ariana declared Cate the best of her friends -- beautiful and worthy of being loved. She declared Frank’s sister Helen, on the other hand, cold and self-centered. But, Ariana, added, she was interesting. She wanted to know what Helen’s coldness concealed.

Ariana went on to enlighten Sanborn as to his own aloofness, now distant, lost in some far distant place, now suddenly talkative -- witty and charming. Eventually, Ariana went so far as to write a report, which Cate then shared with him: The Character of F.B.Sanborn.

Ariana began by observing he was, by nature, overly analytical, his intellect predominating over his heart. She had found his imagination rich and vivid, but recognized in him a practical person, not a dreamer. She saw calmness as a large element in his nature, but sensed great fire under the ice which, if triggered, would flame forth with great power and intensity. He was apt to look on the dark side of things, she warned, but was seldom sad or despondent. She recognized his great pride, and could see how highly he valued his independence, standing alone, quite apart from others. But she knew he’d require some outside authority upon which to lean. She saw him as a religious man, despite his contempt for empty forms, devoid of spirit.

Ariana noted he had great reverence for things reverenceable. Though severe in nature, he was not more so with others than with himself. He liked many, endured most, and was at war with few. He fancied himself indifferent to praise or blame. For all his frankness, still there was much he revealed to no one. He had much intellectual enthusiasm.

She noted Frank loved wit, quickly seeing the ludicrous side of things. She knew ha had many noble aspirations. He wanted a definite end for which to strive heartily. She saw he could execute better than he planned. Impatient of wrongs, he was just as impatient with inability. But he was gentle, in spite of that. His was a nature not likely to find rest. Struggle was its native element. He wanted a steady aim, and had to work. Standing still would be impossible for him. Ariana closed by saying she recognized there were many contradictions in her analysis, but not more than were in the character of the man himself.

She had never met anyone like him. When he left her side, she wrote, she felt full of regret for not speaking more wisely to him. She’d look out the window, desiring to throw herself down on the cool grass below. She’d lay awake nights, thinking of him. She said he made her feel strong and free. Warm tears flowed fast.

On his side, Sanborn said the arrow of love had also wounded him.

For all that, Sanborn went, in the fall, on a long-projected walking tour of the White Mountains, even as Henry Thoreau was joining Ellery Channing in a ten-day excursion to Montreal and Quebec. Sanborn followed the same route as Henry and John Thoreau had taken in the fall of 1839. He stood on the summit of Mount Washington, covered with light snow on September 15th, and returned by the Connecticut Valley as far as Lebanon. From Concord, New Hampshire he traveled west to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, then turned east again, returning home by way of Exeter at the end of September.

Then, in accordance with a suggestion Ariana Walker had made, Sanborn arranged to study with the Exeter teacher and private tutor, John Gibson Hoyt. He would focus on Greek for a year, then enter Phillips Academy. At Exeter, Sanborn wrote verses, some of which appeared in the local paper, and composed commemorative odes for the school’s assorted celebrations.

Sanborn appreciated Ariana’s having steered him in this direction. He was as amazed by her love as he was deeply grateful for her interest in his intellectual development -- and his future. He later claimed that it was Ariana’s sympathetic interest in the oppressed that stirred his resolve to commit himself to the cause of social and political freedom. This determined, he said, which course his education took. Mr. Hoyt, beyond having a reputation as a superb tutor, was also known to be a committed abolitionist.

There was certainly no greater nor more romantic nor more unselfish a love in this world than that which Ariana felt for him, Sanborn swooned. But he admitted there was one fatal flaw in this apparently picture-perfect love affair: Ariana had a rare neurological disease that had struck suddenly in 1846, interrupting her education and making her dependent on others. Ariana’s brother George, five years older than her, gave her his constant attention and care. At first he stood like a lion in the way of Frank’s courting her, Sanborn later lamented. In time, the two would become close friends.

It was just a simple matter of time, Sanborn wrote jubilantly, before he and Ariana Walker became lovers. The affair was a well-kept secret, he revealed. The world was not supposed to learn of it. The two did not want to hear the criticisms of better-knowing people who could see, so much more clearly than the young lovers could, how many outward obstacles stood in opposition to the union of their two hearts.

By January, 1851, Sanborn's correspondence was, as he put it, incessant: the Exeter post office provided the opportunity to mail and receive letters without exciting gossip.

Sanborn had a strong sense that things happened for reasons, though there were not necessarily accompanying explanations. He noticed how one important event in one's early life seemed mysteriously to lead to another like important event, then that to a third, and so on, as if by a chain of sequences arranged beforehand. He felt his life’s path was foreordained and that there was a map of his destiny, pointing the way he should go -- not compelling him to a given course, but indicating the line of least resistance. He thanked his Hampton Falls, New Hampshire forefathers for making friends with their neighbors, which led to his meeting one of their descendants, Cate Cram and, through her, his darling Ariana Walker.

