Chapter 12

I think it highly probable that I shall pass some weeks in Providence next month, and so will defer my day with you at Brook Farm until that time, of which I will inform you.

Burrill has not yet returned, and leaves me still a hermit. I am well pleased with my solitude, nor do I care much to go out of the country during the winter; but domestic circumstances make it advisable to go to Providence. There I shall have a good library at hand, which I miss a good deal here. Indeed, I think it likely that every year while my home is in the country I may perform a pilgrimage to the city for two or three months for purposes of art and literature and affection, for, as there seems in the minds of divines to be some doubt of personal identity when this mortal coil is shuffled off, I am fain to embrace my friends' coils while they are yet palpable. This idea of city visits implies a very free life; but there seems now to be no hinderance to it. When the band of Phalanxes, proceeding into desert and free air, no more allow art to rendezvous in cities, I can take one of the nearest radiating railroads and rush from my solitude into the healthily-peopled and cityish-countrified Phalanx.

I am loath to forgive Fourier the unmitigated slander upon the moon. I began to suspect that was the only influence alive since the sun lights men to cheating and deviltry; and the moon recalls the sweetest remembrance and best hope. After our evening at Almira's it lighted me home with such forgiving splendor that I could have fallen on my knees in the snow and have prayed its pardon if it would not have chilled those members.

Almira I have not seen since Wednesday. She was then well, and went with me to hear Dr. Francis lecture upon Bishop Berkeley. He told the life, which is the most poetical and beautiful of any of his contemporary philosophers, and then suggested that the "limits of a lecture" did not permit an extended notice of his philosophy, and so gave none.

Among my holiday gifts was Miss Barrett's poems. She is a woman of vigorous thought, but not very poetical thought, and throwing herself into verse involuntarily becomes honied and ornate, so that her verse cloys. It is not natural, quite. Tennyson's world is purple, and all his thoughts. Therefore his poetry is so, and so naturally. Wordsworth lives in a clear atmosphere of thought, and his poetry is simple and natural, but no more than Tennyson's. Pardon these critical distinctions. I make them to have them expressed, for Burrill did not see why I called Miss Barrett purple. It was because her highly colored robe was not harmonious with her native style of thought. Ben Jonson, too, I have been reading. After him and Beaumont and Fletcher (who are imitators, rather, of Shakespeare), I feel that Shakespeare differed not in degree only but in kind from all others, his contemporaries and successors. In his peculiar path Jonson was unequalled, but Shakespeare includes that and so much more! He seems to be the only one to whom poets are content to be inferior.

Remember me to Charles Dana and my other compeers at Brook Farm, especially Charles Newcomb.

Yours sincerely,

G.W.C.

XIX

My dear Friend,--If I should come to Brook Farm on Thursday evening will it be convenient, and shall you be at home? If all circumstances favor, I should like to remain with you until Saturday. On Thursday I shall go into Boston to hear what the Texas Convention is saying, and if I hear anything very eloquent or interesting may not see you until Friday.

I was very sorry to know nothing of your convention until it was over. I should have run down to have seen you.

On Saturday evening I was at the Academy, and on Sunday at the Handel and Haydn. I have by Burrill a letter from Cranch, and a book of German songs from Isaac. More anon.

Your friend ever,

G.W. Curtis.

CONCORD, _January 28th_, 1845.

XX

PROVIDENCE, _March 5th, '45._

My dear Friend,--I hope to see you at Brook Farm by Friday, intending to remain until Friday P.M. Here in Providence I have been having a quiet good time, though the weeks have flown faster than I thought weeks could fly. Mrs. Burges received a _Phalanx_ from Miss Russell, in which we found a good deal of interesting matter. I hear from her that she will write by me to Miss Russell.

To-day it rains merrily, a warm southern April rain; and the weeks of mild weather hint that there must be ploughing and sowing very soon. I anticipate my summer work with a good deal of pleasure.

Yours truly and hastily,

G.W. Curtis.

XXI

CONCORD, _March 13, '45._

My dear Friend,--The cold gray days at Brook Farm were the sunniest of the month. I wish I could step into the parlor when my heart is ready for music, and surrender to Beethoven and Mozart or, indeed, when I find men very selfish and mean, look in upon your kindliness and general sympathy. But while your intercourse at the Farm is so gentle and sweet you will not forget that it springs from the characters whose companions are still in outer darkness and civilization! I meet every day men of very tender characters under the roughest mien. Even in the midst of the world I constantly balance my ledger in favor of actual virtue, and enjoy intercourse, not so familiar but as sweet, as that I saw at Brook Farm. Is it not the tendency of a decided institution of reform to be unjust to the Barbarians? I do assure you the warm, tender south winds blow over us here in the unsocial state no less than the chilly east.

