Ever affectionately yours,
F. A. B.
[After my first introduction to Dr. Channing, I never was within
reach of him without enjoying the honor of his intercourse and the
privilege of hearing him preach. I think he was nowhere seen or
heard to greater advantage than at his cottage near Newport, in the
neighborhood of which a small church afforded the high advantage of
his instruction to a rural congregation, as different as possible
from the highly cultivated Bostonians who flocked to hear him
whenever his state of health permitted him to preach in the city.
King's Chapel, as it originally was called, dating back to days when
the colony of Massachusetts still acknowledged a king, was dedicated
at first to the Episcopal service of the Church of England, and I
believe the English Liturgy in some form was the only ritual used in
it. But when I first went to America, Boston and the adjacent
College, Cambridge, were professedly Unitarian, and the service in
King's Chapel was such a modification of the English Liturgy as was
compatible with that profession: a circumstance which enabled its
frequenters to unite the advantage of Dr. Channing's eloquent
preaching with the use of that book of prayer and praise unsurpassed
and unsurpassable in its simple sublimity and fervid depth of
devotion.
I retain a charmingly comical remembrance of the last visit I paid
Dr. Channing, at Newport; when, wishing to take me into his garden,
and unwilling to keep me waiting while he muffled himself up,
according to his necessary usual precautions, he caught up Mrs.
Channing's bonnet and shawl, and sheltering his eyes from the glare
of the sun by pulling the bonnet well down over his nose, and
folding the comfortable female-wrap (it was a genuine woman's-shawl,
and not an ambiguous plaid of either or no sex) well over his
breast, he walked round and round his garden, in full view of the
high-road, discoursing with the peculiar gentle solemnity and
deliberate eloquence habitual to him, on subjects the gravity of
which was in laughable contrast with his costume, the absurdity of
which only made me smile when it recurred to my memory, after I had
taken leave of him and ceased hearing his wise words.]
MY DEAREST HARRIET,
... There is one interest and occupation of an essentially practical
nature, such as would give full scope to the most active energies and
intellect, in which I am becoming passionately interested,--I mean the
cause of the Southern negroes.
We live by their labor; and though the estate is not yet ours (elder
members of the family having a life interest in it), it will be our
property one day, and a large portion of our income is now derived from
it.
I was told the other day, that the cotton lands in Georgia, where our
plantation is situated, were exhausted; but that in Alabama there now
exist wild lands along the Mississippi, where any one possessing the
negroes necessary to cultivate them, might, in the course of a few
years, realize an enormous fortune; and asked, jestingly, if I should be
willing to go thither. I replied, in most solemn earnest, that I would
go with delight, if we might take that opportunity of at once placing
our slaves upon a more humane and Christian footing. Oh, H----! I can
not tell you with what joy it would fill me, if we could only have the
energy and courage, the humanity and justice, to do this: and I believe
it might be done.
Though the blacks may not be taught to read and write, there is no law
which can prevent one from living amongst them, from teaching them
all--and how much that is!--that personal example and incessant personal
influence can teach. I would take them there, and I would at once
explain to them my principles and my purpose: I would tell them that in
so many years I expected to be able to free them, but that those only
should be liberated whose conduct I perceived during that time would
render their freedom prosperous to themselves, and safe to the
community. In the mean time I would allot each a profit on his labor; I
would allow them leisure and property of their own; I would establish a
Savings Bank for them, so that at the end of their probation, those into
whom I had been able to instill industrious and economical habits should
be possessed of a small fund wherewith to begin the world; I would
remain there myself always, and, with God's assistance and blessing, I
do believe a great good might be done. How I wish--oh, how I wish we
might but make the experiment! I believe in my soul that this is our
peculiar duty in life. We all have some appointed task, and assuredly it
can never be that we, or any other human beings were created merely to
live surrounded with plenty, blessed with every advantage of worldly
circumstance, and the ties of happy social and domestic relations,--it
cannot be that anybody ought to have all this, and yet do nothing for
it; nor do I believe that any one's duties are bounded by the
half-animal instincts of loving husband, wife, or children, and the
negative virtue of wronging no man: besides we _are_ villainously
wronging many men.... What would I not give to be able to awaken in
others my own feeling of this heavy responsibility!
