'The place is beautiful, in its way, but its scenery is too
tamely smiling and sleeping. My associations with it are most
painful. There darkened round us the effects of my father's
ill-judged exchange,--ill-judged, so far at least as regarded
himself, mother, and me,--all violently rent from the habits
of our former life, and cast upon toils for which we were
unprepared: there my mother's health was impaired, and mine
destroyed; there my father died; there were undergone the
miserable perplexities of a family that has lost its head;
there I passed through the conflicts needed to give up all
which my heart had for years desired, and to tread a path
for which I had no skill, and no-call, except that it must be
trodden by some one, and I alone was ready. Wachuset and
the Peterboro' hills are blended in my memory with hours of
anguish as great as I am capable of suffering. I used to look
at them towering to the sky, and feel that I, too, from birth,
had longed to rise, and, though for the moment crushed, was
not subdued.
'But if those beautiful hills, and wide, rich fields, saw this
sad lore well learned, they also saw some precious lessons
given in faith, fortitude, self-command, and unselfish love.
There too, in solitude, the mind acquired more power of
concentration, and discerned the beauty of strict method;
there too, more than all, the heart was awakened to sympathize
with the ignorant, to pity the vulgar, to hope for the
seemingly worthless, and to commune with the Divine Spirit of
Creation, which cannot err, which never sleeps, which will
not permit evil to be permanent, nor its aim of beauty in the
smallest particular eventually to fail.'