The spring day looks very inscrutably upon all such
wandering fancies. Her beauty is very inexorable,
yet fascinating beyond resistance. It is not
regal and composing and self-finding as is the mellowed
summer, but an alluring splendor. It is a bud
in inner, as well as outer, expression, and not yet
a satisfying flower. Yet in the young days of
June is sometimes seen the sereneness of autumn.
After the full summer it is quite plain. It is
like a child with pale, consumptive hands. Yet
this is a constant reference to unity, which just
now seemed so far off. Beauty suggests what Truth
only can answer and Goodness realize; and the whole
circle of nature offers these three only, beauty,
truth, and goodness, or, again, poetry, philosophy,
religion, or, more subtly, tone, color, feeling.
This lies beyond words, because they are an intellectual
means. Music foreshadows their interpretation,
but always faintly, as it does everything, because
music is revealed only enough here that we may not
be surprised hereafter in some sphere. This is
an intellectual sphere, but music is sentiment, so
it is here an accomplishment for women, and for men
of finer natures. Music is the science of spiritual
form; and poetry, which is the loftiest expression
of the intellectual sphere, finds its profound distinction
from prose, which is the language of the vulgar, in
its spiritual and sensuous rhythm, and so is music
applied to the intellectual state.
Nature answers questions by removing us out of inquisitiveness.
It is wilfully that we are querulous in nature, and
not naturally.
I just now went to the door, and the still beauty
of the moonlight night makes me a little ashamed of
my letter. If I had stayed all day in the woods,
and seen you there, I should have been content to be
silent; but removed from the immediate glow of nature,
and sitting in a purely human society, surrounded
by circumstances produced humanly, as the house and
furniture, the mind is withdrawn into a separate chamber,
like one who goes down from the house-top into a room
and so looks towards the north or west or south, and
does not see all around as before.
Good-night, good friend.
Yr. aff.
G.W.C.
XXIII
CONCORD, April 5th, 1845.
Judge, my unitary friend, how grateful was your letter,
perfumed with flowers and moonlight, to an unfortunate
up to his ears in manure and dish-water! For
no happier is my plight at this moment. I snatch
a moment out of the week wherein the significance
of that fearful word business has been revealed
to me to send an echo, a reply to your good letter.
Since Monday we have been moving and manuring and
fretting and fuming and rushing desperately up and
down turnpikes with bundles and baskets, and have
arrived at the end of the week barely in order.
Yesterday, in the midst, while I was escorting a huge
wagon of that invaluable farming wealth, I encountered
Mrs. Pratt and family making their reappearance in
civilization. All Brook Farm in the golden age
seemed to be strapped to the rear of their wagon as
baggage, for Mrs. Pratt was the first lady I saw at
Brook Farm, where ladyhood blossomed so fairly.
Ah! my minute is over, and I must leave you to lie
in wait for another.
Copyrights
Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
