I long to see some clear running water.  Our streams and brooks in New England are not appreciated till one comes to this part of the land.  I long to see some good grass.  I yearn for some hills.  I would sail again along our rock-bound coast; Oh for a walk on its beaches, to see the tunnellings of the sea in the rocks, and the spouting-horns.  But what a relief it is to be in a section where the Christian religion is so generally accepted, and the swarms of errorists and sectarians which abound elsewhere are comparatively unknown.  Here, the lowest class, in which error would be prolific, is under instruction, to a great degree.  I see now why it is that false views about slavery are a great stimulant to heretical views and feelings;—­they are a convenient substitute for the love and zeal which true Christianity supplies.  The human mind, where it is accustomed to act freely, must be impelled by some master-passion; and when true religion does not supply it, error stands ready to satisfy the demand.

On the whole, I am persuaded that our Northern people behave full as well under the anti-slavery excitement as Southerners would if their consciences were perverted like ours, and we were the objects of their opposition.  I think that a change will come over us.  At the North, you have heard the wind, at midnight, after a warm rain, in winter, haul out to the north-west, and you know what a piping time we then have of it, and how the clear cold air, the next morning, and the bright sun, excite and cheer us.  There has been with us for a long time at the North, in our political and religious atmosphere, a warm, foggy, unwholesome drizzle of weak, fanatical feeling, with now and then gusts of wind and scud,—­a kind of weather most abhorred by mariners.  But we hope that the wind is changing, and that “fair weather cometh out of the North.”  God will not suffer us to live long, we earnestly hope, in this condition of misunderstanding and hatred, for it would be contrary to his established laws that we should long continue to be one nation with such feelings toward each other.  The change will be in the North.  Slavery will come to be regarded as not in itself a sin, and the evils incident to it will be left for those immediately concerned to bear them or seek their removal.  Or, if we become divided, the Southern section may extend its conquests into the whole southern part of the American continent, and spread the institution of slavery over that vast domain.  God may have purposed that the good which has flowed to the African race in this land by its connection with us, shall be extended to millions more, not by importation, we may suppose, but by propagation here.  I say this to show that fanatical opposers of slavery may be employed under God as the instruments of extending slavery to the very limits of habitable land in the southern parts of our continent.  We have tried in vain at the North, for thirty years, to abolish slavery.  It is time either to cease, or to try some entirely different influences.