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

[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 ”