New York, December 27, 1860.
. . . I am very unhappy. My son Oscar is so imbued with all
that I hold worst in South Carolina, that hardly anything is left between us
but the thread of paternal and filial affection. I enter thus upon the last
stage of old age! Such things must have happened in the Reformation; but that
does not mitigate its bitterness. Unfortunately, too, my whole life has been
spent, and my very profession obliges me to pass my days, in meditating on all
that is going to ruin in corruption and by violence, — as it ever has been, and
as it is. . . . How happy Agassiz, is,
who can shut himself up with his toads and turtles, and investigate that
portion of nature which knows of no question of right or wrong, freedom or
baseness, national unity or separation, treason or loyalty, purity or stealing,
manliness or ignominy. I wish his work were not so monstrously dear. . .
SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 316
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