The same decay and gloom that overhang the way by which it is
approached, hover above the town of Richmond. There are pretty
villas and cheerful houses in its streets, and Nature smiles upon
the country round; but jostling its handsome residences, like
slavery itself going hand in hand with many lofty virtues, are
deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into
ruinous heaps. Hinting gloomily at things below the surface,
these, and many other tokens of the same description, force
themselves upon the notice, and are remembered with depressing
influence, when livelier features are forgotten.
To those who are happily unaccustomed to them, the countenances in
the streets and labouring-places, too, are shocking. All men who
know that there are laws against instructing slaves, of which the
pains and penalties greatly exceed in their amount the fines
imposed on those who maim and torture them, must be prepared to
find their faces very low in the scale of intellectual expression.
But the darkness - not of skin, but mind - which meets the
stranger's eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of
all fairer characters traced by Nature's hand; immeasurably outdo
his worst belief.
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