entomology of an average Pennsylvania summer. But there came a year,
a horrible year, shortly before my last return to England, when the
Colorado beetle (_alias_ potato-bug), having marched over the whole
width of the continent, from the far West to the Atlantic
sea-board, made its appearance in the neighborhood of Philadelphia.
These loathsome creatures, varying in size from a sixpence to a
shilling, but rather oval than round in shape, of a pinkish-colored
flesh, covered with a variegated greenish-brown shell, came in such
numbers that the paths in the garden between the vegetable beds
seemed to _swim_ with them, and made me giddy to look at them. They
devoured everything, beginning with the potatoes; and having
devastated the fields and garden, betook themselves to swarming up
the walls of the house, for what purpose they alone could tell--but
didn't. In vain men with ladders went up and scraped them down into
buckets of hot water; they seemed inexhaustible, and filled me with
such disgust that I felt as if I must fly, and abandon the place to
them. I do not think this pest lasted much more than a week; then,
having devoured, they departed, still making towards the sea, and
were described to me by a gentleman who drove along the road, as
literally covering the highway, like a disbanded army. One's
familiar sensations under this visitation were certainly "crawling
and creeping"; it is a great pity that flying might not have been
added to them.]
BRANCHTOWN, Monday, August 29th, 1836.
DEAREST H----,
You are in Italy! in that land which, from the earliest time I can
remember, has been the land of my dreams; and it seems strange to me
that you should be there, and I here; for when we were together the
realities of life, the matter-of-fact interests of every-day existence
always attracted your sympathies more than mine; nor do I remember ever
hearing you mention, with the longing which possessed me, Italy, or the
shores of the Mediterranean.... If, as I believe, there is a special
Providence in "the fall of a sparrow," then your and my whereabouts are
not the result of accidental circumstance, but the providential
appointment of God. Dearest H----, your life's lesson just now is to be
taught you through variety of scene, the daily intercourse of your most
precious friend [Miss Dorothy Wilson], and the beautiful and lofty
influences of the countries in which you are traveling and sojourning:
and mine is to be learnt from a page as different as the chapters of
Lindley Murray's Grammar are different from those of a glorious,
illuminated, old vellum book of legends. I not only believe through my
intuitive instincts, but also through my rational convictions, that my
own peculiar task is the wholesomest and best for me, and though I
might desire to be with you in Italy, I am content to be without you in
America.... How much all separation and disappointment tend to draw us
nearer to God! To me upon this earth you seem almost lost--you, and
those yet nearer and dearer to me than yourself; your very images are
becoming dim, and vague, and blurred in outline to my memory, like faded
pictures or worn-out engravings. I think of you all almost as of the
dead, and the feverish desire to be once more with you and them, from
which I have suffered sometimes, is gradually dying away in my heart;
and now when I think of any of you, my dear distant ones, it is as
folded with me together in our Heavenly Father's arms, watched over by
His care, guarded over by His merciful love, and though my imagination
no longer knows where to seek or find you on earth, I meet you under the
shadow of His Almighty Wings, and know that we are together--now--and
forever.
[To those who know the rate of intercourse between Europe and
America now, these expressions of the painful sense of distance from
my country and friends, under which I suffered, must seem almost
incomprehensible,--now, when to go to Europe seems to most Americans
the easiest of summer trips, involving hardly more than a week's sea
voyage; when letters arrive almost every other day by some of the
innumerable steamers flying incessantly to and fro, and weaving,
like living shuttles, the woof and warp of human communication
between the continents; and the submarine telegraph shoots daily
tidings from shore to shore of that terrible Atlantic, with swift
security below its storms. But when I wrote this to my friend, no
words were carried with miraculous celerity under the dividing
waves; letters could only be received once a month, and from thirty
to thirty-seven days was the average voyage of the sailing packets
which traversed the Atlantic. Men of business went to and fro upon
their necessary affairs, but very few Americans went to Europe, and
still fewer Europeans went to America, to spend leisure, or to seek
pleasure; and American and English women made the attempt still
seldomer than the men. The distance between the two worlds, which
are now so near to each other, was then immense.]
