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

To Miss Lucy Osgood.

Your letter did me an “unco deal oa gude,” as your letters always do. I agree with you entirely about the “buss fuss” of metaphysics. It has always been my aversion. More than thirty years ago, when Mrs. R. was intimate at my brother's, I used to hear her discuss Kant's philosophy with collegian visitors, until I went to bed without knowing whether or not I had “hung myself over the chair and put my clothes into bed.” I met Mrs. R. in the cars several days ago, after an interval of twenty years, and what do you think? In ten minutes she had plunged into the depths of Kant's philosophy, and was trying to pull me after her. But I resisted stoutly. I do sometimes like a bank of fog to look at, if there are plenty of rainbows on it; but I have no fancy for sailing through it. Circumstances afterward made me acquainted with the transcendentalists, and I attended some of their meetings, where I saw plenty of fog with rainbows flitting over it. I remember once after a long silence, when everybody was looking in the fire expecting something great to come by and by, Mr.-- turned toward us, with that serene glance of his, and said slowly: “Why do we rummage about with memory in the Past, to ascertain our whereabouts and our whatabouts?” He paused for a reply, and receiving none, he continued: “Why do we rummage about in the Past to ascertain it? I am it; and it is I; is it not?”