I have just done reading Dr. Channing's book on slavery; it is like
everything else of his, written in the pure spirit of Christianity, with
judgment, temper and moderation, yet with abundant warmth and energy. It
has been answered with some cleverness, but in a sneering, satirical
tone, I hear. I have not yet read this reply, but intend doing so;
though it matters little what is said by the defenders of such a system:
truth is God, and must prevail.
Enough of this side of the water. Your wanderings abroad, dear H----,
created a feeling of many mingled melancholies in my mind: in the first
place, you are so very, very far off, the dead seem scarcely further;
perhaps they indeed are nearer to us, for I believe we are surrounded by
"a cloud of witnesses." Your description of those southern lands is sad
to me. I have always had a passionate yearning for those regions where
man has been so glorious, and Nature is so still. I thought of your
various emotions at my uncle's grave at Lausanne. Life seems to me so
strange, that the chain of events which forms even the most commonplace
existence has, in its unexpectedness, something of the marvelous.
I rejoice that dear Dorothy is benefited by your traveling, and pray
for every blessing on you both. As to the possibility of my coming to
England and not finding you there, my dear H----; I can say nothing and
you must do what you think right.
God bless you.
I am ever yours,
F. A. B.
[The ideas and expectations, with which I entered upon my Northern
country life, near Philadelphia, were impossible of fulfillment, and
simply ridiculous under the circumstances. Those with which I
contemplated an existence on our Southern estate, or the new one
suggested in this letter, in the State of Alabama, were not only
ridiculously impossible, but would speedily have found their only
result in the ruin, danger, and very probably death, of all
concerned in the endeavor to realize them.
The laws of the Southern States would certainly have been
forestalled by the speedier action of lynch-law, in putting a stop
to my experimental abolitionism. And I am now able to understand,
and appreciate, what, when I wrote this letter, I had not the
remotest suspicion of,--the amazement and dismay, the terror and
disgust, with which such theories as those I have expressed in it
must have filled every member of the American family with which my
marriage had connected me; I must have appeared to them nothing but
a mischievous madwoman.]
BRANCHTOWN, March 28th, 1836.
MY DEAREST H----,
You say that thinking of you makes me fancy that I have written to you:
not quite so, for no day passes with me without many thoughts of you,
and I certainly am well aware that I do not write to you daily.... But,
dearest H----, once for all, believe this: whether I am silent
altogether, or simply unsatisfactory in my communications, I love you
dearly, and hope for a happier intercourse with you,--if never
here--hereafter, in that more perfect state, where, endowed with higher
natures, our communion with those we love will, I believe, be infinitely
more intimate than it can be here, subject as it is to all the
imperfections of our present existence.
You laugh at me for what you consider my optimism, my incredulity with
regard to the evils of this present life, and seem to think I am making
out a case of no little absurdity in ascribing so much of what we suffer
to ourselves. But I do not think my view of the matter is altogether
visionary. Even from disease and death, those stern and inexorable
conditions of our present state, spring, as from bitter roots, some of
the sweetest virtues of which our nature is capable; and I do not
believe it to be the great and good God's appointment that the earth
should be loaded as it is with barren suffering and sorrow. And as to
believing that women were intended to lead the helpless, ailing, sickly,
unprofitable, and unpleasurable lives, which so many of them seem to
lead in this country, I think it would be a direct libel on our Creator
to profess such a creed....
I walked into town, the other day, a distance of only six miles, and was
very much tired by the expedition: to be sure I am not a good walker,
riding being my _natural_ exercise, in which I persist, in spite of
stumbling and shying horses, high-roads three feet deep in dust, and
by-roads three feet deep in mud, at one and the same time. Taking
exercise has become, instead of a pleasure, a sometimes rather irksome
duty to me; a lonely ride upon a disagreeable horse not being a great
enjoyment; but I know that my health has its reward, and I persevere....
