Enough of this side of the water. Your wanderings abroad, dear H——, created a feeling of many mingled melancholies in my mind: in the first place, you are so very, very far off, the dead seem scarcely further; perhaps they indeed are nearer to us, for I believe we are surrounded by "a cloud of witnesses." Your description of those southern lands is sad to me. I have always had a passionate yearning for those regions where man has been so glorious, and Nature is so still. I thought of your various emotions at my uncle's grave at Lausanne. Life seems to me so strange, that the chain of events which forms even the most commonplace existence has, in its unexpectedness, something of the marvelous.
I rejoice that dear Dorothy is benefited by your traveling, and pray for every blessing on you both. As to the possibility of my coming to England and not finding you there, my dear H——; I can say nothing and you must do what you think right.
God bless you.
I am ever yours,
F. A. B.
IMPRACTICABLE IDEAS. [The ideas and expectations, with which I entered upon my Northern country life, near Philadelphia, were impossible of fulfillment, and simply ridiculous under the circumstances. Those with which I contemplated an existence on our Southern estate, or the new one suggested in this letter, in the State of Alabama, were not only ridiculously impossible, but would speedily have found their only result in the ruin, danger, and very probably death, of all concerned in the endeavor to realize them.
The laws of the Southern States would certainly have been forestalled by the speedier action of lynch-law, in putting a stop to my experimental abolitionism. And I am now able to understand, and appreciate, what, when I wrote this letter, I had not the remotest suspicion of,—the amazement and dismay, the terror and disgust, with which such theories as those I have expressed in it must have filled every member of the American family with which my marriage had connected me; I must have appeared to them nothing but a mischievous madwoman.]
Branchtown, March 28th, 1836.
My Dearest H——,
You say that thinking of you makes me fancy that I have written to you: not quite so, for no day passes with me without many thoughts of you, and I certainly am well aware that I do not write to you daily.... But, dearest H——, once for all, believe this: whether I am silent altogether, or simply unsatisfactory in my communications, I love you dearly, and hope for a happier intercourse with you,—if never here—hereafter, in that more perfect state, where, endowed with higher natures, our communion with those we love will, I believe, be infinitely more intimate than it can be here, subject as it is to all the imperfections of our present existence.