Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/401

Rh enchanting to an European eye; a certain romantic picturesqueness of life, caused by the contact of the black and the white races on this beautiful, fragrant soil; the peculiar life and temperament of the negroes, their songs, and religious festivals—will you forgive me for being enchanted with these, and for allowing myself, to forget, or to see less strongly the darkness of slavery than these images of light, which the beauty of the South called forth in natural objects and individual man. No poet here has sung the moral ideal of society, but the hundred-tongued bird (Turdus polyglottos), the nightingale of North America, sings in those fragrant forests, and earth with its human beings and its flowers seem bathed in light. Yet, that I was not blinded to the night side, and to the great lie in the life of the South, is proved by my letters home.

The most beautiful moral phenomenon which I saw, however, was the inbreaking light of Christianity among the children of Africa, the endeavours which true Christians, especially in Georgia, are making for the religious instruction of the slaves, and their emancipation and colonisation in Liberia, on the African coast. A vessel goes annually from Savannah to Liberia, laden with emancipated slaves, together with the means for their establishment in that, the original mother-country. But this phenomenon is no more than a little point of light in the gloomy picture of slavery in these States. It is a work of private individuals. The laws of the States are deficient in light and justice, as regards the slave, and are unworthy of a free country and people!

In the month of May I hastened from the glowing South and travelled northward to Pennsylvania, and afterwards to Delaware.

Amid the greatest heats of summer I found myself in the hot cities of Philadelphia and Washington. I interested myself in Philadelphia by becoming acquainted