Hence, Heaven looks down on Earth with all her eyes;
Hence, the soul’s mighty moment in her sight;
Hence, every soul has partisans above,
And every thought a critic in the skies.”
Young.
“The creature is great, to whom it is allowed to imagine questions to which only a God can reply.”—Aimé Martin.
No one who has travelled largely through the Southern States will require to be told that the slave system sanctions the holding in slavery of persons who are undistinguishable in complexion from the whitest Anglo-Saxons. Several carefully authenticated cases, analogous to that developed in our story, though surpassing it in unspeakable baseness, have been recently brought to light. We need only hint at them at this stage of our narrative.
The reader has already divined that the little girl sold at the slave-auction, and placed under Mrs. Gentry’s care, was no other than the unfortunate child whose parents were lost in the disaster of the Pontiac.
There is a class of minds which, either from inertness or lack of leisure, never revise the opinions they have received from others. If we might borrow a fresh illustration from Mrs. Gentry’s copy-books, we might say that in her mental growth the tree was inclined precisely as the twig had been bent. She honestly believed that there was no appeal from what her sire, the judge, had once laid down as law or gospel. Having been bred in the belief that slavery was a wholesome and sacred institution, she would probably have seen her own sister dragged under it to the auction-block, and not have ventured to question the righteousness of the act.
There were only two passions which, should they ever come in direct collision with her veneration for slavery, might possibly override it; but even on this there seemed to rest much uncertainty. Her acquisitiveness, as the phrenologists would have called it, was large; and then, although she was fast declining into the sere and yellow leaf, she had not surrendered all hope of one day finding a successor to the late Mr. Gentry in her affections.