a wise serenity forever sits. This year, too,
is to many lonely hearts a redeemer; and no heavens
will be darkly clouded when it is over, but still
stars will shine unsurprised. Pale scholars in
midnight vigils, golden gayety wreathing the hours
with flowers and gems, unbending sorrow pressing heavy
seals upon yielding wretchedness, it will steal surely
from all these, and on the morrow be a colorless ghost
in the distant past. Its constancy will secure
our immortality. The grandeur of the year may
be the strength of our character; and as the East
receives it, we may enter the inscrutable future reverently
and with folded hands.
Sunday. I am going to F. Rakemann’s to
pass the afternoon and give him this for you.
He proposes to pass a week in Boston. I have heard
Wallace during the week. He has great talent;
but I had heard Ole Bull, and Wallace’s violin-playing
was only good. What think you of Vieuxtemps, who,
I see, is in Boston? Shall you not send Knoop
hither? So many things I would say! It is
wiser to say nothing. Remember me to my West Roxbury
friends, Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Shaw and their spouses.
Ever your friend,
G.W.C.
N.Y., Thursday, January 18, ’44.
I have not yet answered your letter by W.H. Channing
in words, though I have said a great deal to you that
you have not heard. What an interrupter of conversation
is this absence! Neither have I told you of my
Vieuxtemps experience, nor shall I close my letter
without speaking of Knoop, who by the gods’
favor concerts to-night. Your letter by W.H.
Channing crystallized a resolution which has been
quiet in me for the winter, so still that it needed
only a powerful jerk to induce crystallization at
once. So the day or two succeeding its receipt
found me busy in expressing some thoughts about reform
and association which I meant for The Present.
But the necessity for expression seems to have been
satisfied without publication. The essay remains
as quietly in my portfolio as did the idea in my mind.
So it was with an article on Ole Bull that I wrote
some weeks since for the Tribune. The need
seems to give the thought expression and form, whether
it then lay still or fly abroad upon paper wings.
Besides, printing does give a dignity to thoughts that
the author should feel that they deserve, a permanency
too. The newspaper that escapes the turmoil and
tear and dust of years bears the same aspect as all
its fellows of the same date that were ushered into
the morning parlors with it; and so some commentator
on Ole Bull and Vieuxtemps or what not shall run down
to the lower generations more noiselessly, yet as
certainly, as Shakespeare and Plato. There is
a singular pleasure, too, in publishing what nobody
thinks is yours. It is addressing the world not
as Geo. Curtis, but as some distinguished messenger,
the mystery of whom is a charm, if nothing more.
Yet unfortunate me! I could never maintain the
secret long. Is that from pride or because you
cannot endure to see men go wrong, if you can help
them? When Charles Dana came running to me with
what he thought Emerson’s poem, how could I help
saying, “It is mine.” In that case,
at least, it was sympathy for Emerson’s reputation
that prompted the speech.
