What a change since I wrote you last Sunday! I have just returned again from church. It was crowded to its utmost capacity, and I saw for the first time in my life a whole large congregation literally in tears. When Mr Stebbins said, (I confess to my individual astonishment & somewhat to my horror), something to the effect that if the murder of the President had been assented to at Richmond, or by the rebels, they must be exterminated from the earth, there was a burst of assent, which showed the temper of the people, but when at the end of his discourse, (which was not a sermon, & had no “text” but the death) he said slowly and in a low plaint,—“thy Country bends over thee—and kisses thee—kisses thee—kisses thee!” —I believe that every man and woman in the [354]house was shedding tears. Indeed I never saw anything that compared at all with the public feeling which there has been here since yesterday morning.

I hope you don’t understand my letters as complaining—or rather that I really do complain or ask to be better treated than I am. A man may suffer, and appreciate his deprivations, and be hungry and express a sense of hungering, knowing that he wants what he cannot have, and in all not have a complaining mind, may he not? If I did not show you that I found the change from the close comradship of mutual duties and the exercise of friendship which it occasioned, to this mere fellow-passenger humanity of the frontier community, a difficult and hopeless hardship, what would you think of me? Because I am of all men the most slow, and awkward and difficult & inefficient and incapable in social action—at 43, a perfectly shy, unbroken, moody and balky colt—my social instincts are not less strong than any other man’s. I think I am all the hungrier because I feed so poorly. And as I can’t break out in words of the mouth, and am not yet quite incapable of letting myself out in writing—though getting near it—I have to appear to be complaining—but I only mean to express my lack. I don’t really expect you to fulfil, and I know that if you did nothing but write to me & told me everything you knew & thought of everything and everybody interesting you, I should not be satisfied. I hope you know it & appreciate it.

The fact is I never felt my social incapacity and the fearful deprivation & misfortune it is to me, as I have here. Before, I could always absorb myself in work—chiefly in writing, but now I can’t write, unless in extreme moderation, without great distress. And when I do write—I only make myself a bundle of contradictions—it don’t at all answer the purpose. I have no friends here, I make no progress toward having any. I hate my business & all I do in it is for my truth & duty’s sake. I’ve no other interest in it, and I scarcely do anything from one week’s end to another, do or say anything, with any heartiness.

What I am grumbling to you for again I don’t know, only that I am lonely again & want to say something, and there’s nothing here new or interesting, and I don’t know enough of what is concerning you to write of that.

Mr Lincoln is dead, and we have got a man for President whom I don’t like—whom I think to be a patriotic but low-bred Southerner, consequently an essentially uncivilized man, a man of prejudice & bad temper, a very dangerous man. I mean that I suspect all this. I always regretted his nomination. But I may be wholly wrong. I should like to know, very much, what you think of him. At any rate the nation lives and is immortal and Slavery is dead. Enough for us.

For all that, I can’t help feeling that the best part of me is pining [355]here in a sort of solitary confinement, & a man is never so lonely as in a crowd of strangers—even though a sympathetic crowd.