To the Same.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10, 1846.
. . . FOR am I not through the one third of the second of the five
months, and am I not very glad of it? And yet I am very glad I came
away. You have no idea how I am relieved, and I shall not go back
empty-handed. But the relief I feel admonishes me never to return to
the full charge. How little do people know or conceive what it is!
One case, like what I fear Mrs.-'s is, of slow decline,-one such case
weighs upon the mind and heart for months. If you could go and make the
call, without any sad anticipation or afterthought; but you cannot.
And then, when it is not one case that draws upon your sympathies, but
several, and you are made the confidant of many sorrows besides, and
you are anxious for many minds; and when, moreover, your studies are
not of the habitudes of bees, and the length of butterflies' wings, but
wasting thoughts of human souls in sorrow and peril, and your Sundays
rack your sinews with pain,--I declare I wonder that men live through
it at all.
To the Same.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 1847.
MY DEAR BELLOWS,--I consider it a mercy to you to put some interval
between my letters; indeed, I do [188] not know how you write any,
ever; besides, I feel all the while as if some of your burdens were to
be laid at the door of my delinquencies. . . . Indeed, I rejoice in you
always. I never hear of you but to hear good of you; and it is often
that I hear. . . .
As to the sermons I have been writing here, I consider your suggestion
that you might read since you will not hear them such an enormous
compliment, such a reckless piece of goodness, that all your duties in
regard to them are fully discharged in the bare proposition. And I am
not going to have you canonized and sent down to all ages as the most
suffering saint in the nineteenth century, for having read twelve of
Dewey's manuscript sermons. I have preached one of them this evening,
and it made so much impression (upon, me) that I was quite taken by
surprise. The title is "Nature.". . . Last week I wrote the most
considerable lucubration of the winter, on the darkest problem in the
philosophy of life and history, "the ministry of error and evil in the
world," to wit, Polytheism, Despotism, War, and Slavery. . . . Always
my poor mind and heart are struggling with one subject, and that is the
great world-question.
You speak of my opportunities here. Perhaps I have not improved them
very well. I am not very enterprising in the social relations, and
half of the winter I have not cared for Washington, nor anything else
but what was passing in my own mind. . . . I have met some admirable
persons here, of those I did not know before. Crittenden and Corwin and
Judge McLean have interested me most; men they seem to me of as fine
and beautiful natures as one can well meet. I have had two interviews
with Calhoun that interested me much; [189] and the other evening I met
Soule, the Louisiana senator, and had a long conversation with him,
chiefly about slavery,--a very remarkable person. There is no face in
the Senate, besides Webster's, so lashed up with the strong lines of
intellect; and his smile shines out as brightly and beautifully from
the dark cloud of his features.
To his Daughter Mary.
NEW YORK, May 23, 1847.
DEAR MOLLY,--I thought M. E. D. made you m-a-d; but you shall have
it hereafter, if it makes you "demnition" mad; no appreciation of
my delicacy in leaving out the E,--which stands for error, egotism,
eggnog, epsom-salts, and every erroneous entity extant. Yes, the
E,--have it, with all its compounds. The fact is, I suppose, that when
people retire up into the country, they grow monstrous avaricious, and
exact everything that belongs to them; lay up their best clothes and
go slip-shod. I'm preparing for that condition, mentally and bodily.
You see I begin to slip already in language. Your mother is trying
to persuade me to buy a dressing-gown. A dressing-gown! when I don't
expect to dress at all. As if a beggar who never expects to dine were
to buy a service of plate, or a starving man should have his picture
taken, and give a hundred dollars for famine in effigy. I have ordered
a suit of summer clothes, to be sure, because I feel very thin, and
expect to feel very light some five weeks hence. I shall get some
cigars by the same token, because all things with me are vanishing into
smoke. And if thin clothes can't live, can't be distended, filled out,
and look respectable, upon smoke, let 'em die, and be crushed before
the moth.
[190] Monday morning. These tantrums, dear Molly, were--what? cut
up?-last night after preaching, and mortal tired I was too. I do not
know how it is, but it seems to me that every sermon I take now, every
poor, little, innocent sermon comes bouncing out in the pulpit like a
Brobdingnag.
To Rev. William Ware.
SHEFFIELD, Aug. 22, 1847.
DEAR FRIEND,--I don't like Commencements. I hate travelling. And just
now I hate my pen so much that I can scarce muster patience to tell you
so.
I have been reading Prescott's "Peru." What a fine accomplishment there
is about it! And yet there is something wanting to me in the moral
nerve. History should teach men how to estimate characters. It should
be a teacher of morals. And I think it should make us shudder at the
names of Cortez and Pizarro. But Prescott's does not. He seems to have
a kind of sympathy with these inhuman and perfidious adventurers, as if
they were his heroes. It is too bad to talk of them as the soldiers of
Christ. If it were said of the Devil, they would have better fitted the
character.
Monday morning. The shadows of the lilac fall upon my page, checkered
with the slant rays of the morning light; there is a slope of green
grass under the window; here is quiet all around; I wish you were here.
My love to your wife and children.
Yours as ever,