The snow on the ground belies the season. It is warm to-day and the birds sing. I should have enjoyed more my ride in the soft snow on Tuesday if conscience had not arrayed me against Mr. Billings. But I am most glad to see that I am withdrawing from the argumentative. I begin to enjoy more than ever the pure still characters which I meet. Intellect is not quite satisfying though so alluring. It is a scentless flower; but there is a purer summer pleasure in the sweet-brier than the dahlia, though one would have each in his garden. It is because Shakespeare is not solely intellectual, but equally developed, that his fame is universal. The old philosophers, the sheer intellects, lack as much fitness to life as a man without a hand or an eye. And because life is interpreted by sentiment, the higher the flight of the intellect the colder and sadder is the man. Plato and Emerson are called poets, but if they were so their audience would be as wide as the world. Milton's fame is limited because he lacked a subtlety and delicacy corresponding with his healthiness and strength. Milton fused in Keats would have formed a greater than Shakespeare. If Milton's piety had been Catholic and not Puritanical I do not see why he should not have been a greater poet.

I shall not have much work to do before we undertake our garden plot. We take care of the cattle daily, and that is about all. Yesterday in the sunlight I walked in the woods. It was a spectacle finer than the sleet--the flower of winter among the trees.

I forgot to take the _Phalanxes_. Geo. Bradford asked me for a half-dozen. If you will send them to me I will give them to him. Almira says that he is now in a Brook Farm way. It is a species of chills and fever with him, as you know.

Remember me to the Eaglets, Dolly and her friend, Mary especially; and tell Abby Foord I have already learned the Polonaise which she is practising. I sit and play it over and over, and think I shall never tire of it. It has a peculiar charm to me, as I have never heard it except in the Eyrie parlor. It will always float me back to that room. Will you say to Charles Newcomb that Burrill has destroyed all "the churchmen"? Remember me to your family and believe me, as always,

G.W.C.

XXII

CONCORD, _April 22d, 1845._

Will you forgive me if I flood you with letters now while the mood of writing lasts? It seems that I must so exhaust some of the added life which spring infuses into my veins. The gray herbage of winter fades so slowly, so imperceptibly into the spring greenness, that I watch it with the curious eyes of a lover who sees gradual developments of deeper beauty in the face of his mistress. Do you note how every spring, sliding down from heaven with such intense life, quenches or rather subdues the remembrance of all past springs as a great gem surrounded in the ring by many small ones? And as I stood to-day, as if hearing the throb of the new active life in nature, for winter is more like the unchanged dead face of an intellectual person, the contrast of this steaming and heating life was suggested to me as is always the case, and necessarily so to the perfection of the thought. The idea of day is not symmetrical except when night is implied in thought, for if one could paint a portrait of the day, it would be brightness against darkness.

Why are we so troubled or moved at death, elated or depressed? It cannot give anything, nor take. Every sphere satisfies its desires by its hopes, and so seems to show that life is only an effort at equilibrium. At least it does show that to this state. There is a perpetual balance in every experience, never a permanence, as night follows day, but never survives the sunrise. Plato nor Shakespeare have drunk all this beauty, and it seems not right to become cold and callous towards it, externally, as the dead are. If they see the soul of things, do they see the form of nature without the soul, as we do now? If death mark only a general expansion of life and nature, it is no more pleasant. With greater hopes greater desires; and, after all, it is only keeping a larger set of books. There is no standard of life, as there is none of character. A flower is sometimes as pure a satisfaction as a man or the thought of an archangel. It passes into a proverb that the beggar is happier than a king, and proverbs are only the homely disguises in which wisdom roams the world.

The "Polarity" which Emerson talks about is the nearest approximation to the universal form of life, but this is constantly marred by a stray thought of permanence and the confusing hint of the passive mind that we suppose the balance to be the law, and are glad to accept night with day, and cold with heat, because there is a blindness in the spiritual eye which will not let us see the riper spirits who are not sated but satisfied with permanency. For there, too, is a reason that we are so glad to hide in the equipoise as an eternal fact that we are surfeited with constancy. Drowning in the malmsey-butt is no better than the Thames. Enjoyment to-day is secured by the certain prospect of sorrow to-morrow, which is not wilful, but a lesson of life, and as we suppose, at last, of the central life, just as the creation at daybreak is supported and adorned in the mind by the prospective tenderness of twilight. And this balancing, so universal in this sphere, in outward if not in real life, is therefore a fact, and why not as profound as any, since there is no standard of life? Is there any law at last? Nature seems so general and yet so intensely individual. As fine harmony results from the accord of distinct tones, and each tone an infinite division of vibrations. At bottom no things are similar. Harmony is only unison, not identity. Nature is like the ocean, which bears whole forests hewn into ships laden with treasure; but no bottom is found to support all the weight, only a drop resting upon a drop forever. The elephant that bore the earth stood upon a tortoise, who fortunately could keep his feet in his shell, and so had no need to stand anywhere!

