September 5. Why do I not love to be near the sea better than among the mountains? Here is my home, if birthplace makes home. But no, it is not my natural preference; I believe I was born longing after the mountains. And rivers and lakes are better to me than the ocean. I remember how beautiful the Merrimac looked to me in childhood, the first true river I ever knew; it opened upon my sight and wound its way through my heart like a dream realized; its harebells, its rocks, and its rapids, are far more fixed in my memory than anything about the sea. Yet the vastness and depth and the changes of mist and sunshine are gloriously beautiful; I know and feel their beauty. Still, I admire it most in glimpses; a bit of blue between the hills, only a little more substantial than the sky, and a white sail flitting across it; or when it is high-tide calm,--one broad, boundless stillness,--then there is rest in the sea, but it never rests me like the strong silent hills; they bear me up on their summits into heaven’s own blue eternity of peace. But is it right to wrap one’s own being in this mantle of peace, while the country is ravaged by war?--its garments rolled in blood, brother fighting against brother to the death? The tide of rebellion surges higher and higher, and there is no sadder proof that we are not the liberty-loving people that we used to call ourselves, than to learn that there are traitors in the secret councils of the nation, in forts defended by our own bravest men; among women, too: “Sisters! oh, Sisters! Shame o’ ladies!” A disloyal woman at the North, with everything woman ought to hold dear at stake in the possible fall of this government,--it is too shameful! I hope every one such will be held in “durance vile” until the war is over. But will it end until the question is brought to its true issue,--liberty or slavery? I doubt it: and I would rather the war should last fifty years, than ever again make the least compromise with slavery, that arch-enemy of all true prosperity, that eating sin of our nation. Rather divide at once, rather split into a thousand pieces, than sink back into this sin! The latest news is of the capture of the Hatteras Forts, a great gain for us, and a blight to privateering at the South;--with a rumor of “Jeff Davis’s” death, which nobody believes because it is so much wished. Yet to his friends he is a man, and no rebel. War is a bitter curse,--it forbids sympathy, and makes us look upon our enemies as scarcely human; and we cannot help it, when our foes are the foes of right. Norton, September 8. Am I glad for trials, for disappointments, for opportunities for self-sacrifice, for everything God sends? Ah! indeed I do not know! How many times, when we say, “Try me, and know my heart,” the answer is, “Ye know not what ye ask!” And I know not why, in some states of mind and body, what _seems_ a very little trouble (or would, if told another), should be so oppressive.