the Castle Garden, a spacious enclosure adjoining the Battery. The Choral
Symphony, the overtures to "Der Freischutz" and "The Midsummer-Night's
Dream," Rico's singing, Burke's playing, and De Meyer's, if he is in town,
will make up the bill. The rehearsals of the chorus and orchestra are
separate until the night before (I believe); and the Symphony is found so
difficult that they almost repent having undertaken it. I suppose there
would be no difficulty in your getting to the rehearsals through some of
your friends, as you did before. The orchestra is to consist of 150 and
the chorus of 300 or 400 persons. "The Desert" is to be played for the
fifth time on Monday evening. Trinity Church is to be consecrated on
Thursday, the day after the concert, and Pico will doubtless sing
somewhere during the week. I heard her and Julia Northall last evening in
"The Messiah." Their voices were glorious. After the "Pastoral Symphony"
the clear, rich, sunny voice of Miss Northall in the recitative "While
Shepherds watched," etc., was most fitting and beautiful. It was a soft
stream of pearly light, as the hope of Christ was upon the darkness of his
time. Pico sang, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," simply and sweetly, and
was obliged to repeat it. The choruses were weak; they did not smite
steadily upon the ear, but wavered, ghost-like, through the great
tabernacle. The "Hallelujah" seemed to awaken the singers, and there was
some tolerable body in that.
I heard Walker at his room with the greatest delight. He is so delicately
feminine that I felt with him as with a splendid woman in whose nature you
do not feel the want of masculine elements, since there is strength enough
in a feminine way; with Rakemann I always feel the man with the womanly
tenderness and sweetness which belongs to a real man. It was very pleasant
to feel such a harmonious difference, as when you see a beautiful man and
wife.
This being anniversary week, the Unitarians have been holding meetings and
discussions. I do not feel impressed by them very much, they stand in such
a negative position, "one stocking off and the other stocking on."
At Isaac's request I have been reading the life of the founder of his
order, St. Alphonse of Liguori. He was a very pious man, and the Church
was very jealous of him. It is a painful book to read, for the Catholic
Church seems to use heaven as a weapon whereby to conquer the earth. I
have not yet written Isaac, as he wanted me to read the book first; but if
his promised prayers fall as short as the history, I shall be delivered
incontinently to the buffetings of Satan.
I hope this will not find you at Brook Farm, for it cannot reach there
until Monday; the concert is on Wednesday, if it is pleasant. Charles
Newcomb and his mother are here.
Yours ever,
G.W.C.
XXXIV
CONCORD, _June 6, 1846._
My dear Friend,--I send you some verses for the Harbinger, which are not a
conceit, although they relate to no actual personal experience except that
I am sometimes conscious of the main fact, for my dreams do sometimes so
surpass the waking reality that the charm of the suggesting person, if not
lost, is indefinitely subdued and postponed. It is very pleasant here at
Minot's. The family are still, the household goes smoothly on, and we live
in a house 150 years old, under a tree of apparently almost equal age and
looking across a green meadow to a clump of pines and birches beyond. The
scenery in Concord is very gentle but pleasant. I have become attached to
it as to a taciturn friend who has no splendid bursts of passion but wears
always a soft smile.
All the morning we are busy working, and in the afternoons I have been
reading Goethe's "Rome." It is very fine, and full of wisdom and beauty.
His thoughts are clear and just and profound, and he looks on every side.
He was so ready for Italy, too, as the home of art--he a lover and student
of art, an artist by nature, and always too much a man. But Goethe, though
he is constantly a wise friend, is never a lover. You could not take him
always, personally, as the companion of your rambles, your jokes, your
silence and sorrows. I think of several persons among those I know, who
are by no means lights upon a hill, whom I should select as companions for
a journey rather than him. In Rome one would wish to see him as he would
Jupiter, and hear all his simple, grave, and catholic discourse; but has
he that ineffable and inexplicable human delicacy and sympathy which is
worth so much more in a man, as the innocence of the dove is than the
wisdom of the serpent. And yet, in the "Elective Affinities," does he not
show all that one could wish? But why should he be haunted by the thought
that he does not have it and think of particular things to prove it,
except that he does not have it? It is like feeling the beauty of single
lines which a man writes without being impressed by the whole poem that he
is a poet.
I had yesterday a long letter from Cranch and his wife. They are now in
Washington, and are enjoying the same June weather that we have here. They
have a peculiar interest to me as those who are to take the leap into the
ocean whence we do not know whether we shall emerge upon some fairy island
or upon desolate rocks or shall sink forever deeper and deeper in the
sea-caves where the mermaids are. For a residence in Italy is certainly,
in its entire uncertainty, in its new enclosures of circumstances and
influences, like leaping into an unknown sea. It is a lover's leap,
however, and love is beyond the hopes or arrangements of wisdom.
The Concordians are all well. I feel a pang in going to-night to take
leave of Elizabeth Hoar, who is going away for several weeks, and who will
not return until after I have left Concord. She seems to me one who may at
any moment become invisible, like a pure flame. Almira is well, and sends
love to you. She hopes you will come and make her a visit during the
summer, and I hope it may be made in June, as I shall go away by the 1st
of July, and move by slow stages towards New York. The summer will fly by
on swift wings, and more beautiful than those of a gorgeous butterfly
which we examined today; it flitted away among the dark pines, as the
summer will disappear in the shadowy pines of autumn, so grave and at last
solemn.
I hope this late afternoon is as beautiful with you as it is here.
Your friend,
G.W.C.
DESTINY
That dream was life, but waking came,
Dead silence after living speech,
Cold darkness after golden flame,
And now in vain I seek to reach,
In thought that radiant delight
Which girt me with a splendid night.
No art can bring again to me
Thy figure's grace, lithe-limbed by sleep;
No echo drank the melody
An after-festival to keep
With me, and memory from that place
Glides outward with averted face.
I loved thy beauty as a gleam
Of a sweet soul by beauty nursed,
But the strange splendor of that dream
All other loves and hopes has cursed--
One ray of the serenest star
Is dearer than all diamonds are.
Yet would I give my love of thee,
If thus of thee I had not dreamed,
Nor known that in thine eyes might be
What never on my waking gleamed,
For Night had then not swept away
The possibilities of Day.
For had my love of thee been less,
Still of my life thou hadst been queen,
And that imperial loveliness
Hinted by thee I had not seen;
Yet proudly shall that love expire
The spark of dawn in morning's fire.
How was it that we loved so well,
From love's excess to such sweet woe,
Such bitter honey--for will swell
Across my grief that visioned glow
Which steals the soul of grief away
As sunlight soothes a wintry day.
And so we part, who are to each
The only one the earth can give.
How vainly words will strive to reach
Why we together may not live,
When barely thought can learn to know
The depth of this sublimest woe.
XXXV
CONCORD, _June 29, '46._
My dear Friend,--I had hoped that you would have come to Concord
yesterday, because to-morrow early I leave, and shall be here only one day
more, towards the close of the next week. I had not expected to have gone
so soon, but I shall accompany a sick friend to Saratoga by slow stages,
and, returning to Worcester, make a short visit among my kindred there,
and then return to Concord to take my final departure. I shall try to
secure some day about that time to come to Brook Farm, if only to say
farewell to you; but just now I cannot specify the day.
My trip to Monadnock was very beautiful. The minister, Jno. Brown, is the
same Brook Farmer in a black coat; and I enjoyed a few days at his house
exceedingly. I wrote a long journal while there, and cannot say anything
about it here, therefore.
This afternoon I have answered Isaac's letter which I received during the
winter. With great modesty I attempted to show him how, in the nature of
things, proselyting was hopeless, at least upon any who are really worth
converting. But the tone, like my feeling, was friendly and gentle. If it
does not change his course towards me, he will better understand my
feeling and position, for I told him that in men of his nature and
tendency the zeal of proselytism is a part of the fervor of sentiment, and
therefore I expected and willingly accepted his exhortations, and only
deplored them as a loss of time and misuse of opportunities of
communication. The Roman Church was such an unavoidable goal for Isaac
that one who knows him well cannot possibly grieve to see him prostrate
before the altar, and ought to understand and anticipate what was called
his arrogance, which is a necessary portion of the sentiment and position.
The review of Mr. Hawthorne's book in the last _Harbinger_ is delicately
appreciative. The introductory chapter is one of the softest, clearest
pictures I know in literature. His feeling is so deep, and so
unexaggerated, that it is a profoundly subtle interpreter of life to him,
and the pensiveness which throws such a mellow sombreness upon his
imagination is only the pensiveness which is the shadow of extreme beauty.
There is no companion superior to him in genial sympathy with human
feeling. He seems to me no less a successful man than Mr. Emerson,
although at the opposite end of the village.
For a week or two, if you write, continue to address me at Concord, and
believe me, in constant unitary feeling,
Your friend,
G.W.C.
XXXVI
CONCORD, _July 14th, '46, Sunday night._
My dear Friend,--I have just returned from Almira's, who sends her love,
and will be very happy to see you. I have written Mr. Hawthorne to go to
Monadnock with me this week, but I suppose his duties will prevent. If I
go I shall probably return before Sunday, as that is John Brown's working
day, and we shall stay with him.
The night was glorious as I came from Almira's. The late summer twilight
held the stars at bay; and in the meadows the fire-flies were flitting
everywhere. Suddenly in the north, directly before me, began the flashings
of the aurora--piles of splendor, a celestial colonnade to the invisible
palace. It is a fitting close for a day so soft and beautiful. We took a
long sauntering walk this morning and found the mountain laurel, which is
very rare here.
I have been busy all my afternoons reading Roman history. Niebuhr and
Arnold are fine historians. They are such wise, sincere men and scholars.
I sit at the western door of the barn, looking across a meadow and
rye-field to a group of pines beyond. My eye fixes upon some point in the
landscape which constantly grows more beautiful, winning my eyes from the
rest, until they gradually slide along, finding each as pleasant until the
whole has a separate and individual beauty like a fall whose expressions
you know intimately. It is a "Summer of Summers," as Lizzie Curzon writes
me, and I am glad that my last hours in my own country will be so
consecrated by beauty in my memory.
Burrill goes again to the Hudson to see Mr. Downing on Thursday. He will
remain a week, I suppose, and go again to New York in August, when I sail.
Let me have my answer in person, for so short and poor a letter does not
deserve the exclusive attention of writing.
Remember me kindly to all at Brook Farm, to Wm. Channing particularly, if
he is there.
Your friend ever,
G.W.C.
XXXVII
CONCORD, _July 13th, 1846._
My dear Friend,--It is a miserable piece of business to say my farewell to
this blank sheet and send it to you, instead of having you say good-bye to
my blank face. But, unless you can come to Ida's on Wednesday or Thursday,
it must be so. A sudden trip to Saratoga has deranged my plans.
Will you now send my copy of the _Harbinger_ to Almira?
We have been too happy together in times past and mean to be so so much
more, here or somewhere, that we will not be very serious in our
farewells, for we have been as far apart since I left you as we shall be
when you are at Brook Farm and I at Palmyra. So good-bye, whether for two
or three years, or an indefinite period. When we see each other again we
shall _meet_, for our friendship has been of a fine gold which the moth
and rust of years cannot corrupt.
Will you give my love and say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley and my other
friends with you? and remember, as he deserves,
Your friend,
G.W.C.
XXXVIII
MILTON HILL, _Midnight, July 16, '46._
My dear Friend,--I could not come this evening, and shall only have time
in the morning to go to Boston and take the cars; so we must part so. I
will copy some of my verses for you if I can steal the time, and write you
from Europe if David Jones permits me to arrive.
I must say good-bye and good-night in some lines of Burns's which haunt me
at this time, though they have no appropriateness; but they have a
speechless woe of farewell, like a wailing wind:
"Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had never been broken hearted."
Yr friend
G.W.C.
I shall write you again. Will you give this to Jno. Cheever? I have no
wafer.
XXXIX
FORT HAMILTON, LONG ISLAND, _July 30, '46._
My dear Friend,--It is very shabby, but I have been so unexpectedly and
constantly separated from my manuscripts that I cannot copy, as I hoped,
some of my verses. I have but one more day on land, and more than I can
well do in it.
Could you hear how the sea moans and roars in the moonlight at this
moment, it would be a siren song to draw you far away. I strain my eyes
over the water as one struggles to comprehend the end of life, but the
beauty of the future lies unseen and untouched.
God bless you always, my dear Friend; and do not fail to write me often.
Affly. yr friend,
G.W.C.
XL
ROME, _November 22d, 1846._
My dear Friend,--Italy is no fable, and the wonderful depth of purity in
the air and blue in the sky constantly makes real all the hopes of our
American imagination. Sometimes the sky is an intensely blue and distant
arch, and sometimes it melts in the sunlight and lies pale and rare and
delicate upon the eye, so that one feels that he is breathing the sky and
moving in it. The memory of a week is full of pictures of this atmospheric
beauty. I looked from a lofty balcony at the Vatican upon broad gardens
lustrously green with evergreen and box and orange trees, in whose dusk
gleamed the large planets of golden fruit. Palms, and the rich, rounding
tuft of Italian pines, and the solemn shafts of cypresses, stood beside
fountains which spouted rainbows into the air, which was silver-clear and
transparent, and on which the outline of the landscape was drawn as
vividly as a flame against the sky at night. Beside me rose floating into
the air the dome of St. Peter's, which is not a nucleus of the city, like
the Duomo of Florence, but a crown more majestic and imposing as the
spectator is farther removed. I had come to this balcony and its realm of
sunny silence through the proper palace of the "Apollo" and the "Laocoon"
and Raphael's "Transfiguration" and "Stanze." The Vatican is a wilderness
of art and association, and in the allotted three hours I could only
wander through the stately labyrinth and arrange the rooms, but not their
contents, in my mind, but could not escape the "Apollo," which stands
alone in a small cabinet opening upon a garden and fountain. It was
greater to me than the "Venus de Medici" at Florence, although it has
taught me better to appreciate that when I see it again. It is cold and
pure and vast, the imagination of a man in the Divine Mind, given to
marble because flesh was too recreant a material. The air of the statue is
proudly commanding, with disdain that is not human, and a quiet
consciousness of power. It does not resemble any figure we see of a man
who has drawn a bow, but the ideal of a man in action. Like the "Venus,"
it shows how entire was the possible abstraction of the old Sculptors into
a region of pure form as an expression of what was beyond human passion,
with which color seems to correspond. Deities are properly the subject of
sculpture because of color; colorless purity of marble accords with the
divine superiority to human passion, and although the mythology degraded
the gods into the sphere and influence of men, to the mind of the artist
they would still sit upon unstained thrones.
This was one day. Upon another I stepped from a lovely road upon the
Aventine into an old garden where, at the end of a long, lofty, and narrow
alley of trimmed evergreens, stood the Dome of St. Peter's filling the
vista against an afternoon sky. In these mossy and silent old places, the
trees and plants seem to have sucked their vigor from the sun and soil of
many long-gone centuries, and to remain ghosts of themselves and hoary
reminiscences of their day in the soft splendor of modern light. Italy
itself is that garden wherein everything hands you to the past, and stands
dim-eyed towards the future. It is a vast university, endowed by the past
with the choicest treasures of art, to which come crowds from all nations,
as lovers and dreamers and students, who may be won to live among relics
so dear, but who mostly return to stand as interpreters of the beauty they
have seen. Therefore, Italy is a theme which cannot grow old, as love and
beauty cannot. Every book should be a work of art, and Italy, like the
Madonna, should have a fresh beauty in the hands of every new artist. It
is no longer interesting, statistically, for the names and numbers have
been told often enough; but the impression which it leaves upon the mind
of men of character and taste is the picture which should be novel and
interesting.
But it is the relics of the summer prime of the Rome of distant scholars
and lovers, and the art which shines with an Indian-summer softness in the
autumn of its decay, that rule here yet; for the imperial days have
breathed a spirit into the air which broods over the city still. Although
it is a modern capital, with noise and dirt and smells and nobility and
fashionable drives, and walks and shops, and the red splendor of lacquered
cardinals, and the triple-crowned Pope, in the arches which rise over
modern chapels and of which they are built, in the ruined forum and
acqueducts and baths and walls, are the decayed features of what was once
greatest in this world, and which rules it from its grave. My first view
of old Rome was in the moonlight. We passed through the silent Forum, not
on the level of the ancient city, which recoils from modern footsteps and
goes downward towards the dust of those who made it famous, but by the
ruined temples and columns whose rent seams were shaped anew into graceful
perfection by the magical light, by the wilderness of the ruined Caesar's
palace, until we looked wonderingly into the intricacy of arch and
corridor and column of which was built the arch-temple of Paganism, the
Coliseum. The moonlight silvered the broad spaces of scornful silence as
if Fate mused mournfully upon the work it must needs do. Grass and flowers
in their luxuriant prime waved where the heads of Roman beauties nodded in
theirs; and yet how true to the instincts of their nature were the Romans,
who nourished by their recreations the stern will which had won the world
for them. And since literature and art and science depend in a certain
measure for their development and perfection upon a strong government, the
same Roman beauty, in dooming to a bloody death before her eyes the man
upon whose life depended other and far-away beauties and loves, may have
breathed a sweeter strain into the song of the poet. The Popes have not
refrained from obtruding a cross and shrines upon this defenceless ruin.
They would not render unto Caesar the things which were his, and although
they are shocking at first, the magnificence of silence and decay soon
swallows them, and they appear no more except as emblems of modern Rome
lost in the broad desolation of the imperial city.
One cannot see the present Pope without a hope for Italy. I first saw him
at high mass, with the cardinals, in the Palace chapel. The college of
cardinals resembled a political and not a religious body, which, although
the council of government, it ought to resemble upon religious occasions.
When the Pope entered they kissed his hand through his mantle. He is a
noble-looking man, of a dignified and graceful presence, and already very
dear to the people for what he has done and what he has promised. I could
not look at him without sadness as a man sequestered in splendor and
removed from the small sympathies in which lies the mass of human
happiness. The service seemed a worship of him, but no homage could
recompense a man for what a Pope had lost. I have seen him often since,
and his demeanor is always marked by the same air of lofty independence.
It is good to see him appear equal to a position so solitary and so
commanding, and to indicate this vigor of life and the conscience which
would prevent him from making his seclusion a bower for his own ease.
From one of these wonderful days passed in the Villa Borghese, a spacious
estate near the city, equally charming for its nature and art, I went, a
day or two since, to watch by the deathbed of a young American. Hicks (a
young artist, whom I love and whom the MacDaniels will know) and myself
stood by him and closed his eyes. He was without immediate friends, except
a connection by marriage who has recently arrived, and who was with him at
the last. I was glad that I was here to be with him and lay him decently
in his coffin. The handful of Americans in Rome followed him last evening
at dusk, close by twilight, and buried him in the Protestant graveyard,
near the grave of Shelley's ashes and heart. The roses were in full
blossom, as Shelley says they used to be in midwinter. It is a green and
sequestered spot under the walls of old Rome, where the sunlight lingers
long, and where in the sweet society of roses whose bloom does not wither,
Shelley and Keats sleep always a summer sleep. Fate is no less delicate
than stern, which has here united them after such lives and deaths. And
yet here one feels also the grimness of the Fate which strikes such lips
into silence.
I force myself to send you this letter, because I want to write you. It is
a shadowy hint of what I think and feel, as all letters must be. Cranch
and his wife are with me, and will stay the winter. There are not many
Americans, but I look every day for Burrill. Hicks I have seen a good deal
and like very much. He speaks to me of the MacDaniels. Give my love to all
at Brook Farm, and forgive a letter which you will not believe was written
in Italy. Cranch sends much love.
Always yr
G.W.C.
How I wish you were going with us this sweet sunny day (23 Nov.), on which
I am writing this at my open window, without a fire, to see the
"Gladiator" at the capitol. It is a great responsibility to be in Italy,
one may justly demand so much of you afterwards. Once more, good-bye, and
some day send me a ray from the beautiful past which Brook Farm is to me.
G.W.C.
XLI
NAPLES, _April 27th, 1847._