I believe I have spoken to you when at home with you during a thunderstorm of my admiration & awe of these grand exhibitions of Divine power!  I have stood & gazed at the vivid flashes of lighning - & the awful roar of thunder following while every sensation of my soul vibrated to the "Music of Heaven" yes when others trembled in fright I have stood enraptured at a view to me the grandest connected with earth - Last night we had an exhibition of this kind.  I could not help thinking as I lay under an open tent or [illegible] during the darkness of the night when the heavens seemed almost in a blaze of livid light, how futile the attempt of man to mimic nature, and the comparison seemed the more disparaging from the fact that for the last week, we have been daily & nightly treated with music from Colerbrids, Dalgreens, & all kinds of gunpowder music.  I have been thrilled by the music of these Vicksburg monsters as ther loud breathings reverberated far up & down the shores of this majestic river & when the sound died away I have listened anxiously for the next report.  You may think this strange enjoyment, I have sometimes myself thought strange of it & sometimes I find myself [illegible] during a thunder storm, that I have feared it might be a want of reverence in the Great Auther & Mover of all things.  If so may God forgive me.  This love of the awfully grand is inherent, instilled in my nature.  I have often in your presence & in the presence of my father & mother & others, when I had a different view of the goodness & majesty of the Supreme Ruler, to what I now have, studiously suppressed my admiration & delight at witnessing these scenes of awful grandeur.  I would even now suppress these emotions were it not that in the last letter (written at Fathers in the kitchen) you unveiled your [illegible] freely & seemed to enjoy my [illegible] thoughts that I have given loose reins to my pen.  But as Corwin has got dinner ready & it is corn  soup I must quit for the present & when I write again I will tell you what I am doing & what I have been [illegible] instead of so much about what I have been thinking if that will be more soldierly.  I do not know that this is the place to sentimentalize, Stewart, Robinson, Corwin, Marion & I mess & tent together & we now have a verry pleasant & quiet time
