I wish this was me instead of my letter, for a warm
grasp of the hand might say more than all these words.
Yr friend,
G.W.C.
NEW YORK, March 27, 1844.
At last I imagine our summer destiny is fixed.
This morning Burrill received a reply from Emerson
informing us of a promising place near Concord.
The farmer’s name being Captain Nathaniel Barrett,
of pleasant family and situation, and a farm on which
more farm work than usual is done. Altogether
the prospect is very alluring and satisfactory; and
I have little doubt of our acceptance of the situation.
We shall not then be very far removed from you; and
at some AEsthetical tea or Transcendental club or
Poet’s assembly meet you, perhaps, and other
Brook Farmers. At all events, we shall breathe
pretty much the same atmosphere as before, and understand
more fully the complete pivacy of the country life.
Burrill brought pleasant accounts of your appearance
at Brook Farm. The summer shall not pass without
my looking in upon you, though only for an hour.
That time will suffice to show me the unaltered beauty
of aspect, though days would be scarce to express
all that they suggested.
Emerson writes that there is a piano and music at
the farm mentioned. I have no faith in pianos
under such circumstances; but it shows a taste, a
hope, a capability, possibly it is equal to all spiritual
significances except music! which want in a piano
may be termed a deficiency.
I have become acquainted with a fine amateur, a niece
of Dr. Channing’s, name Gibbs. She is yet
young, not more than 17, but plays with great grace
and beauty. She played me one of Mendelssohn’s
songs, translated by Liszt, a beautiful piece, one
of F.R.’s, and spoke more sensibly of music than
any girl I have met. By-the-way, yesterday I bought
the January number of the Democratic Review
to read Mrs. Fanny Kemble Butler’s review of
Tennyson, when, to my great surprise, I found your
“Haydn.” O’Sullivan I have
met a great deal, but made no acquaintance. The
Tennyson review is very fine. I think she understands
him well. Perhaps she is too masculine a woman
to judge correctly his delicacy; but she does the whole
thing well.
Cranch has just painted a scene from the “Lady
of Shalott,” the scene—
“In among the bearded barley,
The reaping late and early,” etc.—
represents two reapers standing with sickles among
the grain, and turning intently towards the four “gray
walls and four gray towers which overlook a space
of flowers” in an island covered with foliage
to the water, and lying in the midst of the stream.
The criticism upon the picture is obvious; if Cranch
is as painter what Tennyson is as poet, it is good—if
not, it is bad. What do you think? When a
man illustrates a poem he is pledged by the poem,
hence the absurdity of Martyn’s drawings from
the “Paradise Lost,” and the various pictures
of Belshazzar’s feast. Only the Madonnas
of the greatest painters are satisfactory. But
I shall not abandon myself to the tracking of these
mysteries of art.
