without consulting anyone’s tastes but my own. I would be a good deal happier than a prince, and the only free man under the sun. My, how jolly that would be! The conventions of Society would not enslave me, I wouldn’t have to surrender any of my rights to the good of the many. I would have all the freedom and independence of a Robinson Crusoe with a great deal more fun. But what nonsense I am talking. I will stop rhapsodizing before you think me quite crazy. The text to all this is my late best suit of clothes, which has just become my everyday suit, and shows extraordinary symptoms of speedy dissolution. It is coming out at the knees, besides being spotted all over like the tawny hide of the leopard. And I feel utterly discouraged by this new development. My only hope now is that I will get some place to work out in the back woods far from the haunts of civilization, where they will feed me till I want no more on hog and hominy, and where they all go round in their shirt sleeves and where all such things as cuffs and other like expensive luxuries are unknown. Don’t anybody get alarmed aqout my health. The measles have left me all right. My eyes are good, I don’t abuse them. I am strong as a horse, and as lively as a cricket.
With love Clnd in haste,
HENRY N. CASTLE.
OBERLIN, June (?), ’81.
DEAR SISTERS, CARRIE AND HELEN,
It isn’t often that I have an opportunity to write you a letter together. Let’s see, how long is it since the last time? So long that I can’t remember. I guess it must have been when I was up to Hilo in ’76. I have expressed myself so often before on the delights of receiving an inter-monthly mail, that I do not need to expand on my feelings on the present occasion. Suffice it to say that my heart swelled with proud joy and exultation when I received a good, fat, double postage letter last night, with Kamehameha’s smiling visage beaming upon me from the envelope. It was a yellow envelope, not in Father’s handwriting. That indicated a new presence in the family circle, at once. That means that Carrie is at home, thinks I. Hereafter there will be visible still another handwriting on envelopes from home. May it be often visible, as it were. Well, the envelope contained a letter from Helen, one from Carrie, and one from Mother. Thanks, many thanks! I suppose by the time this reaches you, Geo. will be well on with his house. I wish I were there to see it, and Will’s. For that matter, I would be willing to see a few of my relations in Honolulu, as well as their houses. Your letter, dear Carrie, was a splendid one. When you told about how you got home, and where you met the different folks, how you met Mother between the dining room and library, (that’s where I said Goodbye to her, Carrie), I just felt a thrill run through me. I was there, almost as really as if I had been there in bodily presence. I didn’t have the experience about Honolulu that you did, quite. Yes, I did too, partially. But the Government building looked just as I had expected it to, and surely King Street is wide enough. It always impressed me as a wide street, and so it seemed to me when I was back last year, wider than an ordinary city street. How do the mountains look to you? High enough? If not, try climbing some of them, e.g., Konahuanui. There seems to have arisen a mistaken impression as to the state of my health. I am strong enough to fell on ox, and would do it if I had a purpose sufficiently fell. But I fell once myself from the mango tree near the house, and consequently have felt so much sympathy for suffering since, that I will never fell any creature, especially as I have no use for its fell. My eyes are so strong that I can see through a pine board and often take an observation of a great many million miles. You know I wear glasses now. Just think, Helen, of your precious Henry in specs. Carrie can tell you all about it. Almost every one acknowledges the effect to be sublime. My chief affliction is that I can never tell whether I like the world best with my specs on or without. A great question.
With love,
HENRY.
OBERLIN, July, 7, ’81.
DEAR FATHER, MOTHER, CARRIE, HELEN, JIM, AND EVERYBODY ELSE WHO CARES,
I long to talk with you. How I wish I could say what I want on paper. But writing doesn’t come naturally to me, except by fits and starts. My heart is so full that it seems useless to try to write half I feel, and so I give up in despair. And then I am compelled to silence, and that is so hard when I long so for expression. I wish I might find relief in writing, but I don’t. I can’t free my pent-up feelings in that way, as the poet says. I suppose Brother Will found it a consolation to write, but I don’t seem to, as it were. I remember how he used to write such delightful, long letters. I suppose you folks might think that because I write so little, I don’t think so very much about home. But it isn’t so. It is because I think so much that I write so little; which I may say is my condition in reference to everything. The fact is, I never was so full of home as I have been the past two or three months. I never longed for it so. I never thought of it and of you all so much. I never was so constantly reminded of it, and assailed by the thought of it as now. When I first came to this country in 1877, I never used to be homesick. Of course that was because you, Mother and Father and part of the time Helen, were here with me. But even this year when Bowen, Rex and I came here together I never used to be homesick. I would go a long while without the thought of home ever entering my mind. I could say then, “Oh! I’m never homesick.” But now, it is far different. Don’t think I am unhappy though. I am only homesick in its happy sense. For of course it has a happy sense. What thought more pleasant than that of home? And what more pleasant than to have that thought a frequent visitor? Stealing into the open door of my heart at all hours, cheering loneliness, driving away discouragement, with the host of pleasant memories and familiar faces that it brings. It is seeing you again.
One day, in Spring, I was walking out to the woods and through a little break in the trees, I saw some low clouds that looked like distant mountains. The color, the shape and position all were just right. The delusion was perfect. When I first saw them my heart gave a leap. For the moment they were mountains to me. And even afterwards they were, almost. I enjoyed them as something more than clouds. At the Commencement Concert I sat upstairs on one side of the Gallery so that I could look out of the open windows opposite. There were clouds in the distance that looked exactly like a range of our tropical mountains. The tops of the trees seen indistinctly in the dim light seemed exactly like palms and bananas. It was not like the other case just a single illusion, but a whole scene as full, as perfect in detail, as a painting. I could see there was a plain before me, girdled by mountains. The hour I knew was just before it begins to grow dark, when the mountains you know, look so cool and inviting, when a gentle breeze is springing up, when the trees look as if they were waiting every minute for the moon to rise and silver their tops. It was Honolulu. It was home, and far more. You may laugh if you will. You may call me fantastically sentimental. But what’s the use of being foolish about these things? It was just as good as real as long as it looked real, and I enjoyed it as real, enjoyed it intensely, keeping out the thought that it was only a vision, a dream, built out of the mists of the evening. Why not as substantial as the other delusions that we mortals forever cheat ourselves with? It was simply a glimpse of the Paradise of Adam and Eve, memories of which linger in every man’s heart. The other night I was out walking quite late. It was a beautiful evening. I was coming up North Professor towards College St. The stars were shining brightly. The Milky Way came down quite low in the sky, so that the end of it was seen between the steeple of the 2nd Church and a tall poplar at the corner of the Ladies Hall. It was a striking scene. All at once I felt lifted out of myself. I was in the land of the ideal. It seemed as though I were in Heidelberg more than anywhere else. Life all at once was full of significance. It lost all its wearisomeness, seemed full of glorious possibility, and this became a glorious world. Of course things settled back into their usual state of prosaic dullness in a moment, but I felt better for the glimpse OJ an ideal world. And after all I live in the hope that it was the real world I saw in that moment, and that I would live in it all the time, were not my eyes closed and my ears dull of hearing. That is our chronic condition. It is only in moments of spiritual illumination that we see aright and pierce the thin veil of commonplace existence that hides eternal realities from us. In the highest flights of our imagination we are nearest the truth. In the moments of inspiration when we are all poets is the time that we are best
