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.
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.
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.
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
