To believe, to act, and to have events confound you-I grant you, that is hard to bear. That you, believing what you believed-what you sincerely believed, including the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’-acted upon it.
The outcome is not the point.” “Then what, pray, is the point?” His voice was a dry, soft rattle, like a breeze through a bough of dead leaves.
And the outcome is, they are slaves again, or dead.” “You are not God. I valued my principles more than I valued their lives. There was a man, Jesse, he handed me a gun, and I handed it back to him. You must accept that.” “But I might have saved them. “You did not kill Silas Stone, or Zannah’s child. It feigns a gentle lassitude, yet coiled beneath are currents that have crushed the trunks of mighty trees, and swept men to swift drownings…” In others, it sucks the light down and gives back naught but an inscrutable sheen that conceals both depth and shallows. In places, it roils as if heated below by a hidden furnace. Brown as treacle, wider than a harbor, this is water sans sparkle or shimmer. One wakes and falls asleep to a green sameness, the sun like a pale egg yolk, peering down from a white sky.Īnd the river! Water as unlike our clear fast-flowing freshets as a fat broody hen to a hummingbird. Here all is obvious, a song upon a single note. I yearn for mountains, or at least for the gentle ridges of Massachusetts the sweet folds and furrows that offer the refreshment of a new vista as each gap or summit is obtained. We go on through Nature to God, and my Northern eye misses the grandeur that eases that ascent. Here, one who wishes his words to make plain sense had better say “white as cotton.” I will not say that I find the landscape lovely. “I have now traveled so far south that I find myself come to a place where our common expression “white as snow” has no useful meaning.
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