Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/428

Rh peculiarly living impression upon me, and have extended my vision as regards the richness of those forms in which the Creator expresses his life. The earth seems to me as a great symbolic writing, a grand epic, in which the various species of man, of vegetable productions and animals, water and land, form groups of separate songs and paragraphs which we have to read, and from which to learn the style of the Great Master, His design, and His system. My soul, in this view, spreads forth her wings and flies—alas! only in spirit—around the whole world; across the deserts and the paradise of Africa; across the icy tracts of Siberia; over the mountain land of the Himalayas—everywhere between the poles and the equator, where man lives, and animals breathe, and vegetation ascends towards the light; and I endeavour involuntarily, to groupe and arrange the dissimilar forms into harmonious constellations, around one central, all-illuminating Sun; butall is yet only anticipation, glimpses, flashes of light into my soul—merely the dawn, the morning watch! Perhaps at length the perfect day may appear; perhaps in the native land of runes, in my own silent home, I may be enabled to expound these runes of the earth, and that runic song which has been given me to ponder upon.

Of the mysteries of Charleston I shall not tell you anything, because I know them not, excepting by rumour, and that which I know merely by rumour I leave untold. Dark mysteries, more indeed than rumour has told, cannot fail in a great city in which slavery abides. I have heard it said that there is a flogging institution in Charleston for slaves, which brings the city a yearly revenue of more than ten thousand dollars. Every person who wishes to have his slave punished by the whip sends him there with money for his chastisement. I have both heard and read of this many times, and I believe it to be true. But the position of things here makes it difficult,