The spring day looks very inscrutably upon all such wandering fancies. Her beauty is very inexorable, yet fascinating beyond resistance. It is not regal and composing and self-finding as is the mellowed summer, but an alluring splendor. It is a bud in inner, as well as outer, expression, and not yet a satisfying flower. Yet in the young days of June is sometimes seen the sereneness of autumn. After the full summer it is quite plain. It is like a child with pale, consumptive hands. Yet this is a constant reference to unity, which just now seemed so far off. Beauty suggests what Truth only can answer and Goodness realize; and the whole circle of nature offers these three only, beauty, truth, and goodness, or, again, poetry, philosophy, religion, or, more subtly, tone, color, feeling. This lies beyond words, because they are an intellectual means. Music foreshadows their interpretation, but always faintly, as it does everything, because music is revealed only enough here that we may not be surprised hereafter in some sphere. This is an intellectual sphere, but music is sentiment, so it is here an accomplishment for women, and for men of finer natures. Music is the science of spiritual form; and poetry, which is the loftiest expression of the intellectual sphere, finds its profound distinction from prose, which is the language of the vulgar, in its spiritual and sensuous rhythm, and so is music applied to the intellectual state.

Nature answers questions by removing us out of inquisitiveness. It is wilfully that we are querulous in nature, and not naturally.

I just now went to the door, and the still beauty of the moonlight night makes me a little ashamed of my letter. If I had stayed all day in the woods, and seen you there, I should have been content to be silent; but removed from the immediate glow of nature, and sitting in a purely human society, surrounded by circumstances produced humanly, as the house and furniture, the mind is withdrawn into a separate chamber, like one who goes down from the house-top into a room and so looks towards the north or west or south, and does not see all around as before.

Good-night, good friend.

Yr. aff.

G.W.C.

XXIII

CONCORD, _April 5th, 1845._

Judge, my unitary friend, how grateful was your letter, perfumed with flowers and moonlight, to an unfortunate up to his ears in manure and dish-water! For no happier is my plight at this moment. I snatch a moment out of the week wherein the significance of that fearful word _business_ has been revealed to me to send an echo, a reply to your good letter.

Since Monday we have been moving and manuring and fretting and fuming and rushing desperately up and down turnpikes with bundles and baskets, and have arrived at the end of the week barely in order. Yesterday, in the midst, while I was escorting a huge wagon of that invaluable farming wealth, I encountered Mrs. Pratt and family making their reappearance in civilization. All Brook Farm in the golden age seemed to be strapped to the rear of their wagon as baggage, for Mrs. Pratt was the first lady I saw at Brook Farm, where ladyhood blossomed so fairly. Ah! my minute is over, and I must leave you to lie in wait for another.

Evening. I have captured an evening instead, my first tolerably quiet evening in this new life, this new system of ours for a summer sojourn. The waves of my nomadic life drift me on strange shores, and sometimes, as I mount them, I dream of a home, quiet and beautiful, that home which allures all young minds and gradually fades into the sad features of such households as we see. In all my experience I think of three happy homes where the impression is uniform, for in all there are May Days and Thanksgivings; and yet to see a complete home would be to see that marriage which, if we may credit Miss Fuller, does not belong to an age when celibacy is the "great fact." As if the divine force could be extinguished! I must marry and spite her theory. You would be amused if you could see some of the letters which I receive, and which discourse of a wife with the same gravity as they do of washing clothes, as if each were a necessary, and that it would not do for me to settle upon a farm until I am married. There is some wisdom in the last advice. An old bachelor upon a farm, with a solitary old maid-servant, is not the most pleasing prospect for young one-and-twenty to contemplate. But I ignore farms and maids and prospects, saving always the natural one. Next year may find me the favored of all three.

