handwriting and signature may be strange to your eyes and memory alike.
As, however, silence can hardly be more than a _passive_ sin--a sin of
omission, not commission--I hope they will not be unwelcome to you. I am
desirous you should still preserve towards me some of your old
kindliness of feeling, for I wish to borrow some of it for the person
who will carry this letter over the Atlantic--a very interesting young
friend of mine, who begged of me, as a great favor, a letter of
introduction to you.... I think you will find that had she fallen in
your way _unintroduced_, she would have recommended herself to your
liking. [The lady in question was Miss Appleton, of Boston, afterwards
Mrs. Robert Mackintosh, whose charming sister, cut off by too sad and
premature a doom, was the wife of the poet Longfellow.]
And now, what shall I tell you? After so long a silence, I suppose you
think I ought to have plenty to say, yet I have not. What should a woman
write about, whose sole occupations are eating, drinking, and sleeping;
whose pleasures consist in nursing her baby, and playing with a brace of
puppies; and her miseries in attempting to manage six republican
servants--a task quite enough to make any "Quaker kick his mother," a
grotesque illustration of demented desperation, which I have just
learned, and which is peculiarly appropriate in these parts? Can I find
it in my conscience, or even in the nib of my pen, to write you all
across the great waters that my child has invented two teeth, or how
many pounds of tea, sugar, flour, etc., etc., I distribute weekly to the
above-mentioned household of unmanageables? To write, as to speak, one
should have something to say, and I have literally nothing, except that
I am well in mind, body, and estate, and hope you are so too.
Our summer has been detestable: if America had the grace to have fairies
(but they don't cross the Atlantic), I should think the little Yankee
Oberon and Titania had been by the ears together: such wintry squalls!
such torrents of rain! The autumn, however, has been fine, and we spent
part of it in one of the most charming regions imaginable.
A "Happy Valley" indeed!--the Valley of the Housatonic, locked in by
walls of every shape and size, from grassy knolls to bold basaltic
cliffs. A beautiful little river wanders singing from side to side in
this secluded Paradise, and from every mountain cleft come running
crystal springs to join it; it looks only fit for people to be baptized
in (though I believe the water is used for cooking and washing
purposes.)
In one part of this romantic hill-region exists the strangest worship
that ever the craving need of religious excitement suggested to the
imagination of human beings.
I do not know whether you have ever heard of a religious sect called the
Shakers; I never did till I came into their neighborhood: and all that
was told me before seeing them fell short of the extraordinary effect of
the reality. Seven hundred men and women, whose profession of religion
has for one of its principal objects the extinguishing of the human race
and the end of the world, by devoting themselves and persuading others
to celibacy and the strictest chastity. They live all together in one
community, and own a village and a considerable tract of land in the
beautiful hill country of Berkshire. They are perfectly moral and
exemplary in their lives and conduct, wonderfully industrious,
miraculously clean and neat, and incredibly shrewd, thrifty and
money-making.
Their dress is hideous, and their worship, to which they admit
spectators, consists of a fearful species of dancing, in which the
whole number of them engage, going round and round their vast hall
or temple of prayer, shaking their hands like the paws of a dog
sitting up to beg, and singing a deplorable psalm-tune in brisk jig
time. The men without their coats, in their shirt-sleeves, with
their lank hair hanging on their shoulders, and a sort of loose
knee-breeches--knickerbockers--have a grotesque air of stage Swiss
peasantry. The women without a single hair escaping from beneath their
hideous caps, mounted upon very high-heeled shoes, and every one of them
with a white handkerchief folded napkin-fashion and hanging over her
arm. In summer they all dress in white, and what with their pale,
immovable countenances, their ghost-like figures, and ghastly, mad
spiritual dance, they looked like the nuns in "Robert the Devil,"
condemned, for their sins in the flesh, to post-mortem decency and
asceticism, to look ugly, and to dance like ill-taught bears.
The whole exhibition was at once so frightful and so ludicrous, that I
very nearly went off into hysterics, when I first saw them.
