The following fragment of a letter addressed to us, and apparently intended to accompany Mr. Biglow’s contribution to the present number, was found upon his table after his decease.—­EDITORS ATLANTIC MONTHLY.]

TO THE EDITORS OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

JAALAM, 24th Dec., 1862.

RESPECTED SIRS,—–­ The infirm state of my bodily health would be a sufficient apology for not taking up the pen at this time, wholesome as I deem it for the mind to apricate in the shelter of epistolary confidence, were it not that a considerable, I might even say a large, number of individuals in this parish expect from their pastor some publick expression of sentiment at this crisis.  Moreover, Qui tacitus ardet magis uritur.  In trying times like these, the besetting sin of undisciplined minds is to seek refuge from inexplicable realities in the dangerous stimulant of angry partisanship or the indolent narcotick of vague and hopeful vaticination:  fortunamque suo temperat arbitrio.  Both by reason of my age and my natural temperament, I am unfitted for either.  Unable to penetrate the inscrutable judgments of God, I am more than ever thankful that my life has been prolonged till I could in some small measure comprehend His mercy.  As there is no man who does not at some time render himself amenable to the one,—­quum vix justus sit securus,—­so there is none that does not feel himself in daily need of the other.

I confess I cannot feel, as some do, a personal consolation for the manifest evils of this war in any remote or contingent advantages that may spring from it.  I am old and weak, I can bear little, and can scarce hope to see better days; nor is it any adequate compensation to know that Nature is young and strong and can bear much.  Old men philosophize over the past, but the present is only a burthen and a weariness.  The one lies before them like a placid evening landscape; the other is full of vexations and anxieties of housekeeping.  It may be true enough that miscet haec illis, prohibetque Clotho fortunam stare, but he who said it was fain at last to call in Atropos with her shears before her time; and I cannot help selfishly mourning that the fortune of our Republick could not at least stay till my days were numbered.

Tibullus would find the origin of wars in the great exaggeration of riches, and does not stick to say that in the days of the beechen trencher there was peace.  But averse as I am by nature from all wars, the more as they have been especially fatal to libraries, I would have this one go on till we are reduced to wooden platters again, rather than surrender the principle to defend which it was undertaken.  Though I believe Slavery to have been the cause of it, by so thoroughly demoralizing Northern politicks for its own purposes as to give opportunity and hope to treason, yet I would not have our thought and purpose diverted from