Thursday, October 25, 2018

Samuel Gridley Howe to Theodore Parker, Thursday, April 1851

[Envelope addressed;]

The Reverend
Thunder And Lightning
Parker
Everywhere

SUNNYSIDE, Thursday, April, 1851.

My Dear Parker: — I am never well, but for three days past I have been quite under the weather, and such weather!

I am unable to go out, but my chickens have been counting so fondly upon going to your house that I cannot disappoint them.

You will give me credit for usually refraining from shocking your modesty by expressing my views and feelings about your writings, and you will now excuse my saying a word that I must say to somebody. Never in the whole course of my reading have I met with anything that moved the deepest depths of my soul as did the closing part of your Fast Day discourse. It is truly the thunder and lightning of eloquence! It has all the material majesty, power and beauty of Byron's thunder storm in the Alps; — the resistless strength, — the rushing swiftness, — the dazzling light, and the whole dignified and intensified by the moral element of which it is the war. Not “from peak to peak the rattling crags among,” but from heart to heart “leaps the live thunder;” not “every mountain now hath found a tongue,” but every high and towering passion of man's soul; not “Jura answers through her misty shroud, back to the joyous Alps,” but the great spirit of humanity, rending the veil of conventionalism, shouts back “Amen! Amen! and God bless you,” — to you her minister and interpreter.

Excuse, my dear Parker, a fruitless attempt to describe what I have no language to describe, — the effect upon me of your sublime discourse. Tell me you are not destructive? Ha! had not God stored up in your soul a great store of the wrath and indignation with which He wars upon sin, and given you an opportunity of using it without your benevolence to restrain you, we should never have witnessed such a storm and whirlwind as that in which you have come down upon the wicked.

But I can hardly sit up and must not write, or I too shall get up steam, and having no strength of boiler shall explode like the — the — frog in the fable. Regards to Madame and Miss S.

Ever thine,
S. G. Howe.

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 346-7

No comments: