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Kate Carol to Mary H——.
“I miss you, Mary mine, more than I can tell, with this cold pen and sluggish ink. I own I love Right Angledom. After the bustle and randomness of life in New York—its straight ways, its quiet and its monotony, are refreshing. I love the Quakers too, with their delicious repose of manner—their low, lulling, musical voices, and their simple truthfulness of character and conversation. Their ‘ways are ways of pleasantness, and all their paths are peace.’ But I must confess to, now and then, a feeling, I cannot say of home-sickness—for I, wanderer that I am, have no home, unless it be in your heart, and in some few others, a precious few, indeed—but a feeling of regret, a pining for the past; for the few true and pure spirits to whom I have dared reveal myself, who know me thoroughly, faults and all, and who love me the more for those faults; because love and pity come together on their divine mission from the gate of heaven, and walk hand-in-hand, twin children of God, ever tender, and beautiful, and sad, through this clouded vale of tears.
“ ‘Thee knows,’ Mary, as a lovely Quaker maiden said to me in a low lute-tone the other night, ‘Thee knows the gravel and the gold run together in all characters.’ Sweet Lizzie L——, thee does not know how much that simple Orphic saying consoled me. Well, there is some gold in my character, but it requires the sunbeams of love and sympathy to light it up, and so reveal it; and they might change even the gravel to gold in a heart so docile as mine, if they only knew it, and would only take the trouble.
“Thee knows, Mary dear, my invincible aversion to strangers. Gay, careless, confiding, frank, indeed to a fault, among those who seem to love me, I am shy, cold, dull—nay, worse, I am wretched, where I am not sure of pleasing. This is a most unfortunate weakness of mine, and has been the cause of many troubles to me. I recollect once in New York going to a party, which I afterwards heard was made for me—made expressly to introduce me to some distinguished authors—and just see, Mary, how badly I behaved; see what a wayward, naughty lion I was. Had I only known then, as I afterward did, the kind interest that my host took in me, I should have been so happy, so social, so delightful; but as it was, with my usual want of self-confidence, finding myself among strangers, I felt my heart, like the pimpernel on the approach of rain, coldly shrinking and shutting up, leaf by leaf, until I became a statue of lead; and on my introduction to those writers, whom I had all my life been eager to see, and whom, if I had only been sure that they would let me, I could have loved at once. I replied in monosyllables, so coldly, so drily, that they left me, surprised and repelled; and my dear, kind, disappointed host, afterward said, in reply to some encomiums by a friend—‘Yes, I suppose she is all that, but you must allow that she is very eccentric.’ Am I eccentric, Mary? Am I any thing but foolish and timid, and sensitive to a ridiculous degree?
“Now it was this shrinking of the heart that I felt, when I first took possession of a large, and at first, somewhat dreary room in a Philadelphia boarding-house. The sister of a dear friend, then in Washington, called upon me, and with a single magical sentence, like a gleam from the lamp of Aladdin, warmed, and furnished, and lighted up the chamber, till it seemed a home even to my lonely and sorrowing heart. She simply said, ‘Oh! this is the room that Sophy had!’ The following impromptu will show you how fervently I felt the change.
THE ROOM THAT SOPHY HAD.
Though strange and chill at first the room,
How soon it seemed with comfort clad,
When some one said—and blessed the gloom—