We shall be in London, I hope, in the beginning of May next year, when I
trust you will be there also, when I will edify you with all my new
experiences of life, in this "other world," and teach you how to dance
like a Shaker. Be a good Christian, forgive me, and write to me again,
and believe me,
Yours truly,
F. A. B.
BRANCHTOWN, June 27th, 1835.
MY DEAREST H----,
... Did I tell you that the other day our farmer's wife sent me word
that she had seen me walking in the garden in a gown that she had liked
very much, and wished I would let her have the pattern of it? This
message surprised me a little, but, upon due reflection, I carried the
gown down to her with an agreeable sense of my own graceful
condescension. My farmer's wife gave me small thanks, and I am sure
thought I had done just what I ought....
I have resumed my riding, and am beginning to feel once more like my
unmarried self. I may have told you that I had some time ago a pretty
thoroughbred mare, spirited and good tempered too; but she turned out
such an inveterate stumbler that I have been obliged to give up riding
her, as, of course, my neck is worth more to me even than my health. So,
this morning I have been taking a most delectable eight miles' trot upon
a huge, high, heavy carriage-horse, who all but shakes my soul out of
my body, but who is steady upon his legs, and whom I shall therefore
patronize till I can be more _genteelly_ mounted with safety.
You bid me study Natural Philosophy ... and ask me what I read; but
since my baby has made her entrance into the world, I neither read,
write, nor cast up accounts, but am as idle, though not nearly as well
dressed, as the lilies of the field; my reading, if ever I take to such
an occupation again, is like, I fear, to be, as it always has been,
rambling, desultory, and unprofitable....
Come, I will take as a sample of my studies, the books just now lying on
my table, all of which I have been reading lately: Alfieri's Life, by
himself, a curious and interesting work; Washington Irving's last book,
"A Tour on the Prairies," rather an ordinary book, upon a not ordinary
subject, but not without sufficiently interesting matter in it too; Dr.
Combe's "Principles of Physiology"; and a volume of Marlowe's plays,
containing "Dr. Faustus." I have just finished Hayward's Translation of
Goethe's "Faust," and wanted to see the old English treatment of the
subject. I have read Marlowe's play with more curiosity than pleasure.
This is, after all, but a small sample of what I read; but if you
remember the complexion of my studies when I was a girl at Heath Farm,
and read Jeremy Taylor and Byron together, I can only say they are still
apt to be of the same heterogeneous quality. But my brain is kept in a
certain state of activity by them, and that, I suppose, is one of the
desirable results of reading. As for writing anything, or things--good
gracious! no, I should think not indeed! It is true, if you allude to
the mechanical process of caligraphy, here is close to my elbow a big
book, in which I enter all passages I meet with in my various readings
tending to elucidate obscure parts of the Bible: I do not mean disputed
points of theology, mysteries, or significations more or less mystical,
but simply any notices whatever which I meet with relating to the
customs of the Jews, their history, their language, the natural features
of their country; and so bearing upon my reading of passages in the Old
Testament. I read my Bible diligently every day, and every day wish more
and more earnestly that I understood what I was reading; but Philip does
not come my way, or draw near and join himself to me as I sit in my
wagon.
I mean this with regard to the Old Testament only, however. The life of
Christ is that portion of the New alone vitally important to me, and
that, thank God, is comparatively comprehensible.
I have just finished writing a long and vehement treatise against negro
slavery, which I wanted to publish with my Journal, but was obliged to
refrain from doing so, lest our fellow-citizens should tear our house
down, and make a bonfire of our furniture--a favorite mode of
remonstrance in these parts with those who advocate the rights of the
unhappy blacks.
You know that the famous Declaration of Independence, which is to all
Americans what Moses commanded God's Law to be to the Israelites, begins
thus: "Whereas all men are born free and equal." Somebody, one day,
asked Jefferson how he reconciled that composition of his to the
existence of slavery in this country; he was completely surprised for a
moment by the question, and then very candidly replied, "By God! I never
thought of that before."
To proceed with a list of my _works_. Here is an article on the writings
of Victor Hugo, another on an American book called "Confessions of a
Poet," a whole heap of verses, among which sundry doggerel epistles to
you; and last, not least, the present voluminous prose performance for
your benefit.
