Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

To Miss Lucy Osgood.

I thank you heartily for thinking of me at New Year's time. The echo of “hand clapping,” which you heard when news came of the capture of Port Royal, was not from me. I have had but one approach to a pleasurable sensation connected with public affairs since this war began, and that was when I read Fremont's proclamation. He acknowledged the slaves as “men.” Nobody else, except the old Garrisonian abolitionists, seems to have the faintest idea that they have any rights which we are bound to recognize. They are to be freed or not, according to our necessities or convenience, and then we are to do what we please with them, without consulting their interest or convenience. It is the same hateful pro-slavery spirit everywhere. I felt very little interest in the capture of Mason and Slidell. It did not seem to me of much consequence, especially as their dispatches were carried to Europe. Living up here in Wayland, at a distance from cities and railroads, is very conducive to. quietude of mind, which is in [163] fact in some danger of approaching to drowsiness. The prospect of a war with England, superadded to our present troubles, made me almost down sick. The pacific policy of our government was an immense relief to my mind. I did not see any call for “astuteness” about it. It was simply a question whether we had infringed upon the law of nations; and since the lawyers and statesmen all round agreed that we had violated it, at least in form, I think it was as manly in the nation to acknowledge the mistake as it would have been in an individual. It would have been something worse than absurd to go to blowing out each other's brains about a mere legal technicality. I think Charles Sumner takes the true ground. How calm and strong he is! I know of no one who so well deserves the title of Serene Highness.

I have written a letter to the “Anti-slavery standard;” but it is so long that I doubt whether they will get it into the next paper. You will think that I “roar like any sucking dove.” I tried to do so, for it did not seem to me right to do anything to increase the inflammable state of things. Conscience is apt to plague me about acting out my total depravity. I thought of several sarcasms which some readers might have thought smart, but I suppressed them.

Ah, how often I have had your thought: “Would that increasing nearness to the spiritual world abated one jot of its mystery.” To me the mystery thickens the more I contemplate it. Brother Convers, writing to me of the death of his wife, says: “Mysterious ocean of Silence! whence not a sound reaches the ear of one who walks on its shores and listens with an agony of desire. Yet I often say to myself, what matters [164] this, if the soul can only keep its balance of repose and trust? Questions and doubts are mostly the devil's work. While we are with God, we know little or nothing of them. True it is,

The Sphinx sits at the gate of life,
With the old question on her awful lips;

but she cannot now devour us, if we do not solve the question. The heart has its answer; an answer which God has placed there; and blessed are those who rest content with that. I know of no other faith than this of the heart that is worth much. I love the simple beauty of old Richard Baxter's expression: ‘The jingling of too much philosophy often drowns the music of Aaron's bells.’ ” I sympathize with these expressions of my brother's feelings.