I entered into English as a field because I have a particular, nostalgic yearning for the past. It is a rather sad affair, but so moving and beautiful are the scenes portrayed by most of the great writers I have read, that it brings me great joy to read their word paintings and almost poetic portraits of the way life was before the scientific delirium madness we turned our world into the immoral and mechanically tortured mess it now is.
Since our collective parents, Adam and Eve, the world has been filled with a diversity of people with varying degrees of good or evil characteristics. The best of the good have always suffered with the rest and wanted to escape to a lone paradise where they could be alone with their loves and build for themselves, by themselves, in their own conscientious way their own habitation free from the evil and evil consequences of the evil actions of others lesser in moral fiber than they.
But what represents good and who can be trusted to teach it or represent it to others??
This is the subject of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's book Hope Leslie.
As I read this book, it has become like a bible to me, if a comparison should even be made anything as easily miswritten, mistaught, misguided, and misinterpreted as the Bible. The Bible is violent. It is, to put it simply, a war volume in the name of God.
Sedgwick thoroughly understands this and totally questions it's necessity for people of truly moral fiber from the heart. Her book is the most powerfully heroic book I have ever read. It is a war against war. It is a war against a warring religion. It is a war against tyrannical souls. It is a non-violent war against the men who represent these ideas. The heroes are young people brought up to believe and non-violently fight for what is the common personal good with the romantic love in their hearts to guide them on. I can tell I am going to enjoy this book more than any other I have ever read by male or female. I just hope that it has a less tragic ending than I presume it will because of the tragic, misguided circumstances of the young heroes being written about.