In February, Ariana reported to her friend Ednah Littlehale that Sanborn had become so much mingled in her life that it became more difficult, with each passing day, to turn her thoughts away from him. believe In March she worried about visiting Hampton Falls in the summer. Frank would have to visit her in Peterborough under pretense of making a pilgrimmage to Monadnoc which, she admitted, was not very difficult to see through.

Sanborn told her only the heart should govern in such matters. He knew her heart was his. He said that being away from her only hindered the progress of his college studies. Only the friendships he had formed at Exeter meant anything to him, he said -- and his mingling with Exeter’s more cultivated families. Professor Hoyt had been showing him around, introducing him to his circle of political friends.

Some of these people were talking about a man out in Springfield, Massachusetts, one John Brown, who’d released an extraordinary Statement of Purpose for a new group called the League of Gileadites. Agreeing to the motto In Union is Strength, this man Brown proposed there was nothing else Americans liked so well as bravery. He'd come to the conviction that there was simply nothing better he could do than to throw in his lot with colored people, as he told his wife, aiding and encouraging them without reservation or restraint.

In response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Brown told blacks to arm and defend themselves against anyone's kidnapping them in order to return them to enslavement. Blacks were called on to unite and to act collectively, making clean work of their enemies. People should stand by one another so long as a single drop of blood remained, Brown said eloquently. Be hanged if you must but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession.

On February 15, 1851, Shadrach Minkins, a hotel waiter in Boston, was arrested under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act and placed in the confines of the Boston courthouse. At lunchtime that day, a group of armed black men created a disturbance, and Shadrach was hustled to a waiting carriage bound for Concord, his first stop on the Underground Railroad before being transported to Canada. Theodore Parker spoke before the celebrating crowd that joined the Boston vigilantes at a spontaneous rally, calling the rescue the noblest deed done in Boston since the Boston Tea Party. The Concord blacksmith Edwin Bigelow, the very man who had harbored Shadrach, and who had driven him to Leominster in his flight to freedom, was a juror in the trial of those who had released Shadrach from his Boston jailers.

On April 3, 1851 the fugitive slave Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston. Though abolitionists attempted to free him, they were turned back by troops.

That spring, Ralph Waldo Emerson was hissed by Harvard students, the sons of defenders of slavery, as Sanborn called them, who worshipped Webster and Clay while despising Parker and Phillips.

Sanborn said he had never heard an abolitionist orator until April 1851, when he went to Boston to hear Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, whose speeches and sermons he had been reading in newspapers and in the Congressional Globe, to which his brother Charles, an assistant editor for the weekly Independent Democrat, subscribed. Frank visited his Whig uncle, Benson Leavitt, a former Boston Alderman and Acting Mayor of 1845, who was angry at his nephew’s having gone to hear Parker. To the Whigs, Parker was an utter infidel, Sanborn remembered, disorganizing and resisting what was inevitable.

Louisa May Alcott, then 18, also present at the antislavery meeting that spring, noted all the cheering going on for Shadrack and Liberty, and groaning against Webster and slavery -- all a great noise. She was ready to do anything – fight, work, hoot ,or cry. She said she’d be most ashamed of her country if Sims were taken back.

The fugitive slave Thomas Sims, defended by Bronson Alcott's cousin Samuel Sewall, was found guilty of attempting to escape his condition, slavery. The Vigilantes went to work directly, devising a rescue plan, but so many guards were assigned to Sims that the security of the prisoner appeared impenetrable, and the Vigilantes were stymied. The Unitarian Worcester minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson proposed storming the courthouse. Parker thought that a great idea, but the proposal was rejected. Then Parker suggested an attack on the ship that was to carry Sims to Georgia, which was likewise rejected. In the end it was determined nothing could be done. The Vigilance Committee raged and fumed. Their fury was complete when they heard that Sims, upon arriving back in Georgia, got a public whipping.

The Sims Case left Thomas Wentworth Higginson with the impression that it was probably just about time for another revolution. He said it felt very strange to him to find himself outside established institutions, obliged to lower his voice and conceal his purpose. He saw law and order, police and military, on the wrong side. Good citizenship had become a sin, and bad citizenship a duty.

On April 23, 1851, Thoreau lectured on The Wild in Concord. He apologized for not standing up and denouncing the Fugitive Slave Act instead.

Emerson read odious news in each day's paper. Infamy had fallen on Massachusetts. He resolved Americans ought to be focusing all of their energy and attention on just this one thing: opposing the Fugitive Slave Law.