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Life and letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick
Life and letters of Catharine M Sedgwick Author:Catharine Maria Sedgwick Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LIFE AND LETTERS CATHARINE M. SEDGWICK. RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD. May sth, 1853. My Dear Little Alice,—About two years since your father wrote me a... more »n eloquent note persuading me to write for you some memorial of my life, and what I knew of your forbears and mine. If you live to be an old woman, as I now am, you may like to rake in the ashes of the past, and if, perchance, you find some fire still smouldering there, you may feel a glow from it. It is not till we get deep into age that we feel by how slight a tenure we hold on to the memories of those that come after us, and not till then that w,e are conscious of an earnest desire to brighten the links of the chain that binds us to those who have gone before, and to keep it fast and strong. The first of our Sedgwick ancestors of whom I have any tradition was Robert Sedgwick, who was sent by Oliver Cromwell as governor or commissioner (I am not sure by which title) to the island of Jamaica. As I am a full believer in the transmission of qualities peculiar to a race, it chapter{Section 4pleases me to recognize in " the governor," as we have always called him, a Puritan and an Independent, for to none other would Cromwell have given a trust so important. A love of freedom, a habit of doing their own thinking, has characterized our clan. Its men have not been trammeled by old usages, but for the most part have stood on those elevations that first catch the light and command a wide horizon. (There, my dear, I have not got over the second page without betraying my point of family pride and family weakness !) Truly I think it a great honor that the head of our house took office from that great man who achieved his own greatness, and not from the King Charleses who were born ' to it, and lost it by their own unworthiness...« less