Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/429

Rh nay next to impossible, for me to search into such things. But I cannot and will not become a spy. I receive merely that which comes to me compulsively by my own experience, and which I therefore consider as a knowledge by higher design, as a something which I ought to know, and to receive. I have here properly to do with the ideal, and to seize and present it purely and faithfully. And it is in the feeling of that ideal South, as it already exists in some degree, and as it some time may wholly exist, in order to fulfil the design of the Creator, that I now bid farewell to the South, with both admiration and love—sorrowing for that which it now is not, and hoping again to return.

I shall write you no more from this place, but next from one of the Northern States. I long to go northward for cooler air and a freer people. Here one is often obliged to swallow down one's innermost thoughts and be silent, if one would avoid either wounding others or disputing with them. And this heat—if it continues without intermission, as it is likely to do from one month to another, till October—rather would I dwell at North Cape, and be lighted by fire-wood three parts of the year!

But, notwithstanding, farewell thou beautiful, flowery South, the garden of North America! Thou hast warmed and refreshed me deliciously! farewell to thy piazzas covered with blossoming creepers shading pale beauties; farewell fragrant forests, red-rivers where the songs of the negro resound; farewell, kind, beautiful, amiable people, friends of the slave, but not of slavery! When now in spirit I look back to the South I shall think upon you, and through you, on the future of Carolina and Georgia. I see you, then, beneath your palmettos or your magnolia and orange groves, the fruits of all the earth, and beyond all the tropical bananas, spread out before you upon your hospitable boards; see you distribute them,