ridiculously impossible, but would speedily have found their only
result in the ruin, danger, and very probably death, of all
concerned in the endeavor to realize them.

The laws of the Southern States would certainly have been
forestalled by the speedier action of lynch-law, in putting a stop
to my experimental abolitionism. And I am now able to understand,
and appreciate, what, when I wrote this letter, I had not the
remotest suspicion of,--the amazement and dismay, the terror and
disgust, with which such theories as those I have expressed in it
must have filled every member of the American family with which my
marriage had connected me; I must have appeared to them nothing but
a mischievous madwoman.]

BRANCHTOWN, March 28th, 1836.
MY DEAREST H----,

You say that thinking of you makes me fancy that I have written to you:
not quite so, for no day passes with me without many thoughts of you,
and I certainly am well aware that I do not write to you daily.... But,
dearest H----, once for all, believe this: whether I am silent
altogether, or simply unsatisfactory in my communications, I love you
dearly, and hope for a happier intercourse with you,--if never
here--hereafter, in that more perfect state, where, endowed with higher
natures, our communion with those we love will, I believe, be infinitely
more intimate than it can be here, subject as it is to all the
imperfections of our present existence.

You laugh at me for what you consider my optimism, my incredulity with
regard to the evils of this present life, and seem to think I am making
out a case of no little absurdity in ascribing so much of what we suffer
to ourselves. But I do not think my view of the matter is altogether
visionary. Even from disease and death, those stern and inexorable
conditions of our present state, spring, as from bitter roots, some of
the sweetest virtues of which our nature is capable; and I do not
believe it to be the great and good God's appointment that the earth
should be loaded as it is with barren suffering and sorrow. And as to
believing that women were intended to lead the helpless, ailing, sickly,
unprofitable, and unpleasurable lives, which so many of them seem to
lead in this country, I think it would be a direct libel on our Creator
to profess such a creed....

I walked into town, the other day, a distance of only six miles, and wa