Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child
John Greenleaf Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Winslow Sewall, Ed.

To the same.

I have seldom had such a day as the delightful one passed with you and David Wasson. I have marked it in my pilgrimage by a golden pillar, hung with amaranth garlands. I said he was poet, philosopher, and priest. During the evening that I subsequently spent with him I found he was also full of fun. I might have known it, indeed, by those eyes of his, that look out so smiling upon the world. It is many a day since I have met with such a real child of God and Nature. He will not be popular, of course; for

Souls are dangerous things to carry straight
Through all the spilt saltpetre of this world.

[92] As for “come-outerism,” I assure you that if I could only find a church, I would nestle into it as gladly as a bird ever nestled into her covert in a storm. I have staved away from meeting, because one offered me petrifactions, and another gas, when I was hungry for bread. I have an unfortunate sincerity, which demands living realities, and will not be put off with respectable shams. I sometimes wish it were otherwise; there is such a plenty of respectable shams to be had without the seeking. Another thing that I really feel the want of is one or two sympathizing friends with a sufficient degree of culture to make intercourse easy and mutually agreeable. I am well aware that it is not good to live so much alone as I do; but I see no help for it. Better to be forever alone than to have an indiscriminate inrush of the world into one's sanctum. I find the problem of useful and agreeable social intercourse a very hard one to solve. If our minister, Mr. Sears, were near by, I should scarcely feel the need of any other society; for his mind and heart are full to overflowing. But unfortunately he lives two miles off, on an out-of-the-way road, and it is a job to get to him. He has lately been preaching a series of beautiful sermons on the immortality of the soul. The one last Sunday was on entering upon immortality through the long pathway of old age. It was excellent in itself, and interested me so much by its association with my good old father that I borrowed it, and made copious extracts. To me there is a peculiar charm in Mr. Sears' preaching ; for a kind of lunar-halo of Swedenborgianism surrounds it. My first and deepest religious experience came to me through that medium and such an experience is never entirely forgotten by [93] the soul. The angel of my youth calls to me through Mr. Sears' preaching. Ah, would to God he could give me back the undoubting faith, the poetic rapture of spiritual insight, which I then enjoyed! But it cannot be. That was a state of childhood; and childhood will pass away. The intellect will call aloud to the Infinite, and it receives no answer but the echo of its own voice. If the problem of our existence is not solved elsewhere, how cruel must be the Being that placed us here! Meanwhile, nothing surprises me more than that men should judge so harshly of each other for believing, or not believing, since it is a thing obviously beyond our control. The man educated at Seville cannot see spiritual things in the same light that they are seen by the man educated in Boston. At fifty years of age, it is out of our power to believe many things that we believed at twenty. Our states have changed by slow degrees, as the delicate blossom changes to the dry seed-vessel. We may weep for the lost blossom, but it avails not. “Violets dead the sweetest showers will ne'er make grow again.” But, thanks to the Heavenly Father, in the dry seed-vessel lies the embryo of future flowers!