The death of an elderly lady puts us in possession of our property,
which she had held in trust during her life.... Increase of fortune
brings necessarily increased responsibility and occupation, and for that
I am not sorry, though the circumstance of the death of this relation,
of whom I knew and had seen but little, has been fruitful in
disappointments to me.... In the first place, I have been obliged to
forego a visit from my delightful friend, Miss Sedgwick, who was coming
to spend some time with me; this, in my lonely life, is a real
privation. In the next place, our proposed voyage to England is
indefinitely postponed, and from a thing so near as to be reckoned a
certainty (for we were to have sailed the 20th of next month), it has
withdrawn itself into the misty regions of a remote futurity, of the
possible events of which we cannot even guess....
We have had a most unprecedented winter; the cold has been dreadful, and
the snow, even now, in some places, lies in drifts from three to five
feet deep. There is no spring here; the winter is with us to-day, and
to-morrow the heat will be oppressive; and in a week everything will be
like summer, without the full-fledged foliage to temper the glare.
I have taken up your letter to see if there are any positive questions
in it, that I may not this time be guilty of not replying to you while I
answer it....
I do not give up my music quite, but generally, after dinner, pass an
hour at the piano, not so much from the pleasure it now gives me, as
from the conviction that it is wrong to give up even the smallest of
our resources; and also because, as wise Goethe says, "We are too apt to
suffer the mean things of life to overgrow the finer nature within us,
therefore it is expedient that at least once a day we read a little
poetry, or sing a song, or look at a picture." Upon this principle, I
still continue to play and sing sometimes, but no longer with any great
pleasure to myself.
Good-bye, dearest H----.... Oh, I should like to see you once again!
I am ever yours,
F. A. B.
BRANCHTOWN, July 31st, 1836.
MY DEAREST H----,
You ask me if I do not write anything; yes, sometimes reviews, for which
I am solicited. It is an occupation, but returns neither reputation, the
articles being anonymous; nor remuneration, as they are also gratuitous;
and I do it without much interest, simply not to be idle. As to anything
of more literary pretension, I never shall attempt it again: I do not
think nature intended mothers to be authors of anything but their
babies; because, as I told you, though a baby is not an "occupation," it
is an absolute hindrance to everything else that can be called so. I
cannot read a book through quietly for mine; judge, therefore, how
little likely I am to write one....
You ask me if I take no pleasure in gardening; and suggest the cutting
of carnations and raising of lettuce, as wholesome employments for me.
The kitchen-garden is really the only well-attended-to horticulture of
this place. The gardener raises early lettuces and cauliflowers in
frames, which remunerate him, either by their sale in market or by
prizes that he may obtain for them. His zeal in floriculture is less; as
you will understand, when I tell you that, discovering some early
violets blowing along a sunny wall in the kitchen-garden, and seizing
joyfully upon them, with reproaches to him for not having let me know
that there were any, he replied--"letting fall a lip of much
contempt,"--"Well, ma'am, I quite forgot them violets. You see, them
flowers is such frivolous creatures." Profane fellow!
I spend generally about three hours a day pottering in my garden, but,
alas! my gardening consists chiefly of slaughter. The heat of the
climate generates the most enormous quantity of insects, for the
effectual prevention or destruction of which the gardeners in these
parts have yet discovered no means. The consequence is that, in spite of
my daily executions, every shrub and every flower-bush is fuller of
_bugs_ (so they here indiscriminately term these displeasing beasts)
than of leaves. They begin by _eating up_ the roses bodily (these are
called distinctively, rose-bugs; of course, they have a pet name, but
it's Latin, and is only used by their familiars); they then attack and
devour the large white lilies, and honeysuckles; finally, they spread
themselves impartially all over the garden, and having literally
stripped that bare, are now attacking the fruit. It is an insect which I
have never seen in England; a species of beetle, much smaller, but not
unlike the cockchafer we are familiar with. Their number is really
prodigious, and they seem to me to propagate with portentous rapidity,
for every day, in spite of the sweeping made by the gardener and myself,
they appear as thick as ever. But for the dread of their coming in still
greater force next year, if we do not continue our work of
extermination, I should almost be tempted to give it up in despair.
