. . . FOR am I not through the one third of the second of the five months, and am I not very glad of it? And yet I am very glad I came away. You have no idea how I am relieved, and I shall not go back empty-handed. But the relief I feel admonishes me never to return to the full charge. How little do people know or conceive what it is! One case, like what I fear Mrs.-'s is, of slow decline,-one such case weighs upon the mind and heart for months. If you could go and make the call, without any sad anticipation or afterthought; but you cannot. And then, when it is not one case that draws upon your sympathies, but several, and you are made the confidant of many sorrows besides, and you are anxious for many minds; and when, moreover, your studies are not of the habitudes of bees, and the length of butterflies' wings, but wasting thoughts of human souls in sorrow and peril, and your Sundays rack your sinews with pain,—I declare I wonder that men live through it at all.
To the Same.
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 1847.
MY DEAR BELLOWS,—I consider it a mercy to you to put some interval between my letters; indeed, I do [188] not know how you write any, ever; besides, I feel all the while as if some of your burdens were to be laid at the door of my delinquencies. . . . Indeed, I rejoice in you always. I never hear of you but to hear good of you; and it is often that I hear. . . .
As to the sermons I have been writing here, I consider your suggestion that you might read since you will not hear them such an enormous compliment, such a reckless piece of goodness, that all your duties in regard to them are fully discharged in the bare proposition. And I am not going to have you canonized and sent down to all ages as the most suffering saint in the nineteenth century, for having read twelve of Dewey's manuscript sermons. I have preached one of them this evening, and it made so much impression (upon, me) that I was quite taken by surprise. The title is "Nature.". . . Last week I wrote the most considerable lucubration of the winter, on the darkest problem in the philosophy of life and history, "the ministry of error and evil in the world," to wit, Polytheism, Despotism, War, and Slavery. . . . Always my poor mind and heart are struggling with one subject, and that is the great world-question.
You speak of my opportunities here. Perhaps I have not improved them very well. I am not very enterprising in the social relations, and half of the winter I have not cared for Washington, nor anything else but what was passing in my own mind. . . . I have met some admirable persons here, of those I did not know before. Crittenden and Corwin and Judge McLean have interested me most; men they seem to me of as fine and beautiful natures as one can well meet. I have had two interviews with Calhoun that interested me much; [189] and the other evening I met Soule, the Louisiana senator, and had a long conversation with him, chiefly about slavery,—a very remarkable person. There is no face in the Senate, besides Webster's, so lashed up with the strong lines of intellect; and his smile shines out as brightly and beautifully from the dark cloud of his features.
To his Daughter Mary.
NEW YORK, May 23, 1847.
DEAR MOLLY,—I thought M. E. D. made you m-a-d; but you shall have it hereafter, if it makes you "demnition" mad; no appreciation of my delicacy in leaving out the E,—which stands for error, egotism, eggnog, epsom-salts, and every erroneous entity extant. Yes, the E,—have it, with all its compounds. The fact is, I suppose, that when people retire up into the country, they grow monstrous avaricious, and exact everything that belongs to them; lay up their best clothes and go slip-shod. I'm preparing for that condition, mentally and bodily. You see I begin to slip already in language. Your mother is trying to persuade me to buy a dressing-gown. A dressing-gown! when I don't expect to dress at all. As if a beggar who never expects to dine were to buy a service of plate, or a starving man should have his picture taken, and give a hundred dollars for famine in effigy. I have ordered a suit of summer clothes, to be sure, because I feel very thin, and expect to feel very light some five weeks hence. I shall get some cigars by the same token, because all things with me are vanishing into smoke. And if thin clothes can't live, can't be distended, filled out, and look respectable, upon smoke, let 'em die, and be crushed before the moth.
[190] Monday morning. These tantrums, dear Molly, were—what? cut up?-last night after preaching, and mortal tired I was too. I do not know how it is, but it seems to me that every sermon I take now, every poor, little, innocent sermon comes bouncing out in the pulpit like a Brobdingnag.