Clara said she had met the Key in Turin and Milan. The Cabin is made a school reading book in Sardinia, for those who wish to learn English, with explanatory notes in Italian. The feeling here on the continent for the slave is no less earnest than in England and Scotland. I have received most beautiful and feeling letters from many Christians of Switzerland, which I will show you.
I am grieved to say, that there are American propagandists of slavery here, who seem to feel it incumbent on them to recognize this hideous excrescence as a national peculiarity, and to consider any reflection upon it, on the part of the liberty-loving Swiss, as an insult to the American nation. The sophisms by which slaveholding has been justified from the Bible have left their slimy track even here. Alas! is it thus America fulfils her high destiny? Must she send missionaries abroad to preach despotism?
Walking the other evening with M. Fazy, who is, of course, French in education, we talked of our English literature. He. had Hamlet in French—just think of it. One never feels the national difference so much as in thinking of Shakspeare in French! Madame de Stael says of translation, that music written for one instrument cannot be played upon another. I asked if he had read Milton.
"Yes."
"And how did you like him?"
"0," with a kind of shiver, "he is so cold!"
Now, I felt that the delicate probe of the French mind had dissected out a shade of feeling of which I had often been conscious. There is a coldness about all the luscious exuberance of Milton, like the wind that blows from, the glaciers across these flowery valleys. How serene his angels in their adamantine virtue! yet what sinning, suffering soul could find sympathy in them? The utter want of sympathy for the fallen angels, in the whole celestial circle, is shocking. Satan is the only one who weeps.
"For millions of spirits for his fault amerced,
And from eternal splendors flung."
God does not care, nor his angels. Ah, quite otherwise is God revealed in Him who wept over Jerusalem, and is touched with the feeling of our infirmities.
I went with Mrs. Fazy the other night to call on Mrs. C.'s friend, Pastor C. They were so affectionate, so full of beautiful kindness! The French language sounds sweetly as a language of affection and sympathy: with all its tart vivacity, it has a richness in the gentler world of feeling. Then, in the evening, I was with a little circle of friends at the house of the sister of Merle d'Aubigne, and they prayed and sang together. It was beautiful. The hymn was one on the following of Jesus, similar to that German one of old Godfrey Arnold, which is your favorite. These Christians speak with deep sorrow of our slavery; it grieves, it distresses them, for the American church has been to them a beloved object. They have leaned towards it as a vine inclines towards a vigorous elm. To them it looks incomprehensible that such a thing could gain strength in a free Christian republic.