I have a few flower-beds that I have had made, and keep under my own
especial care; also some pretty baskets, which I have had expressly
manufactured with exceeding difficulty; these, filled with earth, and
planted with roses, I have placed on the stumps of some large trees,
which were cut down last spring and form nice rustic pedestals; and thus
I contrive to produce something of an English garden effect. But the
climate is against me. The winter is so terribly cold that nothing at
all delicate can stand it unless cased up in straw-matting and manure.
We have, therefore, no evergreen shrubs, such as the lauristinus, and
Portugal and variegated laurels, which form our English garden
shrubberies; nor do they seem to replace these by the native growth of
their own woods, the kalmias and rhododendrons, but principally by hardy
evergreens of the fir and pine species, which are native and abundant
here. Then, with scarcely any interval of spring to moderate the sudden
extreme change, the winter becomes summer--summer, without its screen of
thick leaves to shelter one from the blazing, scorching heat. Everything
starts into bloom, as it were, at once; and, instead of lasting even
their proverbially short date of beauty, the flowers vanish as suddenly
as they appeared, under the fierce influence of the heat and the
devastations of the swarming insects it engenders.
To make up for this, I have here almost an avenue of fine lemon-trees,
in cases; humming-birds, which are a marvel and enchantment to me; and
fire-flies, which are exquisite in the summer evenings.
I have, too, a fine hive of bees, which has produced already this spring
two strong young swarms, whose departure from the parent hive formed a
very interesting event in my novel experiences; especially as one of
the stablemen, who joined the admiring domestic crowd witnessing the
process, proved to be endowed with the immunity some persons have from
the stings of those insects, and was able to take them by handfuls from
the tree where they were clinging, and put them on the stand where the
bee-hive prepared for them was placed. I had read of this individual
peculiarity with the incredulity of ignorance (incomparably stronger
than that of knowledge); but seeing is believing, and when my
fiery-haired Irish groom seized the bees by the handful, of course there
was no denying the fact.
There is a row of large old acacia-trees near the house, inhabited by
some most curious ants, who are gradually hollowing the trees out. I can
hear them at work as I stand by the poor vegetables, and the grass all
round is literally whitened with the fine sawdust made by these
hard-working little carpenters. The next phenomenon will be that the
trees will tumble on my head, while I am pursuing my entomological
studies. [To avert this catastrophe, the trees had all to be cut
down].... Dear H----, I never contemplated sacrificing my child's, or
anybody else's, health to my desire for "doing good." There is a
difference between living all the year round on a rice-swamp, and
retiring during the summer to the pinewood highlands, which are healthy,
even in the hot season; nor am I at all inclined to advocate the neglect
of duties close at hand for quixotical devotion to remote ones. But you
must remember that _we are slave owners_, and live by slave-labor, and
if the question of slavery does not concern us, in God's name whom does
it concern? In my conviction, that is _our_ special concern.... There is
a Convention about to meet at Harrisburg, the seat of Government of this
State, Pennsylvania, for the election of Van Buren, the Democratic
candidate for the Presidency....
The politics of this country are in a strange, uncertain state, but I
have left myself no room to enlarge upon them.
I have just finished reading Judge Talfourd's "Ion," and Lamartine's
"Pelerinage" to Palestine. God bless you, dearest H----.
