Their consciences are turned to india-rubber,
or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.
One thing, if no more, I have gained by my custom-house experience,--to
know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power
of sympathy could have taught me, because the animal, or the machine
rather, is not in nature.
March 23d.--I do think that it is the doom laid upon me, of murdering
so many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-House, that
makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again trying to write
worthily, . . . . yet with a sense as if all the noblest part of man had
been left out of my composition, or had decayed out of it since my nature
was given to my own keeping. . . . . Never comes any bird of Paradise
into that dismal region. A salt or even a coal ship is ten million times
preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the fresh breeze around
me, and my thoughts, having hardly anything to do with my occupation, are
as free as air.
Nevertheless, you are not to fancy that the above paragraph gives a
correct idea of my mental and spiritual state.
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