Let me answer your questions, dear H----; though when I strive most
entirely to satisfy you, I seem to have left out the very things you
wish to know....
I am reading Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici." What charming old
English it is! How many fantastical and how many beautiful things there
are in it!
Yesterday I walked down, with a basket of cucumbers and some beautiful
flowers, to Mrs. F----'s, the wife of the Unitarian clergyman whose
church I attend, and who is an excellent and highly valued friend of
mine; and I sat two hours with her and another lady, going through an
interminable discussion on the subject of intellectual gifts: the very
various proportions in which they were distributed, and the measure of
consciousness of superiority which was inevitable, and therefore
allowable, in the possessor of an unusual amount of such endowments....
I wish Mr. and Mrs. F---- lived near me instead of being merely come to
spend a few weeks in this neighborhood.... I do not keep a diary any
more; I do not find chronicling my days helps me to live them, and for
many reasons I have given up my journal. Perhaps I may resume it when we
set out for the South....
We are now altogether proprietors of this place, and I really think, as
I am often told, that it is getting to be prettier and better kept than
any other in this neighborhood. It is certainly very much improved, and
no longer looks quite unlike an English place, but there are yet a
thousand things to be done to it, in the contemplation of which I try to
forget its present mongrel appearance.
Now, dear, I have answered as many of your questions as my paper allows.
Do not, I beseech you, send me back word that my letter was "thoroughly
unsatisfactory."
God bless you.
I am ever your affectionate
F. A. B.
BRANCHTOWN, Wednesday, October 5th.
MY DEAREST H----,
It is a great disappointment to me that I am not going to the South this
winter. There is no house, it seems, on the plantation but a small
cottage, inhabited by the overseer, where the two gentlemen proprietors
can be accommodated, but where there is no room for me, my baby, and her
nurse, without unhousing the poor overseer and his family altogether.
The nearest town to the estate, Brunswick, is fifteen miles off, and a
wretched hole, where I am assured it will be impossible to obtain a
decent lodging for me, so that it has been determined to leave me and
baby behind, and the owner will go with his brother, but without us, on
his expedition to Negroland. As far as the child is concerned, I am well
satisfied; ... but I would undergo much myself to be able to go among
those people. I know that my hands would be in a great measure tied. I
certainly could not free them, nor could I even pay them for their
labor, or try to instruct them, even to the poor degree of teaching them
to read. But mere personal influence has a great efficiency; moral
revolutions of the world have been wrought by those who neither wrote
books nor read them; the Divinest Power was that of One Character, One
Example; that Character and Example which we profess to call our Rule of
life. The power of individual personal qualities is really the great
power, for good or evil, of the world; and it is upon this ground that I
feel convinced that, in spite of all the cunningly devised laws by which
the negroes are walled up in a mental and moral prison, from which there
is apparently no issue, the personal character and daily influence of a
few Christian men and women living among them would put an end to
slavery, more speedily and effectually than any other means whatever.
You do not know how profoundly this subject interests me, and engrosses
my thoughts: it is not alone the cause of humanity that so powerfully
affects my mind; it is, above all, the deep responsibility in which we
are involved, and which makes it a matter of such vital paramount
importance to me.... It seems to me that we are possessed of power and
opportunity to do a great work; how can I not feel the keenest anxiety
as to the use we make of this talent which God has entrusted us with? We
dispose of the physical, mental, and moral condition of some hundreds of
our fellow-creatures. How can I bear to think that this great occasion
of doing good, of dealing justly, of setting a noble example to others,
may be wasted or neglected by us? How can I bear to think that the day
will come, as come it surely must, when we shall say: We once had it in
our power to lift this burden from four hundred heads and hearts, and
stirred no finger to do it; but carelessly and indolently, or selfishly
and cowardly, turned our back upon so great a duty and so great a
privilege.
I cannot utter what I feel upon this subject, but I pray to God to pour
His light into our hearts, and enable us to do that which is right.
