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

LETTERS. 71
I shall listen to himl with all courtesy." HIe is the
first one that hlas stood up like a man, and boldly
professed to be an abolitionist. The Southerners respected him, in spite of themselves; for honesty and
boldness will be respected. It is reported that one
said to another, " We have not only got an honest
man among us, but the best debater of us all." The
honest man was a rarity!
Dear Sarah's beautiful articles found a ready sale
at the anti-slavery fair. Was it not a touching incident that a poor German peasant, who had read
"' Uncle Tom," should have taken down two engravw
ings from the walls of his cabin and sent them to the
fair in Boston? I would have expended my last dollar for them, but unfortunately they were lost by
shipwreck. Such things make us forget a thousand
disappointments in hu man nature..
Sarah writes that you were disappointed in the
Sphinx. The description of travellers has not led me
to suppose there was anything attractive in the Sphinx
itself. But Gliddon's " Panorama of the Nile," where
the Sphinx appears just as evening closes her curtains
and " pins them with a star," made a deep impression
on my imagination. The huge, dark, almost shapeless mass, strange, silent relic of such a remote past,
so diml and solemn in the desert stillness, seemed to
me invested with awful grandeur. I don't wonder
your brother was afraid to stay alone with those colossal statues of Egypt. A mysterious, disturbing
influence comes over the soul when the Past looks
us in the face, so like the eternal eye of God.
With regard to the present, here in our own country, my dear friend, it is gloomy enough..... Of all
our servile Senates, none have been so completely