e to speak of common things in these
blessed days. Did you observe what the papers say about the manner in
which they received the Great News yesterday in New York [The surrender
of the Rebel army],--not with any loud ebullition of joy, but rather
with a kind of religious silence and a gratitude too deep for utterance?
And I see that they propose to celebrate, not with fireworks and firing
of cannon, but with an illumination,--the silent shining out of joy from
every house. Last evening the locomotive of the freight train expressed
itself in a singular way. Not shutting its whistle when it left the
station, it went singing all down through the valley. For my part, I
feel a solemn joy, as if I had escaped some great peril, only that it is
multiplied by being that of millions.

To Rev. Henry W Bellows, D.D.

SHEFFIELD, April 15, 1865.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--We used to think that life in our country, under our
simple republican regime and peaceful order, was tame and uneventful;
given over to quiet comfort and prosaic prosperity; never startled by
anything more notable than a railroad disaster or a steamer burnt at
sea. Events that were typified by the sun turning to darkness and the
moon to blood, and stars falling from heaven,--distress of nations with
perplexity of men's hearts, failing them for fear,--all this seemed to
belong to some far-off country and time.

[280] But it has come to us. God wills that we should know all that any
nation has known, of whatever disciplines men to awe and virtue. The
bloody mark upon the lintel, for ten thousands of first-born slain,--the
anxiety and agony of the struggle for national existence,--the
tax-gatherer taking one fourth part of our livelihood, and a deranged
currency nearly one half of the remainder,--four years of the most
frightful war known in history,--and then, at the very moment when our
hearts were tremulous with the joy of victory, and every beating pulse
was growing stiller and calmer in the blessed hope of peace, then the
shock of the intelligence that Lincoln and Seward, our great names
borne up on the swelling tide of the nation's gratulation and hope, have
fallen, in the same hour, under the stroke of the assassin,--these are
the awful visitations of God!. . . As I slowly awake to the dreadful
truth, the question that presses upon me--that presses upon the national
heart--is, what is to become of us? If the reins of power were to fall
into competent hands, we coul