Boston, May 30th, 1852.
My Dear Mann: —
I was equally surprised and disappointed by hearing of your Hegira (to
Washington). I was in hopes of seeing you and talking with you fully about your
plans. I have a sort of conviction that we must lose you here: that you will go
West; and I try in all ways to reconcile myself to it. You are, much more than
you suppose, necessary to the new college — while it is not necessary to you.
There is a radical fault in your organization which prevents you from feeling
your own worth and power and acting upon the feeling. Your self-esteem is too
small; so small that it does not know it is small. You have a sort of
intellectual perception of your talents and virtues — but these intellectual
perceptions never do the duty of the feelings. Old Dan sees with his intellect
the beauty and the glory of virtue, right and truth — but how poorly does this
intellectual perception supply the place of the normal sentiments, which should
engender, feel and embody virtue and goodness.
By the by — I heard old Dan1 last Saturday, and
was most painfully impressed by the melancholy spectacle which he presented. I
do not say that he was drunk, but he appeared like a man who was nearly drunk —
or else half paralyzed. I am told that most of the Methodist clergy got the impression
that he was very drunk — and were indignant. One thing is certain — most
certain; not a fifth part, perhaps not an eighth part could make out what he
said; and yet they sat, patient and open-mouthed, waiting for words of power
and beauty. Oh! what an awful reckoning it would be if that man had to answer
for the hundred talents which were committed to him! Would be? It is now awful
— how he suffers and how the world suffers, if we consider that when we do not
have what we might and ought to have we suffer positive loss. . . .
If you were going to a clime ten degrees further south and
on the west slope of the Alleghanies, I should be strongly tempted to pull up
stakes and follow you. There is a degree of self-conceit and intolerance [in
Boston] that makes it seem a pitiful place. Then the prospect for the future is
not good. The American population is getting crowded out of town and the houses
filled up with Irish. By the by, do you remember the beautiful mansion formerly
inhabited by P. C. Brooks, in Atkinson Street, and more recently by Samuel May?
Well, it is now a colony of Irish, where they pig in sixteen in a room. So long
as these poor creatures came to us only fast enough to be leavened by the
little virtue there was in us, so long we welcomed them; but if they are to
pull us down instead of our pulling them up we may well cry hold off! However,
I suppose that this evil is only local: as a whole the process may be good for
humanity, and we have no right to partition off God's earth and say here shall
be Saxon and here shall not be Celt. . . .
I shall write you again in a day or two; meanwhile I am,
dear Mann,
Ever yours,
S. G. Howe.
_______________
1 Webster's last speech in Boston.
SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and
Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 378-380
