Page:Letters of Life.djvu/17

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LETTERS OF LIFE.




LETTER I.


HOME AND ITS INHABITANTS.


You request of me, my dear friend, a particular account of my own life. It is little varied by incident, and has no materials for romance. Yet your wish ought to be sacred to my much indebted heart; and I believe there is no earthly pilgrimage, if faithfully portrayed in its true lights and shadows, but might impart some instruction to the future traveller, and set forth His praise, whose mercies are "new every morning, and fresh every moment."

I was born in Norwich, Connecticut; beautiful Norwich, whose varied scenery reveals sometimes the Caledonian wildness, and at others the tender softness of the vale of Tempe. The earliest pictures of Memory, and they hang still unfaded in her gallery, are of rude ledges of towering rock, which were to me as the Alps,