Rockaway, Friday, August 10th.
Where are you, my dearest Harriet; and what are you doing? Drinking of queer-tasting waters, and soaking in queer-smelling ones? Are you becoming saturated with sulphur, or penetrated with iron? Are you chilling your inside with draughts from some unfathomable well, or warming your outside with baths from some ready-boiled spring?
LOVE FOR THE ABSENT. Oh! vainest quest of that torment, the love for the absent! Do you know, Harriet, that I have more than once seriously thought of never writing any more to any of my friends? the total cessation of intercourse would soon cause the acutest vividness of feeling to subside, and become blunt (for so are we made): the fruitless feeling after, the vain eager pursuit in thought of those whose very existence may actually have ceased, is such a wearisome pain! This being linked by invisible chains to the remote ends of the earth, and constantly feeling the strain of the distance upon one's heart,—this sort of death in life, for you are all so far away that you are almost as bad as dead to me,—is a condition that I think makes intercourse (such intercourse as is possible) less of a pleasure than of a pain; and the thought that so many lives with which mine was mingled so closely are flowing away yonder, in vain for me here (and of hereafter who can guess!), prevents my contentedly embracing my own allotted existence, and keeps me still with eyes and thoughts averted towards the past, from the path of life I am appointed to tread. If I could believe it right or kind, or that those who love me would not be grieved by it, I really feel sometimes as if I could make up my mind to turn my thoughts once and for all away from them, as from the very dead, and never more by this disjointed communion revive, in all its acuteness, the bitter sense of loss and separation....
You see I discourse of my child's looks; for at present, indeed, I know of nothing else to discourse about in her. Of her experiences in her former states of existence she says nothing, though I try her as Shelley used to do the speechless babies that he met; and her observations upon the present she also keeps religiously to herself, so that I get no profit of either her wisdom or her knowledge....
The vast extent of this country offers every variety of climate which an invalid can require, and its mineral waters afford the same remedies which are sought after in the famous European baths. God has everywhere been bountiful, and doubtless no country is without its own special natural pharmacopæia, its medicines, vegetable and mineral, and healing influences for human disease and infirmity. The medicinal waters of this country are very powerful, and of every variety, and I believe there are some in Virginia which would precisely answer our purpose....
We are now staying for a short time on the Long Island shore, at a place called Rockaway. As I sit writing at my window here, the broad, smooth, blue expanse of the Atlantic stretches out before me, and ships go sailing by that are coming from, or returning to, the lands where you live.
You cannot conceive anything more strange, and to me more distasteful than the life which one leads here. The whole watering-place consists of a few detached cottages, the property of some individuals who are singular enough to comprehend the pleasure of privacy; and one enormous hotel, a huge wooden building, of which we are at present among the inmates.
How many can sleep under this mammoth roof, I know not; but upwards of four hundred have sat down at one time to feed in the boundless dining-hall. The number of persons now in the house does not, I believe, exceed eighty, and everybody is lamenting the smallness of the company, and the consequent dullness of the place; and I am perpetually called upon to sympathize with regrets which I am so far from sharing, that I wish, instead of eighty, we had only eight fellow-lodgers.... The general way of life is very disagreeable to me. I cannot, do what I will, find anything but constraint and discomfort in the perpetual presence of a crowd of strangers. The bedrooms are small, and furnished barely as well as a common servant's room in England. They are certainly not calculated for comfortable occupation or sitting alone in; but sitting alone any part of the day is a proceeding contemplated by no one here.
BATHING IN AMERICA. As for bathing, we are carried down to the beach, which is extremely deep and sandy, in an omnibus, by batches of a dozen at a time. There are two little stationary bathing-huts for the use of the whole population; and you dress, undress, dry yourself, and do all you have to do, in the closest proximity to persons you never saw in your life before.... This admitting absolute strangers to the intimacy of one's most private toilet operations is quite intolerable, and nothing but the benefit which I believe the children, as well as myself, derive from the bathing would induce me to endure it.
From this place we go up to Massachusetts—a delightful expedition to me—to our friends the Sedgwicks, who are very dear to me, and almost the only people among whom I have found mental companionship since I have been in this country.