Two Years Ago, Volume I eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 430 pages of information about Two Years Ago, Volume I.

Two Years Ago, Volume I eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 430 pages of information about Two Years Ago, Volume I.
me; and ever since they have redoubled their kindness:  but it is intolerable, this dependence, and on you, too, who have a father to support in his darkness.  Oh, how I feel for you!  But to tell you the truth, I pay a price for this dependence.  I must needs be staid and sober; I must needs dress like any Quakeress; I must not read this book nor that; and my Shelley—­taken from me, I suppose, because it spoke too much ‘Liberty,’ though, of course, the reason given was its infidel opinions—­is replaced by ‘Law’s Serious Call.’  ’Tis all right and good, I doubt not:  but it is very dreary; as dreary as these black fir-forests, and brown snake fences, and that dreadful, dreadful Canadian winter which is past, which went to my very heart, day after day, like a sword of ice.  Another such winter, and I shall die, as one of my own humming-birds would die, did you cage him here, and prevent him from fleeing home to the sunny South when the first leaves begin to fall.  Dear children of the sun! my heart goes forth to them; and the whir of their wings is music to me, for it tells me of the South, the glaring South, with its glorious flowers, and glorious woods, its luxuriance, life, fierce enjoyments—­let fierce sorrows come with them, if it must be so!  Let me take the evil with the good, and live my rich wild life through bliss and agony, like a true daughter of the sun, instead of crystallising slowly here into ice, amid countenances rigid with respectability, sharpened by the lust of gain; without taste, without emotion, without even sorrow!  Let who will be the stagnant mill-head, crawling in its ugly spade-cut ditch to turn the mill.  Let me be the wild mountain brook, which foams and flashes over the rocks—­what if they tear it?—­it leaps them nevertheless, and goes laughing on its way.  Let me go thus, for weal or woe!  And if I sleep awhile, let it be like the brook, beneath the shade of fragrant magnolias and luxuriant vines, and image, meanwhile, in my bosom nothing but the beauty around.

“Yes, my friend, I can live no longer this dull chrysalid life, in comparison with which, at times, even that past dark dream seems tolerable—­for amid its lurid smoke were flashes of brightness.  A slave?  Well; I ask myself at times, and what were women meant for but to be slaves?  Free them, and they enslave themselves again, or languish unsatisfied; for they must love.  And what blame to them if they love a white man, tyrant though he be, rather than a fellow-slave?  If the men of our own race will claim us, let them prove themselves worthy of us!  Let them rise, exterminate their tyrants, or, failing that, show that they know how to die.  Till then, those who are the masters of their bodies will be the masters of our hearts.  If they crouch before the white like brutes, what wonder if we look up to him as to a god?  Woman must worship, or be wretched.  Do I not know it?  Have I not had my dream—­too beautiful for earth?  Was there not one whom you knew, to hear whom call me slave would have been rapture; to whom I would have answered on my knees, Master, I have no will but yours!  But that is past—­past.  One happiness alone was possible for a slave, and even that they tore from me; and now I have no thought, no purpose, save revenge.

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Two Years Ago, Volume I from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.