'_Dec._ 26, 1839.--If you could look into my mind just now,
you would send far from you those who love and hate. I am
on the Drachenfels, and cannot get off; it is one of my
naughtiest moods. Last Sunday, I wrote a long letter,
describing it in prose and verse, and I had twenty minds to
send it you as a literary curiosity; then I thought, this
might destroy relations, and I might not be able to be calm
and chip marble with you any more, if I talked to you in
magnetism and music; so I sealed and sent it in the due
direction.
'I remember you say, that forlorn seasons often turn out
the most profitable. Perhaps I shall find it so. I have been
reading Plato all the week, because I could not write. I hoped
to be tuned up thereby. I perceive, with gladness, a keener
insight in myself, day by day; yet, after all, could not make
a good statement this morning on the subject of beauty.'
She had, indeed, a rude strength, which, if it could have been
supported by an equal health, would have given her the efficiency of
the strongest men. As it was, she had great power of work. The account
of her reading in Groton is at a rate like Gibbon's, and, later, that
of her writing, considered with the fact that writing was not grateful
to her, is incredible. She often proposed to her friends, in the
progress of intimacy, to write every day. 'I think less than a daily
offering of thought and feeling would not content me, so much seems
to pass unspoken.' In Italy, she tells Madame Arconati, that she has
'more than a hundred correspondents;' and it was her habit there to
devote one day of every week to those distant friends. The facility
with which she assumed stints of literary labor, which veteran feeders
of the press would shrink from,--assumed and performed,--when her
friends were to be served, I have often observed with wonder, and
with fear, when I considered the near extremes of ill-health, and
the manner in which her life heaped itself in high and happy moments,
which were avenged by lassitude and pain.
'As each task comes,' she said, 'I borrow a readiness from its
aspect, as I always do brightness from the face of a friend.
Yet, as soon as the hour is past, I sink.'
I think most of her friends will remember to have felt, at one time
or another, some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved a larger
atmosphere than it found; as if she were ill-timed and mis-mated,
and felt in herself a tide of life, which compared with the slow
circulation of others as a torrent with a rill. She found no full
expression of it but in music. Beethoven's Symphony was the only right
thing the city of the Puritans had for her. Those to whom music has a
representative value, affording them a stricter copy of their inward
life than any other of the expressive arts, will, perhaps, enter into
the spirit which dictated the following letter to her patron saint, on
her return, one evening, from the Boston Academy of Music.