In every point of view, I feel that we ought to embrace the cause of
these poor people. They will be free assuredly, and that before many
years; why not make friends of them instead of deadly enemies? Why not
give them at once the wages of their labor? Is it to be supposed that a
man will work more for fear of the lash than he will for the sake of an
adequate reward? As a matter of policy, and to escape personal violence,
or the destruction of one's property, it were well not to urge
them--ignorant, savage, and slavish, as they are--into rebellion. As a
mere matter of worldly interest, it would be wise to make it worth their
while to work with zeal and energy for hire, instead of listlessly
dragging their reluctant limbs under a driver's whip.
Oh, how I wish I was a man! How I wish I owned these slaves! instead of
being supported (disgracefully, as it seems to me) by their unpaid
labor....
You tell me, dear H----, that you are aged and much altered, and you
doubt if I should know you. That's a fashion of speech--you doubt no
such thing, and know that I should know you if your face were as red as
the fiery inside of Etna, and your hair as white as its snowy shoulders.
I have had the skin peeled off the back of my neck with standing in the
sun here, and my whole face and hands are burnt, by constant exposure,
to as fine a coffee-color as you would wish to see of a summer's day.
Yet, after all, I got as sharp a sunstroke on my shoulders, driving on a
coach-box by the side of Loch Lomond once, as could be inflicted upon me
by this American sky. The women here, who are careful, above all things,
of their appearance, marvel extremely at my exposing myself to the
horrors of tanning, freckling, etc.; but with hair and eyes as dark as
mine, a gipsy complexion doesn't signify, and I prefer burning my skin
to suffocating under silk handkerchiefs, sun-bonnets, and two or three
gauze veils, and sitting, as the ladies here do, in the dark till the
sun has declined. I am certainly more like a Red Indian squaw than when
last you saw me; but that change doesn't signify, it's only skin
deep....
You speak of the beauty of the Italian sky, and say that to pass the
mornings with such pictures, and the evenings with such sunsets, is
matter to be grateful for.
I have been spending a month with my friends, the Sedgwicks, in a
beautiful hilly region in the State of Massachusetts; and I never looked
abroad upon the woods and valleys and lakes and mountains without
thinking how great a privilege it was to live in the midst of such
beautiful things. I felt this the more strongly, perhaps, because the
country in my own neighborhood here is by no means so varied and
interesting.
I am glad you are to have the pleasure of meeting your own people
abroad, and thus carrying your home with you: give my kindest love to
them all whenever you see them....
I have not been hot this summer: the weather has been rainy and cold to
a most uncommon degree; and I have rejoiced therefore, and so have the
trees and the grass, which have contrived to look green to the end of
the chapter, as with us....
If I am not allowed to go to the South this winter, it is just possible
that I may spend three months in England.
Good-bye, my dearest H----.
I am ever yours,
F. A. B.
[This was the last letter I wrote to my friend from America this
year; it was decided that I should not go to the South, and so
lonely a winter as I should have had to spend in the country being
rather a sad prospect, it was also decided that I should return to
England, and remain during my temporary widowhood with my own family
in London.
I sailed at the beginning of November, and reached England, after a
frightfully stormy passage of eight and twenty days. I and my
child's nurse were the only women on board the packet, and there
were very few male passengers. The weather was dreadful; we had
violent contrary winds almost the whole time, and one terrific gale
that lasted nearly four days; during which time I and my poor little
child and her nurse were prisoners in the cabin, where we had not
even the consolation of daylight, the skylights being all closely
covered to protect us from the sea, which broke all over the decks.
I begged so hard one day to have the covering removed, and a ray of
daylight admitted, if only for five minutes, that I was indulged,
and had reason to repent it; the sea almost instantly broke the
windows and poured down upon us like Niagara, and I was thankful to
be covered up again as quick as possible in dry darkness.
This storm was made memorable to me by an experience of which I have
read one or two descriptions, by persons who have been similarly
affected in seasons of great peril, and which I have never ceased
regretting that I did not make a record of as soon as possible; but
the lapse of time, though it has no doubt enfeebled, has in no other
way altered, the impressions I received.
