Mrs. Prentiss’ letters relating to her husband’s call to Chicago require perhaps an explanatory word.  She had some very pleasant associations with Chicago.  It was the home of a brother and sister-in-law, to whom she was deeply attached, and of other dear relatives.  There Stepping Heavenward had first appeared, and many unknown friends—­grateful for the good it had done them—­were eager to form her acquaintance and bid her welcome to the great city of the Interior.  And yet the thought of removing there filled her with the utmost distress.  Had her husband’s call been to some distant post in the field of Foreign Missions, her language on the subject could hardly have been stronger.  But this language in reality expresses simply the depth of her devotion to her church and her friends in New York, her morbid shyness and shrinking from the presence of strangers, and, especially, her vivid sense of physical inability to make the change without risking the loss of what health and power of sleep still remained to her.  Misgiving on this last point caused her husband to hesitate long before accepting the call, and to feel in after years that his decision to accept it, although conscientiously made, had been a grave mistake.

To Mrs. Condict, New York, June 3, 1871.

I knew that you would rather hear from me than through the papers, the fact that Mr. Prentiss has been once more unanimously elected by the General Assembly to the Chicago Professorship.  He has come home greatly perplexed as to his duty, and prepared to do it, at any reasonable cost, if he can only find out what it is.  We built our Dorset house not as a mere luxury, but with the hope that the easy summer there would so build up our health as to increase and prolong our usefulness; but going to Chicago would deprive us of that, besides cutting us off from all our friends.  But we want to know no will but God’s in this question, and I am sure you and Miss K. will join us in the prayer that we may not so much as suggest to Him what path He will lead us into.  The experience of the past winter would impress upon me the fact that place and position have next to nothing to do with happiness; that we can be wretched in a palace, radiant in a dungeon.  Mr. P. said yesterday that it broke his heart to hear me talk of giving up Dorset; but perhaps this heartbreaking is exactly what we need to remind us of what for many years we never had a chance to forget, that we are pilgrims and strangers on the earth.  Two lines of my own keep running in my head: 

Oh foolish heart, oh faithless heart, oh heart on ruin bent, Build not with too much care thy nest, thou art in banishment.