To the same.
I marvel that you, who are no stranger to philosophy in its best sense, and who have the highest peaks of your mind at least a little gilded with transcendentalism, suppose that the “deadening drudgery of the world” call “imprison the soul in caverns.”
It is not merely an eloquent phrase, but a distinct truth, that the outward has no power over us but that which we voluntarily give it. It is not I who drudge, it is merely
the case containing me. I defy all the powers of earth and hell to make me scour floors and feed pigs, if I choose meanwhile to be off conversing with the angels. ... You are right, my dear brother, to attribute such freshness as I have to a vivid religious sentiment, not a theological tenet.
If I can in quietude and cheerfulness forego my own pleasure, and relinquish my own tastes, to administer to my father's daily comfort, I seem to those who live in shadows to be cooking food or mixing medicines; but I am in fact making divine works of art, which will reveal to lie their fair proportions in the far eternity.
If I can smother the rising anger, and melt wrath with love, I have written a glorious piece of music, to be sung in my “Father's house of many mansions.”
Nay, more, perhaps I am doing somewhat
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to make a holier music descend to this world, first in purified affections, and ultimately in written notes.
In this view of the ever-active agency of spirit, how appalling is the responsibility of a human soul; how glorious its capabilities.
Another means of keeping my soul fresh is my intense love of Nature.
Another help, perhaps stronger than than either of the two, is domestic love ....
A Southern gentleman, some time since, wrote to me from New Orleans, postage double and unpaid, inviting me to that city, promising me a “warm reception, and lodgings in the calaboose, with as much nigger company as you desire.”
1 He wrote according to the light that was in him. He did not know that the combined police of the world could not imprison me. In spite of bolts and bars, I should have been off, like a witch at midnight holding fair discourse with Orion, and listening to the plaintive song of Pleiades mourning for the earth-dimmed glory of their fallen sister.
How did he know, in his moral midnight, that choosing to cast our lot with the lowliest of earth was the very way to enter into companionship with the highest in heaven?