The tempest was the first I had ever witnessed, and was undoubtedly
a more formidable one than I have ever since encountered in eighteen
passages across the Atlantic. I was told, after it was over, that
the vessel had sprung its mainmast--a very serious injury to a
sailing ship, I suppose, by the mode in which it was spoken of; and
for three days we were unable to carry any sail whatever for the
fury of the wind.
At the height of the storm, in the middle of a night which my
faithful friend and servant, Margery O'Brien, passed in prayer,
without once rising from her knees, the frightful uproar of the
elements and the delirious plunging and rearing of the convulsed
ship convinced me that we should inevitably be lost. As the vessel
reeled under a tremendous shock, the conviction of our impending
destruction became so intense in my mind, that my imagination
suddenly presented to me the death-vision, so to speak, of my whole
existence.
This kind of phenomenon has been experienced and recorded by persons
who have gone through the process of drowning, and afterwards
recovered; or have otherwise been in imminent peril of their lives,
and have left curious and highly interesting accounts of their
sensations.
I should find it impossible adequately to describe the vividness
with which my whole past life presented itself to my perception; not
as a procession of events, filling a succession of years, but as a
whole--a total--suddenly held up to me as in a mirror, indescribably
awful, combined with the simultaneous acute and almost despairing
sense of _loss_, of _waste_, so to speak, by which it was
accompanied. This instantaneous, involuntary retrospect was followed
by a keen and rapid survey of the religious belief in which I had
been trained, and which then seemed to me my only important
concern....
The tension, physical and mental, of the very short space of time in
which these processes took place, gave way to a complete exhaustion,
in which, strangely enough, I found the sort of satisfaction that a
child does in crooning itself to sleep, in singing, one after
another, every song I could call to memory; and my repertory was a
very numerous one, composed of English, Scotch, Irish, Welsh,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish specimens, which I "chanted
loudly, chanted lowly," sitting on the floor, through the rest of
the night, till the day broke, and my sense of danger passed away,
but not the recollection of the never-to-be-forgotten experience it
had brought to me.
I have often since wondered if any number of men going into action
on a field of battle are thus impressed. Several thousands of human
beings, with the apparition of their past life thus suddenly
confronting them, is not a bad suggestion of the Day of Judgment.
I have heard it asserted that the experience I have here described
was only that of persons who, in the full vigor of life and health,
were suddenly put in peril of immediate death; and that whatever
regret, repentance, or remorse might afflict the last moments of
elderly persons, or persons prepared by previous disease for
dissolution, this species of revelation, by the sudden glare of
death, of the whole past existence was not among the phenomena of
death-beds.
As a curious instance of the very mistaken inferences frequently
drawn from our actions by others, when the storm had sufficiently
subsided to allow of our very kind friend, the captain, leaving his
post of vigilant watch on deck, to come and inquire after his poor
imprisoned female passengers, he congratulated me upon my courage.
"For," said he, "at the very height of the storm, I was told that
you were heard singing away like a bird."
I am not sure that I succeeded in making him understand that that
was only because I had been as frightened as I was capable of being,
and, having touched the extremest point of terror, I had subsided
into a sort of ecstacy of imbecility, in which I had found my
"singing voice."
I returned to my home and family, and stayed with them in London all
the time of my visit to England, which, from unforeseen
circumstances, was prolonged far beyond what had originally been
intended.
I returned to the intercourse of all my former friends and
acquaintance, and to the London society of the day, which was full
of delightful interest for me, after the solitary and completely
unsocial life I had been leading for the two previous years.
My friend, Miss S----, was still abroad, and her absence was the
only drawback to the pleasure and happiness of my return to my own
country.
My father resided then in Park Place, St. James's, in a house which
has since become part of the Park Hotel; we have always had a
tending towards that particular street, which undoubtedly is one of
the best situated in London: quiet in itself, not being a
thoroughfare, shut in by the pleasant houses that look into the
Green Park below Arlington Street, and yet close to St. James's
Street, and all the gay busyness of the West End, Pall Mall, and
Piccadilly.
