What a curious fellow you are! calm as a philosopher, usually, wise as a judge, possessed in full measure of the very Ware moderation and wisdom, and yet every now and then taking some tremendous lurch—against England or for Kossuth! I go far enough, go a good way, please to observe,—but to go to war, that would I not, if I could help it. Fighting won't prepare men for voting. Peaceful progress, I believe, is the only thing that can carry on the world to a fitness for self-government. I have no idea that the Hungarians are fit for it. See what France has done with her free constitution! Oh! was there ever such a solemn farce, before Heaven, as that voting,—those congratulations to the Usurper-President, and his replies?
To Rev. Henry W Bellows.
WASHINGTON, March 7, 1852.
. . . I HAVE seen a good deal of Ole Bull here within a week or two. I admire his grand and simple, reverent and affectionate Norwegian nature very much. He has come out here now with views connected with the welfare [225] of his countrymen; I do not yet precisely understand them. Is it not remarkable that he and Jenny Lind should have this noble nationality so beating at their very hearts?
To the Same.
I DON'T see but you must insert these articles in the "Inquirer" as "Communications." Some of them will have things in them that cannot possibly be delivered as Wegotisms. Don't be stiff about the matter. I tell you there is no other way; and indeed I think it no harm, but an advantage, to diversify the form, and leave out the solemn and juridical Wego sometimes, for the more sprightly and "sniptious" Ego.
To his Daughter Mary.
WASHINGTON, May, 1852.
DEAREST MOLLY,—To be sure, how could you? And, indeed, what did you for? Oh! for little K.'s sake. Well, anything for little K.'s sake. Indeed, it's the duty of parents to sacrifice themselves for their children. It's the final cause of parents to mind the children. Poor little puss! We shall feel relieved when we hear she is in New York, and safe under the sisterly wing. I am afraid she is getting too big for nestling. How I want to see the good little comfort! Is she little? Tell us how she looks and does.
Yesterday, beside preaching a sermon more than half new, and attending a funeral (out of the society), I read skimmingly more than half Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens." I laid aside the book overwhelmed. What shall we do? What shall we think? Far from our [226] Milky Way,—there they lie, other universes,—rebuke resolved by Rosse's telescope into stars, starry realms, numerous, seemingly innumerable, and as vast as our system; and yet from some of them it takes the light thirty—sixty thousand years to come to us: nay, twenty millions, Nichol suggests, I know not on what grounds. And yet in the minutest details such perfection! A million of perfectly formed creatures in a drop of water! I do not doubt that it is this overwhelming immensity of things that leads some minds to find a sort of relief, as it were, in the idea of an Infinite Impersonal Force working in all things. But it is a child's thought. Nay, does not the very fact that my mind can take in so vast a range of things lead me better to conceive of what the Infinite Mind can do? An ant's mind, if it had one, might find it just as hard to conceive of me.