This first week of
October, this month of months, shall not pass without some record of its
beauty. Norton woods and Norton sunsets are the two redeeming features of the
place; as its levelness is its bane. What is it in us that refuses to love
levels? Is it that there is no searching and toiling for anything, up cool
heights and down in sheltered hollows?
These splendidly
tinted maples before my window would be a hundred-fold more splendid if lifted
up among the hemlocks and pines of the mountainsides. Oh! how magnificent those
New Hampshire hills must be now, in the sunset of the year!
The place is a
level, and boarding-school life is a most wearisome level to me, yet flowers
spring up, and fruits grow in both. We are to welcome "all that makes and
keeps us low;" yet it seems to me as if it would be good for me to ascend
oftener to the heights of being; I fear losing the power and the wish to climb.
Let us say we are
struggling to put down slavery, and we shall be strong.
SOURCE: Daniel
Dulany Addison, Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary, p. 105
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