While we were living at No. 10 Park Place, my cousin, Horace Twiss,
was our opposite neighbor, at No. 5, which became my own residence
some years afterwards; and, since then, my sister had her London
abode for several years at No. 9. The street seems always a sort of
home to me, full of images and memories of members of my family and
their intimates who visited us there.
My return to London society at this time gave me the privilege of an
acquaintance with some of its most remarkable members, many of whom
became, and remained, intimate and kind friends of mine for many
years. The Miss Berrys, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, Lady Morley, Lord
and Lady Lansdowne, Lord and Lady Ellesmere, Lord and Lady Dacre,
Sydney Smith, Rogers, were among the persons with whom I then most
frequently associated; and in naming these members of the London
world of that day, I mention only a small portion of a brilliant
society, full of every element of wit, wisdom, experience, refined
taste, high culture, good breeding, good sense, and distinction of
every sort that can make human intercourse valuable and delightful.
I was one of the youngest members of that pleasant society, and have
seen almost all its brilliant lights go out. Eheu! of what has
succeeded to them in the London of the present day, I know nothing.]
PARK PLACE, St. James's, December 28th, 1836.
Nevertheless, and in spite of all your doubts, and notwithstanding all
the improbabilities and all the impossibilities, here I am, dearest
H----, in very deed in England, and in London, once again. And shall it
be that I have crossed that terrible sea, and am to pass some time here,
and to return without seeing you? I cannot well fancy that. Surely, now
that the Atlantic is no longer between us, though the Alps may be, we
shall meet once more before I go back to my dwelling-place beyond the
uttermost parts of the sea. The absolute impossibility of taking the
baby to the South determined the arrangements that were made; and as I
was at any rate to be alone all the winter, I obtained leave to pass it
in England, whither I am come, alone with my chick, through tempestuous
turbulence of winds and waves, and where I expect to remain peaceably
with my own people, until such time as I am fetched away. When this may
be, however, neither I nor any one else can tell, as it depends upon the
meeting and sitting of a certain Convention, summoned for the revising
of the constitution of the State of Pennsylvania; and there is at
present an uncertainty as to the time of its opening. It was at first
appointed to convene on the 1st of May, and it was then resolved that I
should return early in March, so as to be in America by that time; but
my last news is that the meeting of the Convention may take place in
February, and my stay in England will probably be prolonged for several
months in consequence....
Your various propositions, regarding negro slavery in America, I will
answer when we meet, which I hope will be ere long.... I wish to heaven
I could have gone down to Georgia this winter!...
Your impression of Rome does not surprise me; I think it would be mine.
I have not seen dear Emily, but expect that pleasure in about a
fortnight....
My father took his farewell of the stage last Friday. How much I could
say upon that circumstance alone! The house was immensely full, the
feeling of regret and good-will universal, and our own excitement, as
you may suppose, very great. My father bore it far better than I had
anticipated, and his spirits do not appear to have suffered since; I
know not whether the reaction may not make itself felt hereafter.
Perhaps his present occupation of licenser may afford sufficient
employment of a somewhat kindred nature to prevent his feeling very
severely the loss of his professional excitement; and yet I know not
whether a sufficient _succedaneum_ is to be found for such a dram as
that, taken nightly for more than forty years....
Who do you think Adelaide and I went to dine with last Friday? You will
never guess, so I may as well tell you--the C----s! The meetings in this
world are strange things. She sought me with apparent cordiality, and I
had no reason whatever for avoiding her. She is very handsome, and
appears remarkably amiable, with the simple good breeding of a French
great lady, and the serious earnestness of a devout Roman Catholic. They
are going to Lisbon, where he is attache to the Embassy.
I had a letter from Mr. Combe the other day, full of the books he had
been publishing, and the lectures he had been delivering. He seems to be
very busy, and very happy. [Mr. Combe had lately married my cousin,
Cecilia Siddons.] ...
Farewell, my dearest H----.
I am ever your most affectionate,
F. A. B.