From collection Frances Willard Journal Transcripts
is touching beyond words.
How many lovely things our humanity enshrines!
Lucy Stone has passed to heaven-what a great brave life was that!
[Still pages out of order;continuation of 10/27; also 10/27 in back of book]
October 27, 1893
This atmosphere of this home is one quite new to me and Bess notices it more than I do. For these good friends are anglicized Americans who have learned to expatriate themselves-so that the little grandchildren, rejoicing in the lovely lanes cry out "Not like America-is it grandma" & she says "O no-ugly rail fences there." Perhaps this is "All right" since they are likely to be reared & live in England but somehow it hurts me to feel how America is discounted among these dear friends of mine. It seems to me that to miss the passionate love of one's country is to cheapen one's character & life.
October 28, 1893
I have been looking over some books by Henry James for whom I have felt a certain criss-crossness because of the unjust conception he gives of his own country & country women in his books. But something seemed to say to me "Why can't you let him live his own life-take him at his best and not be so severe with him. And so I will! (How glad he would be if he knew it!) His gifts are notable and his limitations doubtless inborn. I can overlook ![?] much of his expatriated view since I read his really noble essay on James Russell Lowell-there was a true & great American.
October 29, 1893
It seems pitiful in this land of a state church to get so little gospel food. But a descendant of Major Simon Willard of Kent, Puritan, who "came over" in 1632 (I think) on account of religious persecution has still a strain of blood that prefers the blessed gospel of outdoors to the hum-haw of the high church machinery& so-with all good wishes to preacher (beg pardon, priest) and people I staid at home and read a book on Immortality. Have been reviewing [entry continues in space for 11/3] Phaedo, (read when I was 20) and took comfort in it even more than I did then. In the P.M. Hannah, her two little (Catholic!) granddaughters, Bess & I took a long ride over the moors.
November 1, 1893
We repeated that sweet "Traeller's Psalm" at prayers & sang
We repeated that sweet "Traveller's Psalm" at prayers & sang