These are some of my occupations: then I do a little housekeeping; then
I do, as the French say, a little music; then I waste a deal of time in
feeding and cleaning a large cageful of canary-birds, of which, as the
pleasure is mine, I do not choose to give the rather disgustful trouble
to any one else; strolling round the garden, watching my bee-hives,
which are full of honey just now; every chink and cranny of the day
between all this desultoriness, is filled with "the baby"; and _study_,
of every sort (but that most prodigious study of any sort, _i.e._, "the
baby,") seems further off from me than ever....
I am looking forward with great pleasure to a visit we intend paying
Miss Sedgwick in September. She is a dear friend of mine, and I am very
happy when with her.
And where will you be next spring, wanderer? for we shall surely be in
England. [Miss St. Leger and Miss Wilson were wintering at Nice for the
health of the latter.] Will you not come back from the ends of the earth
that I may not find the turret-chamber empty, and the Dell without its
dear mistress at Ardgillan?
Dear H----, I shall surely see you, if I live, in less than a year, when
we shall have so much to say to each other that we shall not know where
to begin, and had better not begin, perhaps; for we shall know still
less where to stop.
Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
BRANCHTOWN, October 31st, 1835.
MY DEAREST H----,
I wonder where this will find you, and how long it will be before it
does so. I have been away from home nearly a month, and on my return
found a long letter from you waiting for me.... I cannot believe that
women were intended to suffer as much as they do, and be as helpless as
they are, in child-bearing. In spite of the third chapter of Genesis, I
cannot believe [the beneficent action of ether had not yet mitigated the
female portion of the primeval curse] that all the agony and debility
attendant upon the entrance of a new creature into life were ordained;
but rather that both are the consequences of our many and various abuses
of our constitutions, and infractions of God's natural laws.
The mere items of tight stays, tight garters, tight shoes, tight
waistbands, tight arm-holes, and tight bodices,--of which we are
accustomed to think little or nothing, and under the bad effects of
which, most young women's figures are suffered to attain their growth,
both here and in civilized Europe,--must have a tendency to injure
irreparably the compressed parts, to impede circulation and respiration,
and in many ways which we are not aware of, as well as by the more
obvious evils which they have been proved to produce, destroy the health
of the system, affect disastrously all its functions, and must aggravate
the pains and perils of child-bearing.... Many women here, when they
become mothers, seem to lose looks, health, and strength, and are mere
wrecks, libels upon the great Creator's most wonderful contrivance, the
human frame, which, in their instance, appears utterly unfit for the
most important purpose for which He designed it. Pitiable women!
comparatively without enjoyment or utility in existence. Of course, this
result is attributable to many various causes, and admits of plenty of
individual exceptions, but I believe tight-lacing, want of exercise, and
a perpetual inhaling of over-heated atmosphere, to be among the
former.... They pinch their pretty little feet cruelly, which certainly
need no such _embellishment_, and, of course, cannot walk; and if they
did, in the state of compression to which they submit for their beauty's
sake, would suffer too much inconvenience, if not pain, to derive any
benefit from exercise under such conditions....
When one thinks of the tragical consequences of all this folly, one is
tempted to wish that the legislature would interfere in these matters,
and prevent the desperate injury which is thus done to the race. The
climate, which is the general cause assigned for the want of health of
the American women, seems to me to receive more than its due share of
blame. The Indian women, the squaws, are, I believe, remarkable for the
ease with which they bear their children, the little pain they suffer
comparatively, and the rapidity with which they regain their strength;
but I think in matters of diet, dress, exercise, regularity in eating,
and due ventilation of their houses, the Americans have little or no
regard for the laws of health; and all these causes have their share in
rendering the women physically incapable of their natural work, and
unequal to their natural burdens.
What a chapter on American female health I have treated you to!...
Sometimes I write to you what I think, and sometimes what I do, and
still it seems to me it is the thing I have not written about which you
desire to know.... You ask if I am going through a course of
Channing,--not precisely, but a course of Unitarianism, for I attend a
Unitarian Church. I did so at first by accident (is there such a
thing?), being taken thither by the people to whom I now belong, who are
of that mode of thinking and have seats in a church of that
denomination, and where I hear admirable instruction and exhortation,
and eloquent, excellent preaching, that does my soul good.... I am
acquainted with several clergymen of that profession, who are among the
most enlightened and cultivated men I have met with in this country. Of
course, these circumstances have had some effect upon my mind, but they
have rather helped to develop, than positively cause, the result you
have observed....
