With love to you two miserable creatures, away from your parents,
Thine ever,
ORVILLE DEWEY.
To the Same.
[Undated.]
What have I not written to you about, you cross thing? Oh! Kossuth. Well, then, here is an immensely interesting person, whom we invited over here to settle, and who is much more likely to unsettle us. How far would you have him unsettle us? To the extent of carrying us into a war with Russia, or of banding us, with all liberal governments, in a war with the despotic governments, so that Europe should be turned into a caldron of blood for years to come, millions of people sacrificed, [227] unutterable miseries inflicted, the present frame of society torn in pieces; and, when all is done, the human race no better off,—worse off? You say, no. Well, anything short of that I am willing Kossuth should accomplish. Any expression of opinion that he can get here, from the people or the government, asserting the rights of nations and the wrong of oppression, let him have,—let all the world have it. Moral influence, gradually changing the world, is what I want. But Kossuth and the Liberals of Europe want to bring on that great war of opinion, which, I fear, will come only too soon. I fear that Kossuth has fairly broached the question of intervention here, and that in two years it will enter the ballot box. I fear these tendencies to universal overthrow that are now revealing themselves all over the civilized world.
Kossuth is a man all enthusiasm and eloquence, but not a man, I judge, of deep practical sagacity. A sort of Hamlet, he seems to me,—graceful, delicate, thoughtful, meditative, moral, noble-minded; and I should not wonder if he was now feeling something of Hamlet's burden: "The time is out of joint: oh, cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"
A lady, who saw him two days ago, told me that so sad a face she never saw; it haunted her.
It was on his return to his Berkshire home, after this winter in Washington, that the next merry little letter, describing his renewed acquaintance with his country neighbors, was sent to me. The custom of ringing the church bell at noon and at nine in the evening had not then been relinquished, although it has since died out.
[228] To his Daughter Mary.