Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

70 LETTERS.
of that woman! She knows how to feel for a man
when he is obliged to sell a good honest slave! " In
his view the book was intended as a balsam for bereaved slave-holders.
TO FRANCIS G. SHA'W.
WAYLAND, January 22, 1854.
Did you ever see, among a series of frescoes by
Correggio, somewhere in Italy, Diana with a crescent
on her brow, guiding her chariot through the clouds?
The engraving of it by Toschi is, to me, the most
graceful, beautiful, altogether perfect thing I ever did
see. It is a glorious woman, and yet, in expression,
the real full moon, guiding her bright chariot through
the heavens. If I lived where it was I should make
a little golden altar, and burn incense before it. You
see there is no washing my Greek heathenism out of
me. What is the reason that a region so totally
unlike my homely environment in the outward
world has always seemed to me so like a remembered
home?...
Things are going on at a terrible rate on the slavery question. They are trying in Congress to vote
payment to the piratical claimants of the Amistad,
and to abolish the obligation of Southerners in the
Missouri compromise. Think of that! Gerrit Smith
is in Congress now, and has made a noble speech.
He was interrupted by a member from Maryland,
who tried to put him down at the outset by saying,
1" It appears that the gentleman from New York intends to give us an anti-slavery speech." With dignified courtesy, Mr. Smith replied, "I do intend to
make an anti-slavery speech; and if the gentleman
from Maryland wishes to make a pro-slavery speech,