To Miss Catherine M. Seagwick.
SHEFFIELD, Feb. 5, 1862.
My FRIEND,—I must report myself to you. I must have you sympathize with my life, or—I will not say I shall drown myself in the Housatonic, but I shall feel as if the old river had dried up, and forsaken its bed.
I do not know how to set about telling you how happy I am in the old home. I feel as if I had arrived after a long voyage, or were reposing after a day's [259] work that had been forty years long. Indeed, it is forty-two years last autumn since I left Andover and began to preach. And I have never before had any cessation of work but what I regarded as temporary. Indeed, I have never before had the means to retire upon. And although it is but a modest competence, $1,500 a year [FN: He had just received a legacy of $5,000 from Miss Eliza Townsend, of Boston]-yet I am most devoutly thankful to Heaven that I have it, and that I am not turned out, like an old horse upon the common. To be sure, I should be glad to be able to live nearer to the centres of society; but you can hardly imagine what comfort and satisfaction I feel in having enough to live upon, instead of the utter poverty which I might well have feared would be, and which so often is, the end of a clergyman's life.'
This house of ours is very pleasant, you would think so if you were in it,—all doors open, as in summer, a summer temperature from the furnace, day and night, moderate wood-fires in the parlor and library, cheering to the eye, and making of the chimneys excellent ventilators, and the air pure; and this summer house seated down amidst surrounding cold, and boundless fields of snow,—it seems a miracle of comfort.
And then, this surrounding splendor and beauty,-the valley, and the hills and mountains around,—the soft-falling snow, the starry crystals descending through the still air,—the lights and shadows of morning and evening,—this wondrous meteorology of winter—but you know all about it. Really, I think some days that winter is more beautiful than summer. Certainly I would not have it left out of my year. . . . "Aha! all is rose-colored to him!" Well, nay, but it is literally [260] so. The white hill opposite, looking like a huge snow-bank, only that it is checkered with strips and patches of wood, dark as Indian-ink, is stained of that color every clear afternoon, and rises up at sundown into a bank of roseate or purple bloom all along above the horizon.
6th. I did n't get through last evening. No wonder, with so much heavy stuff to carry. Did I ever write such a stupid letter before? Well, do not say anything about it, but quickly cover it over with the mantle of one of your charming epistles. It is not often that one has a chance to show so much Christian generosity. Besides, consider that I do not altogether despair of myself. I am reviving; and you don't know what a letter I may write you one of these days, if you toll me along.
In the autumn his only son enlisted for nine months in the 49th
Massachusetts Regiment.
To his Daughters.
SHEFFIELD, Oct. 13, 1862.