Why do I not love to
be near the sea better than among the mountains? Here is my home, if birthplace
makes home. But no, it is not my natural preference; I believe I was born
longing after the mountains. And rivers and lakes are better to me than
the ocean. I remember how beautiful the Merrimac looked to me in childhood, the
first true river I ever knew; it opened upon my sight and wound its way through
my heart like a dream realized; its harebells, its rocks, and its rapids, are
far more fixed in my memory than anything about the sea. Yet the vastness and
depth and the changes of mist and sunshine are gloriously beautiful; I know and
feel their beauty. Still, I admire it most in glimpses; a bit of blue between
the hills, only a little more substantial than the sky, and a white sail
flitting across it; or when it is hightide calm, — one broad, boundless
stillness, then there is rest in the sea, but it never rests me like the strong
silent hills; they bear me up on their summits into heaven's own blue eternity
of peace. But is it right to wrap one's own being in this mantle of peace,
while the country is ravaged by war? — its garments rolled in blood, brother
fighting against brother to the death? The tide of rebellion surges higher and
higher, and there is no sadder proof that we are not the liberty-loving people
that we used to call ourselves, than to learn that there are traitors in the
secret councils of the nation, in forts defended by our own bravest men ; among
women, too: "Sisters! oh, Sisters! Shame o'ladies!" A disloyal woman
at the North, with everything woman ought to hold dear at stake in the possible
fall of this government, — it is too shameful! I hope every one such will be
held in "durance vile" until the war is over.
But will it end
until the question is brought to its true issue, — liberty or slavery? I doubt
it: and I would rather the war should last fifty years, than ever again make
the least compromise with slavery, that arch-enemy of all true prosperity, that
eating sin of our nation. Rather divide at once, rather split into a thousand
pieces, than sink back into this sin!
The latest news is
of the capture of the Hatteras Forts, a great gain for us, and a blight to
privateering at the South; — with a rumor of "Jeff Davis's" death,
which nobody believes because it is so much wished. Yet to his friends he is a
man, and no rebel. War is a bitter curse, — it forbids sympathy, and makes us
look upon our enemies as scarcely human; and we cannot help it, when our foes
are the foes of right.
SOURCE: Daniel
Dulany Addison, Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary, pp. 100-2
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