In reading my Bible--my written rule of life--I find, of course, much
that I have no means of understanding, and much that there are no means
of understanding, matters of faith.... Doctrinal points do not seem to
me to avail much here: how much they may signify hereafter, who can
tell? But the daily and hourly discharge of our duties, the purity,
humanity, and activity of our lives, do avail much here; all that we can
add to our own worth and each other's happiness is of evident, palpable,
present avail, and I believe will prove of eternal avail to our souls,
who may carry hence all they have gained in this mortal school to as
much higher, nobler, and happier a sphere as the just judgment of
Almighty God shall after death promote them to....
I have been for the last two days discharging a most vexatious species
of duty--vexatious, to be sure, chiefly from my own fault. We have a
household of six servants, and no housekeeper (such an official being
unknown in these parts); a very abundant vegetable garden, dairy, and
poultry-yard; but I have been very neglectful lately of all domestic
details of supply from these various sources, and the consequences have
been manifold abuses in the kitchen, the pantry, and the store-room;
and disorder and waste, more disgraceful to me, even, than to the people
immediately guilty of them. And I have been reproaching myself, and
reproving others, and heartily regretting that, instead of Italian and
music, I had not learned a little domestic economy, and how much bread,
butter, flour, eggs, milk, sugar, and meat ought to be consumed per week
in a family of eight persons, not born ogres.... I am sorry to find that
my physical courage has been very much shaken by my confinement. Whereas
formerly I scarcely knew the sensation of fear, I have grown almost
cowardly on horseback or in a carriage. I do not think anybody would
ever suspect that to be the case, but I know it in my secret soul, and
am much disgusted with myself in consequence.... Our horses ran away
with the carriage the other day, and broke the traces, and threatened us
with some frightful catastrophe. I had the child with me, and though I
did not lose my wits at all, and neither uttered sound nor gave sign of
my terror, after getting her safely out of the carriage and alighting
myself I shook from head to foot, for the first time in my life, with
fear; and so have only just attained my full womanhood: for what says
Shakespeare?--
"A woman naturally born to fears."
... God bless you, dearest friend.
I am ever yours affectionately,
F. A. B.
... I was at first a little disappointed that my baby was not a
man-child, for the lot of woman is seldom happy, owing principally, I
think, to the many serious mistakes which have obtained universal sway
in female education. I do not believe that the just Creator intended one
part of his creatures to lead the sort of lives that many women do....
In this country the difficulty of giving a girl a good education is even
greater, I am afraid, than with us, in some respects. I do not think
even accomplishments are well taught here; at least, they seem to me for
the most part very flimsy, frivolous, and superficial, poor alike both
in quality and quantity. More solid acquirements do not abound among my
female acquaintance either, and the species of ignorance one encounters
occasionally is so absolute and profound as to be almost amusing, and
quite curious; while there is, also, quite enough native shrewdness,
worldly acuteness, and smattering of shallow superficial reading, to
produce a result which is worthless and vulgar to a pitiable degree. Of
course there are exceptions to this narrowness and aridity of
intellectual culture, but either they are really rare exceptions, or I
have been especially unfortunate....
My dear Dorothy, this letter was begun three months ago; I mislaid it,
and in the vanity of my imagination, believed that I had finished and
sent it; and lo! yesterday it turns up--a fragment of which the Post
Office is still innocent: and after all, 'tis a nonsense letter, to send
galloping the wild world over after you. It seems hardly worth while to
put the poor empty creature to the trouble of being sea-sick, and going
so far. However, I know it will not be wholly worthless to you if it
brings you word of my health and happiness, both of which are as good as
any reasonable human mortal can expect....
Kiss dear Harriet for me, and believe me,
Very affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
BRANCHTOWN, March 1st, 1836.
