Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/261

Rh on earth should be governed by a queen, a ruler of the heart as well as of the state, to whom all hearts and all people, black, and white, and red, and olive-complexioned, and yellow, should pay voluntary homage—a queen good and beautiful as your Majesty!

&emsp; I conclude this letter to your Majesty, which I commenced beneath the southern heavens, in the United States of North America. I no longer behold the infinitely mild skies of the south, and its waving palms, but I see before me a large and increasing popular life; a guadarajah of states growing aloft like palms. In the southern portion of Northern America nature is a great poet, in the northern a great human being.

It is still in this southern portion that I am now writing, and in one of the Slave States of North America.

It is the month of May, and the luxuriant, but feeble, and almost diseased beauty of South Carolina, is now in its fullest bloom. They are, however, glorious, these live-oaks, with their long depending trails of moss, which convert the forest into a natural gothic temple, these magnolia-trees, with their large, snow-white blossoms, and odours which fill the warm, soft air.

The songs of the negro slaves, from the river, as they row home after having sold their wares in the city, reach me at this moment in the beautiful, homelike home from which I have now the happiness of writing to your Majesty, and where I feel myself, as it were, nearer good Denmark, because its mistress, Mrs. William Howland, is a Dane, of the Danish line of Monefeldt, and well worthy to be introduced to the Queen of Denmark, both from the love which she bears to her mother-country, and for the beautiful, maternal feeling, towards both blacks and whites which distinguish this noble Danish woman.

I have already spoken of slavery as the misfortune of the