therners would if their
consciences were perverted like ours, and we were the objects of their
opposition. I think that a change will come over us. At the North, you
have heard the wind, at midnight, after a warm rain, in winter, haul out
to the north-west, and you know what a piping time we then have of it,
and how the clear cold air, the next morning, and the bright sun, excite
and cheer us. There has been with us for a long time at the North, in
our political and religious atmosphere, a warm, foggy, unwholesome
drizzle of weak, fanatical feeling, with now and then gusts of wind and
scud,--a kind of weather most abhorred by mariners. But we hope that the
wind is changing, and that "fair weather cometh out of the North." God
will not suffer us to live long, we earnestly hope, in this condition of
misunderstanding and hatred, for it would be contrary to his established
laws that we should long continue to be one nation with such feelings
toward each other. The change will be in the North. Slavery will come to
be regarded as not in itself a sin, and the evils incident to it will be
left for those immediately concerned to bear them or seek their removal.
Or, if we become divided, the Southern section may extend its conquests
into the whole southern part of the American continent, and spread the
institution of slavery over that vast domain. God may have purposed that
the good which has flowed to the African race in this land by its
connection with us, shall be extended to millions more, not by
importation, we may suppose, but by propagation here. I say this to show
that fanatical opposers of slavery may be employed under God as the
instruments of extending slavery to the very limits of habitable land in
the southern parts of our continent. We have tried in vain at the North,
for thirty years, to abolish slavery. It is time either to cease, or to
try some entirely different influences.

But I must close my long letter. When you write again, I have no doubt
that you will have seen some things in a new light. Tell me more about
your studies. I was interested in your way of describing things. I only
wondered that, with your occasional sense of the ludicrous, you should
not have been aware of the impression which you yourself must have made
on others. Burns's "giftie," "to see oursel's," etc., we all, more or
less, need. I told Hattie the other day that I thought some parts of
your letter did you very great credit, but that the