would like to go home on some accounts, yet evidently vastly prefers to be here with Father, where she can prosecute her studies, which she says she hates to leave. She has made her arrangements to go home, but that is a mere nothing. Arrangements are not hard to make and unmake, as our. family surely ought to know, if anybody does. Carrie was going to visit in Kansas, but will give that up for the present. She jumps at the chance of coming here to study, she says. I do hope you will surely come, for it will be worse than ever to have Carrie come here a little while and then go home after all. I didn’t know how much I missed the home folks till Carrie came and went. It is life, heaven with you. Mere existence alone. But of course, I only want you to do just what is best. I don’t see how Father is to be invigorated by coming here just at the beginning of summer? Won’t the heat be hard on him? Of course May, the first month he spends here, will be invigorating, but how will it be after that? June, July, August, how will he stand those? But the very thought of having Father, Mother, Carrie and Helen here together, and of keeping house somewhere in the centre of the town, in some nice house, fairly makes my mouth water. It makes my heart leap to think of it. It is too good to believe.
Lovingly,
HENRY.
OBERLIN, Thursday, April 26, ’85
DEAR PEOPLE AT HOME,
I have had the misfortune to be put on for Junior Ex. for an English Oration. I just want to know, dear folks, what I am to do for sure, next vacation. I regard the plans for work as visionary. I think there is a fair chance that I may be able to get some honest, hard, unremunerative work next vacation, to which I can turn my attention. But as for finding some nice place in a carpenter’s or other mechanic’s shop, where I can learn a great deal, that is not a probable thing, I think. I must be willing, of course, to turn my hand to anything that comes up. Now the question is, if I can’t get anything better than feeding pigs for my board, am I to do that, in preference to going to Winchendon, Milwaukee, New York or Kansas? Whatever the decision, I shall cheerfully abide by it. Will and Ida, I have just rec’d my certificate of stock from the Book Ex. I shall be glad to get you books at a discount, at any time, or any others of the Family. You will find a list of their publications in the “Good Literature,” which I send Helen by Carrie. The stockholders discount is (1-3) one-third off. Must close. Much love; in haste..
HENRY.
OBERLIN, Sunday, May IS, ’81.
DEAR SISTER HELEN,
I had the unexpected pleasure of receiving a good long letter from you the other day with one from Hattie, by same sailing vessel I suppose. Dear Helen, you needn’t think you have deserted me, and suffer qualms of conscience. I’m sure you are altogether the most faithful correspondent that ever existed. You have written to me every mail but one since I have been here. And you have written by so many sailing vessels that I have almost got to expecting an intermediate mail as a regular thing. I was overjoyed to get the photographs you sent me. But don’t think. I don’t admire the Royal Palms. I was completely converted on that subject before leaving the Islands. The effect of that Royal Palm up at the Mausoleum is something magnificent. And that in the Kawaiahao Cemetery, ditto. Reky and I are regular showman with our Island pictures, and Bowen is too. He has taken them with him out into the country and exhibited them to a great circle of friends and relatives. We have converted a great many to the belief that the Islands are a very nice place, and aroused in everybody an ambition to go there. You speak of not having written or so long that you feel like a stranger. I don’t think it is because one hasn’t written for a long time, but because you have lived a great deal since writing last. So that for a time I am really forgotten, and you wake up to my existence suddenly with the force of a discovery, and then I seem something very far away, like a part o. your past. I know that is the way it is with me. I wish I could be there to play backgammon with you, but when I got there Helen, I don’t believe you would want to very long. You would play about one game, and then hide the board, so I wouldn’t be reminded of it.
May 27.
You must not say “scraggly Oberlin” Helen, for you must remember that we have just been having spring here.
“When the earth with blossoms again is gay,
And the fountains gush in the lovely May.”
Yes, for the last few weeks our souls have been filled with the glory of the Springtide. How many thousands have hearts that have waxed gross, eyes that see not, and ears that are dull of hearing. Thus it must have been with me, that I never fully appreciated before the “fullness of the Spring.” The Campus is a magnificent park. My memory goes back with a bound to the Park at the Hague and to the still finer groves and avenues of Fontainebleau and St. Cloud, and then I turn to the Campus, and its beauty does not fade by the comparison. And then how the birds do sing; oh what we miss at Honolulu, in having no song birds. A caged canary may do very well, but how can it compare with these songs from the tops of green trees? And then the wild flowers. (I hear the birds sing now.) Remember the “Ode to the Nightingale,” and then think what it is to have no songsters. I can appreciate now the poetry on the songs of birds. In this connection I should like to write by the hour of Wordsworth. How beautiful are his “Odes to a Skylark” and other bits on birds. By the way his “Ode on Immortality” is one of the finest things in the whole range of literature. Read it, read it, over and over again. “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” etc., and so on. But really Helen, Oberlin was a most beautiful place about two weeks ago. What grand trees elms are. I wonder if they won’t grow at the Islands. And the wild flowers certainly will. I must send you some seeds if I can get some. There is no denying that this is a beautiful country. What’s the use in thinking only one country beautiful. They are all beautiful. I am going to be a citizen of the world hereafter, and not try through a false patriotism, to tie my soul down to the circumscribed limits of a few square miles. I am first of all, above all a man, and therefore I should turn my patriotism to the whole world. What does Coleridge say? Something so good that I must quote it. “Nor will I profane that man’s” sublimer spirit, who can feel that God is everywhere! The God “who framed mankind to be one mighty family, Himself our “Father, and the World our Home.” I forgot to say anything about poor Reky’s hand. I am afraid Mary and Edward will think I lacked sympathy with him. I didn’t and don’t. I almost cried, and felt pretty nearly as bad about it as he did, and I did everything in my power to comfort him until he got over feeling bad about it. But I have been so excessively busy myself, that I haven’t been able to do much. I should like to have Mary and Edward know this. Either send them this letter or something. For I have felt for Reky very much in all this. And he has been very brave about it all. I do not believe he was very careless. He probably had some curiosity about sawing, and I would have too under the same circumstances. My text for next time will be how the dust spoils the looks of everything, and how hot it is.
Yours, etc.,
HENRY.
OBERLIN, Saturday, May 27, ’81.
DEAR SISTER HATTIE,
I think if I owe any one a letter it certainly must be you. You have written me a great many good letters, and I thoroughly appreciate them, even though I haven’t answered you personally. You folks must calm down on the subject or my clothes. Carrie helped me out of that. She just sent forth her fiat and the result was a bran new, elegant, fashionable suit of clothes. She helped me select the cloth, but never had the joy of seeing me wear them, which joy however I have possessed to the fullest extent. However I am completely discouraged on the subject or economy. I can’t economize worth a cent. I wish I was a beggar, without a cent in the world or any prospect of getting one. What a happy fellow I would be then! Perfectly independent, I could go around in ragged clothes and a torn hat, and if there wasn’t the proper hitch on my necktie nobody would have a word to say about it. The world would be perfectly independent
