1 January 1833 – 6 January 1833

There it lies in its cradle! its pure forehead yet unstained by sin, unfurrowed by care; and not an hour shall have passed without the traces of both becoming visible. And where is the mother gone? where is the fulfilled year?—Gone sorrowing to join the crowd of ancestors, who witness each against me for the unthrift waste I have made of the rich legacies they one by one have bestowed on me. Oh, new-born year! ere half thy hours are spent, how often will my weary spirit have wished them fleeter wings than even those they wear! What secrets are there folded in thy breast,—what undreamt-of chances,—what strange befallings,—what unforeseen sorrows,—what unexpected joys! Perhaps, in the mysterious accomplishments with which thou art laden, my death may be numbered!—perhaps, ere thy course be duly run, the death of Time may be decreed! Oh! this life, and all things in it, remind me of the thin veils of spiders' webs which divided Desire from his aim, and which, though light and transparent, were so numerous, that to lift them all away was hopeless. After breakfast, began writing journal. 'Twas not until dating it that I discovered it was New-year's day. When I did so, and looked at my strange surroundings, at the gloomy wintry sky, and thought of the heathenish disregard with which I was passing over, in this far land, the season of home-gathering and congregating of kin in my own country, I could not refrain from crying bitterly. In spite of the pouring rain, and Mr. ——'s hints to keep us away, my father, who wished to ascertain the truth of the reports with regard to the state of his theatre, set forward thither with me. We found a very large handsome house, larger, I think, than the Park, but dirty, dilapidated, and looking as if there had been eleven executions in it that morning. No actors, scarcely any scenes,—in short, such a state of things as rendered it totally impossible for us to think of acting there. Came home; sat diligently crying the whole morning. The afternoon cleared up, and became soft and sunny. My father insisted on my taking a walk; so I bonneted and set out with him. What I saw of the town appeared to me extremely like the outskirts of Birmingham or Manchester. Bright-red brick houses, in rows of three and five, with interesting gaps of gravel-pits, patches of meadow, and open spaces between, which give it an untidy straggling appearance. They are building in every direction, however, and in less than two years, these little pauses being filled up, Baltimore will be a very considerable place; for it covers, in its present state, a large extent of ground, and contains a vast population. Immediately after dinner, our host made his entrée with a piano-forte. I had suggested to Mr. —— that I should be glad of one; and here it came. I had asked him to return in the evening, and was glad of the piano, for it helps the time away. At six o'clock, the managers of the Holliday Street theatre made their appearance; and my father stating that Mr. —— was literally unable to fulfil his engagement with us, entered into arrangements with them, during which I sat up at a tremendously high window, looking at the beautiful serious skies, and radiant moon, and listening to a tolerable band playing sundry of Rossini's airs. When these men had departed, —— came in. I sang and made him sing till tea-time. After that, he entertained us with a very long, but not very clear, account of the various processes of making, polishing, etc. steel, as practised in his manufactory. His account of their hard dealings with the poorer manufacturers was dreadful; and he himself spoke with horror of it, saying, "Oh, they are so miserably ground, poor wretches, they cannot be said to live,—they barely exist." When I remonstrated with him upon the wickedness of such proceedings, he replied, "We are compelled to do it in self-defence: if we did not use the same means as other manufacturers, we should presently be undersold." And this is the game playing all over England at this moment, in every department of her commerce and manufacture,—this cruel oppression of the poor, this forcing them by a league against them, as it were, to toil in bitterness for their scanty daily bread, while those who thus inhumanly depreciate their labour, and wring their hard earnings from their starving grasp, grow wealthy on their plunder. Are not these the things for which God has said he will avenge? Is his abomination of the false balance, and the stinted measure, and the unjust reckoning, less than in the days when he said he would visit the oppressor of the poor, and plead the cause of the widow and fatherless? Are not these the things that make a nation rotten at core, and ripe for decay? Are not these the things for which retribution is laid up, and fourfold restitution will be demanded?—'Tis awful to think of. From this the conversation grew to the means of obtaining interest upon money in this country, which the gentlemen discussed together for a length of time. I listened to them with many sad thoughts. How intent they seemed in their discourse, how much they appeared to value every slightest advantage of place or circumstance which enabled them to draw a greater profit from their capital; how eagerly, how earnestly, they seemed absorbed in these calculations. I do not know when I have been so forcibly struck with the worthlessness of money, and the strange delusion under which all men seem to be labouring, giving up their lives, as they do, to the hunting of wealth. Are these the cares that should engross the faculties of immortal souls, and rational thinking creatures? That we must live, I know, and that money is necessary to live, I know; but that our glorious capacities of soul, mind, and body, the fitting exercise of which alone, in itself, is happiness, should thus be chained down to the altar horns of Mammon, is what I never will believe wise, right, or fitting. I at length spoke, for my heart was burning within me, and burst into an eloquent lamentation on the folly and misery of which the world was guilty in following this base worship as it does. But when I said that I was convinced happiness might and did exist most blessedly upon half the means which men spent their lives in scraping together, my father laughed, and said I was the last person in the world who could live on little, or be content with the mediocrity I vaunted. I looked at my satin gown, and held my tongue, but still I was not convinced. We returned to our music till ten o'clock, when they had some supper, after which they drank a happy new year to England:—poor old England, God bless it! At about twelve o'clock, —— departed. Sat up a long time at the window, listening to some serenading, which, in the moonlight, sounded pleasantly enough.

