Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis eBook

The snow on the ground belies the season.  It is warm to-day and the birds sing.  I should have enjoyed more my ride in the soft snow on Tuesday if conscience had not arrayed me against Mr. Billings.  But I am most glad to see that I am withdrawing from the argumentative.  I begin to enjoy more than ever the pure still characters which I meet.  Intellect is not quite satisfying though so alluring.  It is a scentless flower; but there is a purer summer pleasure in the sweet-brier than the dahlia, though one would have each in his garden.  It is because Shakespeare is not solely intellectual, but equally developed, that his fame is universal.  The old philosophers, the sheer intellects, lack as much fitness to life as a man without a hand or an eye.  And because life is interpreted by sentiment, the higher the flight of the intellect the colder and sadder is the man.  Plato and Emerson are called poets, but if they were so their audience would be as wide as the world.  Milton’s fame is limited because he lacked a subtlety and delicacy corresponding with his healthiness and strength.  Milton fused in Keats would have formed a greater than Shakespeare.  If Milton’s piety had been Catholic and not Puritanical I do not see why he should not have been a greater poet.

I shall not have much work to do before we undertake our garden plot.  We take care of the cattle daily, and that is about all.  Yesterday in the sunlight I walked in the woods.  It was a spectacle finer than the sleet—­the flower of winter among the trees.

I forgot to take the Phalanxes.  Geo. Bradford asked me for a half-dozen.  If you will send them to me I will give them to him.  Almira says that he is now in a Brook Farm way.  It is a species of chills and fever with him, as you know.

Remember me to the Eaglets, Dolly and her friend, Mary especially; and tell Abby Foord I have already learned the Polonaise which she is practising.  I sit and play it over and over, and think I shall never tire of it.  It has a peculiar charm to me, as I have never heard it except in the Eyrie parlor.  It will always float me back to that room.  Will you say to Charles Newcomb that Burrill has destroyed all “the churchmen”?  Remember me to your family and believe me, as always,

G.W.C.

XXII

CONCORD, April 22d, 1845.

Will you forgive me if I flood you with letters now while the mood of writing lasts?  It seems that I must so exhaust some of the added life which spring infuses into my veins.  The gray herbage of winter fades so slowly, so imperceptibly into the spring greenness, that I watch it with the curious eyes of a lover who sees gradual developments of deeper beauty in the face of his mistress.  Do you note how every spring, sliding down from heaven with such intense life, quenches or rather subdues the remembrance of all past springs as a great gem surrounded in the ring