How gladly I would be with you on Monday, you know; but what candidate for the plough and the broom should I be after the bewilderment of that scene! I remember too well the festivals which graced the younger days to trust myself within their sphere again, save in the midst of a boundless summer leisure. And when, after these chill, moist, April days, the perfect flower of summer shall bloom, I will be in its heart and breathe the enchanted air again. The word reminds me how glad I am that the flowers were so grateful. I committed my memory to delicate guardians, who, dying, did not suffer that to die. And the trinity of tone, color, and sentiment, though I knew not, like you, how to indicate it, is one of the most alluring of mysteries, so much so that I must leave it even unexpressed. Since so little may be known, I will not bring it into the melancholy purlieus of theory, but see it and hear it and feel it in echoes and glimpses. Yet all these rainbows which span the heaven of thought, finely woven of the tears of humility, one would sometimes grasp and crystallize forever. In that I find my satisfaction in what I know of Fourier; but to clutch at the rainbow! can it be crystallized?

Let not the spasm of infidelity mar my letter in your eyes or heart, and on your anniversary let one stream flow to the memory of your friend,

G.W.C.

XXIV

CONCORD, _April 17th, 1845._

As a good friend, am I not bound to advise you how my new household works, here in the very bosom of terrible civilization, which yet keeps me very warm? A long wet day like this, when I have been gloriously imprisoned by dropping diamonds, tries well the power of my new solitary life to charm me. It has not failed. It is going away now through the dark, still midnight, but it bears the image of my smile. A long wet day, with my books and fire and Burrill for external, long thoughts for internal, company. After a morning service prolonged far beyond the hour of matins, led by the sweet and solemn Milton, I read Miss Martineau's last tale, founded upon the history of Toussaint L'Ouverture, in whom I have been interested. I have just read Victor Hugo's "Bug Jargal," his first novel, and also based upon the insurrection of St. Domingo. I feel that Miss Martineau's picture is highly colored, but the features must be correct. A strong, sad, long-suffering, far-seeing man, finally privately murdered by one who had been the idol of his manhood. The interest is individual throughout, which is necessary, yet fatal to the novel. I followed the Hero away from St. Domingo to his grave, and afterwards the thought of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been viewing so varied and wide a landscape become suddenly very opaque. History is a gallery of pictures so individually unexpressive that you must know the artist to know their meaning. Very few men relate with cold precision what occurs daily, so much are their feelings enlisted; and no less daily experiences are the recorded events of the past to the man whose days are devoted to them, and he too must infuse himself into them. He is a Guelph or a Ghibelline, not a judge of the struggle, wiser by five or six centuries of experience. In Carlyle's book "that shall be" the "Cromwell," I feel there will be so much stress laid upon the gravity and prompt, sturdy heroism of the man that much else will be shoved out of sight. It will be the history of Cromwell as a strong man, for Carlyle loves strong men; but if there are other things to be said, we shall not hear so much about them. So in Emerson's "Napoleon." He commences with saying that Napoleon is the Incarnate Democrat, the representative of the 19th century, and the lecture is an illustration of that position, but most comprehensive and eloquent.

Let history and great men fade from our sight. Lately I have grown to be a sad rhymer, and shall end my letter with hints of a life sweeter than these records of mine. More and more I feel that my wine of letters is poured by the poets, not handed as cold sherbet by the philosophers. Some day I may speak more fully upon these things. Meanwhile, secretly and constantly, I turn over pebble after pebble upon the shore, not uncheered by the hope that one day a pearl may glitter in my hands. Even this smacks of history, for Clio had claimed this page.

LADY JANE GREY

Meek violet of History! there flows A modest fragrance from thy maiden fame Touched with the coolness of the chaste repose Which broods o'er Plato's name.

No Wanderer through the dimly arched hall Which Time has reared between thy date and ours Meeting thy form, but sees that on its pall Are broidered Grecian flowers.

Thy shrinking virgin fame is wed with one Whose calm celestial teaching was thy King; When sitting in that cloistered nook alone Thou heardst the rude shout ring.

To thee that rabble shout foretold a scene Of tearful splendor faded in its birth-- The melancholy mockery of a Queen-- And virgin dust to earth.

Ah! Princess of that golden classic hoard, Thy need was other than an earthly crown; But ours was such, for else couldst thou have poured Through time thy pure renown?

For us thy blood was spilled; the whetted edge Of that keen axe gave us one jewel more, As a stream-drifted lily by chance sedge Is held beside the shore.

Good-night. Let the remembrance of the flowers still hold mine fast, and my solemn sweet Milton shall sing my vespers too.

May you "move In perfect Phalanx to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft Recorders...."

Your aff.

G.W.C.

XXV

CONCORD, _May 3, '45.