Ever yours,
F. A. B.
[Sydney Smith said that he never desired to live in a hot climate,
as he disliked the idea of processions of ants traversing his bread
and butter. The month of June had hardly begun in the year 1874,
when I was residing close to the home of my early married life,
Butler Place, when the ants appeared in such numbers in the
dining-room sideboards, closets, cupboards, etc., that we were
compelled to isolate all cakes, biscuits, sugar, preserves, fruit,
and whatever else was kept in them, by placing the vessels
containing all such things in dishes of water--moats, in fact, by
which the enemy was cut off from these supplies. Immediately to
these succeeded swarms of fire-flies, beautiful and wonderful in
their evening apparition of showers of sparks from every bush and
shrub, and after sunset rising in hundreds from the grass, and
glittering against the dark sky as if the Milky Way had gone mad and
taken to dancing; but even these shining creatures were not pleasant
in the house by day, where they were merely like ill-shaped ugly
black flies. These were followed by a world of black beetles of
every size and shape, with which our room was alive as soon as the
lights were brought in the evening. Net curtains, and muslin
stretched over wooden frames, and fixed like blinds in the
window-sashes, did indeed keep out the poor mouthful of stifling air
for which we were gasping, but did not exclude these intolerable
visitors, who made their way in at every crack and crevice and
momentarily opened door, and overran with a dreadful swiftness the
floor of the room in every direction; occasionally taking to the
more agreeable exercise of flying, at which, however, they did not
seem quite expert, frequently tumbling down and struggling by twos
and threes upon one's hair, neck, and arms, and especially attracted
to unfortunate females by white or light-colored muslin gowns, which
became perfect receptacles for them as they rushed and rattled over
the matting. After the reign of the beetles came that of the flies,
a pest to make easily credible the ancient story of the Egyptian
plague. Every picture and looking-glass frame, every morsel of
gilding, every ornamental piece of metal about the rooms, had to be
covered, like the tarts in a confectioner's shop, with yellow gauze;
whatever was not so protected--unglazed photographs, the surface of
oil pictures, necessary memoranda, and papers on one's
writing-table--became black with the specks and spots left by these
creatures. Plates of fly-paper poison disfigured, to but small
purpose, every room; and at evening, by candlelight, while one was
reading or writing, the universal hum and buzz was amazing, and put
one in mind of the--
"Hushed by buzzing night-flies to thy slumber"
of poor King Henry. The walls and ceiling of the servants' offices
and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted
white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a
yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as
soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four
dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably
diminishing their number.
These flies accompanied our whole summer, from June till the end of
October. Before, however, the beginning of the latter month, the
mosquitoes made their appearance; and though, owing to the peculiar
dryness of the summer of 1874, they were much less numerous than
usual, there came enough of them to make our days miserable and our
nights sleepless.
These are the common indoor insects of a common summer in this part
of Pennsylvania, to which should be added the occasional visits of
spiders of such dimensions as to fill me with absolute terror; I
have, unfortunately, a positive physical antipathy to these
strangely-mannered animals (the only resemblance, I fear, between
myself and Charles Kingsley), some of whose peculiarities, besides
their infinitely dexterous and deliberate processes for ensnaring
their prey, make them unspeakably repulsive to me,--indeed, to a
degree that persuades me that, at some former period of my
existence, "which, indeed, I can scarcely remember," as Rosalind
says, I must have been a fly who perished by spider-craft.
It is not, however, only in these midland and comparatively warmer
states of North America that this profusion of insect life is found;
the heat of the summer, even in Massachusetts, is more than a match
in its life-engendering force, for the destructive agency of the
winter's cold; and in the woods, on the high hill-tops of Berkshire,
spiders of the most enormous size abound. I found two on my own
place, the extremities of whose legs could not be covered by a large
inverted tumbler; one of these perfectly swarmed with parasitical
small spiders, a most hideous object! and one day, on cutting down a
hollow pine tree, my gardener called me to look at a perfect jet of
white ants, which like a small fountain, welled up from the middle
of the decayed stump, and flowed over it in a thick stream to the
ground. As far north as Lenox, in Berkshire, the summer heat brings
humming-birds and rattlesnakes; and of less deadly, but very little
less disagreeable, serpent-beasts, I have encountered there no fewer
than eight, in a short mile walk, on a warm September morning,
genial even for snakes.