"The slave of a tyrannical master is too often the most brutal of oppressors; but disinterestedness and tenderness have a sympathetic force, no less, surely, than rapacity and cruelty. Besides, with a race in which sense of honor is so leading a characteristic as in the African, the glory of being the doer and the giver, the shame of being the mere idle recipient, are very potent. Shaler was not too wise and good for dealing with ordinary human nature; he was considerate of innocent weaknesses, even of those with which his nature least enabled him to sympathize. He found, for example, that his people did not like to see the 'great house' on their estate surpassed in furniture and decoration by the mansions of neighboring planters. He respected their simple pride. He understood that his house was their palace, their state-house,--that their wish to embellish it was, in fact, a form of public spirit. He indulged them in what was no indulgence to himself." "Harvey has rather the advantage of him there: he can please himself and his people at the same time. How long have you known the Harvey plantation,--Land's End, as Judge Harvey called it, when he first came to settle here?" WEDNESDAY, April 10, 1844. "How long have you known the Harvey plantation?" Dr. Borrow had just asked me. "Ten years," I answered. "I was there for the first time about three years after Mr. Frank Harvey came back from Europe." "I was there nearly twenty-three years ago. Frank and I had just left Harvard. We were both going to finish our studies abroad. We were to sail together. Frank must go home for a visit first, and asked me to go with him. I saw slavery then for the first time. I had heard enough about it before. We had just been through the Missouri storm. I did not find it, as it showed itself on Judge Harvey's place, 'the sum of all villanies'; though, perhaps, looking back, I may think it was the sum of all absurdities. I did not reason or moralize about it then. I was hardly eighteen, and took things as they came. But to judge of what has been done on that plantation, you should have seen it as I saw it in '21. Sans Souci would have been the right name for it. Not that I liked it the less. I made none of these wise observations then. On the contrary, I was fresh from the study of dead antiquity, and was charmed to find that it wasn't dead at all. It must be admitted, there is a certain dignity in the leisurely ease of primitive peoples, past and present. They seem to think that what they are doing is just as important as what they may be going to do. We moderns and civilized talk a good deal about immortality; but those simple folks have a more vital sense of it: they seem to be conscious that there will be time enough for all they shall ever have to do in it. Old Judge Harvey was a sort of pristine man,--about as easy and indolent as the negroes themselves."