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

LETTERS. 99
letter, I stop with my pen poised in air, to contemplate my Galatea, my St. Cecilia, my Flying Hour of
the Night, my palace in Venice, my young Bacchus,
my glowing nasturtium, and my vase of tremulous
grass. Decidedly, there are many compensations for
those who are poor, and have never seen the world.
The landscape in front of the window is lovely. No
sharp frost has come to blight the foliage, and the
scenery is like a handsome woman of fifty, whom
Time has touched so lightly that her girlish delicacy
of beauty is merely deepened and warmed with a few
autumnal tints. Thus gently may you glide into the
frosted silver of a bright old age! It must be so,
dearest, because so many are cheered by your heart
warmth.
TO InRS. LUCY OSGOOD.
WVAYLAND, January 16, 1859.
I have buckled to Buckle's "History of Civilization," though I said I would not read it because I
dreaded being umade uncomfortable by the point of
view from which lie looks at things. This malking
moral progress depend entirely on intellectual progress seems to turn things so inside out that it twists
my poor brain. I care more that the world should
grow better, than it should grow wiser. The external must be developed from the internal. It makes
my head ache to look at human growth from any
other point of view. That is the great mistake of
Fourier. He is wise and great, and often prophetic,
but he thinks to produce perfect men by surrounding them with perfect circumstances; whereas the
perfect circumstances must be the result of perfect men. How can the marriage relation, for instance, be well ordered, until men and women are