For Louisa
1839
My Daughter,
You are Seven years old to-day and your Father is forty. You have learned a great many things, since you have lived in a Body, about things going on around you and within you. You know how to think, how to resolve, how to love, and how to obey. You feel your Conscience, and have no real pleasure unless you obey it. You cannot love yourself, or anyone else, when you do not mind its commandments. It asks you always to BE GOOD, and bears, O how gently! how patiently! with all endeavors to hate, and treat it cruelly. How kindly it bears with you all the while. How sweetly it whispers Happiness in your HEART when you Obey its soft words. How it smiles upon you, and makes you Glad when you Resolve to Obey it! How terrible its punishments. It is GOD trying in your soul to keep you always Good.
You begin, my dear daughter, another year this morning. Your Father, your Mother, and Sisters, with your little friends, show their love on this your Birthday, by giving you this BOX. Open it, and take what is in it, and the best wishes of
Your Father.
Beach Street,
Friday morning, Nov. 29, 1839.
His explanation to a seven-year-old girl that conscience is "God in your soul," and the lines, "since you have lived in a body," are eloquent manifestations of his belief. It is not surprising that, given such thoughts at seven, Louisa at ten or eleven wrote that she was sure in some previous life she must have been a horse,—she loved so to run. A month before May Alcott was born, little Louisa, then eight, again away from home, received this letter from her father: