CONCORD, July 21, 1841.
DEAR FRIEND,--Don't think I need any prompting to write to you; but
what tough earthenware shall I put into my packet to travel over so
many hills, and thrid so many woods, as lie between Concord and
Plymouth? Thank fortune it is all the way down hill, so they will get
safely carried; and yet it seems as if it were writing against time
and the sun to send a letter east, for no natural force forwards it.
You should go dwell in the West, and then I would deluge you with
letters, as boys throw feathers into the air to see the wind take
them. I should rather fancy you at evening dwelling far away behind
the serene curtain of the West,--the home of fair weather,--than over
by the chilly sources of the east wind.
What quiet thoughts have you nowadays which will float on that east
wind to west, for so we may make our worst servants our
carriers,--what progress made from _can't_ to _can_, in practice and
theory? Under this category, you remember, we used to place all our
philosophy. Do you have any still, startling, well moments, in which
you think grandly, and speak with emphasis? Don't take this for
sarcasm, for not in a year of the gods, I fear, will such a golden
approach to plain speaking revolve again. But away with such fears; by
a few miles of travel we have not distanced each other's sincerity.
I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my
tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking
abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,
while my eyes revolve in an Egyptian slime of health,--I to be nature
looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in
the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would
put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.
Now-a-nights I go on to the hill to see the sun set, as one would go
home at evening; the bustle of the village has run on all day, and
left me quite in the rear; but I see the sunset, and find that it can
wait for my slow virtue.
But I forget that you think more of this human nature than of this
nature I praise. Why won't you believe that mine is more human than
any single man or woman can be? that in it, in the sunset there, are
all the qualities that can adorn a household, and that sometimes, in a
fluttering leaf, one may hear all your Christianity preached.
You see how unskillful a letter-writer I am, thus to have come to the
end of my sheet when hardly arrived at the beginning of my story. I
was going to be soberer, I assure you, but now have only room to add,
that if the fates allot you a serene hour, don't fail to communicate
some of its serenity to your friend,