Word: harriet
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Speaking as one of the millions of hard-of-hearing folk in this land I wish that in your admirable review of Harriet Martineau's Retrospect of Western Travel (TIME, Nov. 2) the reviewer had played up more dramatically Harriet's really amazing achievement. This was not writing a lively and realistic description of our infant republic, but rather in spite of serious deafness collecting the facts for it. My lifelong interest in Harriet was inspired by her handicap, for I, too, have been seriously deaf all my life...
When an Irishman confided that he "feared that the independence of the Americans made them feel themselves independent of God," Harriet snapped: "This consequence of democratic government had not struck me before...
Great Republicans. But Washington had "a society of the highest order"-the great republicans Harriet had come so far to see. She saw everybody. Congressmen "reposed themselves" by Harriet's fireside. "Mr. Clay, sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuffbox ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his even, soft, deliberate tone. . . . Mr. Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter . . . would illuminate an evening. Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could...
...Harriet never tired of studying the regional types of the new nation. She was full of admiration for the Yankee who would not kneel to the Pope, but was willing to take off his hat. "The same respect," he said, "I would show to the President of the United States, and I can't show any more to anyone." But the Yankee who came to Washington did not seem happy. He appeared "to bear in mind perpetually that he cannot fight a duel, while other people can." Of Southern society, she said: "Its characteristic is a want of repose...
...Harriet was puzzled by the "odd mortals that wander in from the western border." These pioneer statesmen of the expanding Union, she said, "cannot be described as a class, for no one is like anybody else." But she noted: "All [have] shrewd faces, and [are] probably very fit for the business they come upon...