Her children were with her, and she was
enjoying, as few persons know how to enjoy, the loveliness of Italy.
She delighted, too, in the congenial society of Mr. and Mrs. Browning
and the agreeable friends who were that winter grouped around them.
After her long trial and her years of suffering she was to have "her
day" in the world of beauty and love which lay about her.
In one of her early letters to Georgiana May, in 1833, she says,
speaking of some relaxation which had come to her friend: "How good it
would be for me to be put into a place which so breaks up and
precludes thought. Thought, intense emotional thought, has been my
disease. How much good it might do me to be where I could not but be
thoughtless." This letter was written when she was twenty-two years
old, and there had never been any respite in her life until those
sweet Italian days of the winter of 1859 and '60.
It was only about a year later than the date of the above letter when
the subject of slavery was first brought under her own observation
during a brief visit in Kentucky. Her father had received a call in
Boston, where he had been preaching for six years, to go to
Cincinnati, which at that period was considered the far West and
almost like banishment; but the call was one not to be refused; the
need of such preaching as Dr. Beecher's being greatly felt at that
distant post. About a year after their arrival an invitation came to
Harriet to cross the river and to see something of Kentucky in company
with a young friend.
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