At about half-past ten, Mr. —— called for us, and we walked up to the cathedral, which is a large unfinished stone building, standing on the brow of a hill, which is to be the fashionable quarter of the town, and where there are already some very nice-looking houses. The interior of the church is large and handsome, and has more the look of a church than any thing I have been inside of in this country yet. 'Tis full eight years since I was in a Catholic church; and the sensation with which I approached the high altar, with its golden crucifix, its marble entablatures, and its glimmering starry lights, savoured fully as much of sadness as devotion. I have not been in a Catholic place of worship since I was at school. How well I remember the beautiful music of the military mass, the pageants and processions of the feast days at high mass, and the evening service, not vespers, but the Salut. They sang that exquisitely mournful and beautiful Et incarnatus est, of Haydn's, which made my blood all run backwards. One thing disgusted me dreadfully, though the priests who were officiating never passed or approached the altar without bending the knee to it, they kept spitting all over the carpet that surrounded and covered the steps to it, interrupting themselves in the middle of the service to do so, without the slightest hesitation. We had a very indifferent sermon: the service was of course in Latin. When it was over, Mr. —— insisted on showing me some paintings which hung on either side the grand entrance. These were a couple of pictures by Paulin Guerin; the one representing the descent from the cross, the other, the burying of the dead, by St. Charles, in the Holy Land. I do not understand much about bad pictures, but I know good ones when I see them; and I think these were not such. There was no beauty of imagination or poetical conception whatever in them, and there appeared to me to be manifold glaring faults in the execution. I could have sworn to their being French pictures. Was introduced to several people, coming out of church. A little way beyond the cathedral stands Washington's monument,—a neat and appropriate pillar,—which, together with a smaller one erected at the head of our street, to the memory of the North Point heroes, has given Baltimore the appellation of the monumental city, which never could have befallen it in any other country under heaven but this. At eight o'clock, we went to Mrs. ——'s. They are all in deep mourning, and the circle was very small. They are most agreeable pleasant people, with a peculiar gentleness of manner, like very high breeding, which I have often observed in Catholics of the better orders. Their conversation appeared to me totally divested of the disagreeable accent which seems almost universal in this country. Mrs. —— talked to me about my aunt Whitelock, and what a charming actress she was, and what an enchanting thrilling voice she had. I spent a delightful evening. Before we went away, Mr. —— showed us a picture of Lady ——, by Lawrence. It looked quite refreshing, with its lovely dark curls unfrizzed, and the form of the neck and arms undisguised by the hideousness of modern fashions. Saw a very good likeness, too, of the Duke of ——. 'Twas very like him, though many years younger. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * By the by, somebody said that —— had turned Roman Catholic, and very devout. Some of the Marys and Magdalens of the old Italian painters are very converting pictures, with their tearful melancholy eyes, and golden, glorious, billowy hair. Mrs. —— amused me very much by her account of the slaves on their estates, whom, she said, she found the best and most faithful servants in the world. Being born upon the land, there exists among them something of the old spirit of clanship, and "our house," "our family," are the terms by which they designate their owners. In the south, there are no servants but blacks; for the greater proportion of domestics being slaves, all species of servitude whatever is looked upon as a degradation; and the slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as "poor white trash."