DEAREST H----,
Are you conjecturing as to the fate of three letters which you have
written to me from the Continent? all of which I have duly received, I
speak it with sorrow and shame; and certainly 'tis no proof that my
affection is still the same for you, dear H----, that I have not been
able to rouse myself to the effort of writing to you.... You will ask if
my baby affords me no employment? Yes, endless in prospect and theory,
dear H----; but when people talk of a baby being such an "occupation,"
they talk nonsense, such an _idleness_, they ought to say, such an
interruption to everything like reasonable occupation, and to any
conversation but baby-talk....
You ask of my society. I have none whatever: we live six miles from
town, on a road almost impracticable in the fairest as well as the
foulest weather, and though people occasionally drive out and visit me,
and I occasionally drive in and return their calls, and we
semi-occasionally, at rare intervals, go in to the theatre, or a dance,
I have no friends, no intimates, and no society.
Were I living in Philadelphia, I should be but little better off; for
though, of course, there, as elsewhere, the materials for good society
exist, yet all the persons whom I should like to cultivate are
professionally engaged, and their circumstances require, apparently,
that they should be so without intermission; and they have no time, and,
it seems, but little taste for social enjoyment.
There is here no rich and idle class: there are two or three rich and
idle individuals, who have neither duties nor influence peculiar to
their position, which isolates without elevating them; and who, as might
be expected in such a state of things, are the least respectable members
of the community. The only unprofessional man that I know in
Philadelphia (and he studied, though he does not practice, medicine) who
is also a person of literary taste and acquirement, has lamented to me
that all his early friends and associates having become absorbed in
their several callings, whenever he visits them he feels that he is
diverting them from the labor of their lives, and the earning of their
daily bread.
No one that I belong to takes the slightest interest in literary
pursuits; and though I feel most seriously how desirable it is that I
should study, because I positively languish for intellectual activity,
yet what would under other circumstances be a natural pleasure, is apt
to become an effort and a task when those with whom one lives does not
sympathize with one's pursuits.... Without the stimulus of example,
emulation, companionship, or sympathy, I find myself unable to study
with any steady purpose; however, in the absence of internal vigor, I
have borrowed external support, and on Monday next I am going to begin
to read Latin with a master.... Any pursuit to which I am compelled will
be very welcome to me, and I have chosen that in preference to German,
as mentally more bracing, and therefore healthier.
I have already described what calls itself my garden here--three acres
of kitchen-garden, and a quarter of an acre of flower-garden, divided
into three straight strips, bordered with mangy box, and separated from
the vegetables by a white-washed paling. I am the more provoked with
this, because there are certain capabilities about the place; money is
spent in keeping it up, and three men, entitled gardeners, are
constantly at work on it; and it is not want of means, but of taste and
knowledge and care, that makes it what it is. The piece of coarse grass
dignified by the name of a lawn, in front of the house, is mowed twice
in the whole course of the summer; of course, during the interval, it
looks as if we were raising a crop of poor hay under our drawing-room
windows. However, the gardening of Heaven is making the whole earth
smile just now; and the lights and shadows of the sky, and wild flowers
and verdure of the woods are beneficently beautiful, and make my spirit
sing for joy, in spite of the little that men have done here gratefully
to improve Heaven's gifts. This is not audacious, for Adam and Eve
landscape-gardened in Paradise, you know; and I wish some little of
their craft were to be found among their descendants hereabouts.
My paper is at an end: do I tell you "nothing of my mind and soul"?
What, then, is all this that I have been writing? Is it not telling you
more than if I were to attempt to detail to you methodically,
circumstantially (and perhaps unconsciously quite falsely), the state of
either?...
I am expecting a visit from Dr. Channing, whom I love and revere. After
reading a sermon of his before going to bed the other night, I dreamt
towards morning that I was in Heaven, from whence I was literally pulled
down and awakened to get up and go to church, which, you will allow, was
a ridiculous instance of bathos and work of supererogation. But, dear
me, that dream was very pleasant! Rising, and rising, and rising, into
ever-increasing light and space, not with effort and energy, as if
flying, but calmly and steadily soaring, as if one's _property_ was to
float upwards, _mounting eternally_. I send you my dream across the
Atlantic; there is something of my "mind and soul" in that.