lectual action. Her general feeling on the subject is best to be seen in a letter written a few years later to the Rev. W. H. Channing, not on this express theme, but in regard to a sermon that she had just heard: —
… “Many thoughts had risen in my mind during the discourse. But when we cannot gratify these wishes to express ourselves, it is probably as well. If we are prevented from gathering and giving away the flower, it withers indeed unenjoyed, but leaves a seed on the stalk. My thoughts generally seem too slight or too much in need of more to be written down, so I like to speak them, but if they lie in the mind, they attract the more they want. Some degree of expression is necessary for growth, but it should be little in proportion to the full life.
“As fire lays open, and the plow awakes a virgin soil, successions of seeds are called into development, which the powers of nature had generated in different moods and left there in the cold dark, perhaps for ages, quite forgotten. So shall it be with a mind that works lonely, unsolicited, unutterable; the destined hour of tillage shall find it rich.
“I will rejoice in every gladsome spring day, eloquent with blooms, or autumn with its harvests, but the silent fields of stubble or snow shall be no less prized.”[1]
In this letter she clearly defines the power of oral utterance, not as a sign of supreme strength, but as rather, in her case at least, a resource of
- ↑ MS. (W. H. C.)
