Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis eBook

Evening.  I have captured an evening instead, my first tolerably quiet evening in this new life, this new system of ours for a summer sojourn.  The waves of my nomadic life drift me on strange shores, and sometimes, as I mount them, I dream of a home, quiet and beautiful, that home which allures all young minds and gradually fades into the sad features of such households as we see.  In all my experience I think of three happy homes where the impression is uniform, for in all there are May Days and Thanksgivings; and yet to see a complete home would be to see that marriage which, if we may credit Miss Fuller, does not belong to an age when celibacy is the “great fact.”  As if the divine force could be extinguished!  I must marry and spite her theory.  You would be amused if you could see some of the letters which I receive, and which discourse of a wife with the same gravity as they do of washing clothes, as if each were a necessary, and that it would not do for me to settle upon a farm until I am married.  There is some wisdom in the last advice.  An old bachelor upon a farm, with a solitary old maid-servant, is not the most pleasing prospect for young one-and-twenty to contemplate.  But I ignore farms and maids and prospects, saving always the natural one.  Next year may find me the favored of all three.

How gladly I would be with you on Monday, you know; but what candidate for the plough and the broom should I be after the bewilderment of that scene!  I remember too well the festivals which graced the younger days to trust myself within their sphere again, save in the midst of a boundless summer leisure.  And when, after these chill, moist, April days, the perfect flower of summer shall bloom, I will be in its heart and breathe the enchanted air again.  The word reminds me how glad I am that the flowers were so grateful.  I committed my memory to delicate guardians, who, dying, did not suffer that to die.  And the trinity of tone, color, and sentiment, though I knew not, like you, how to indicate it, is one of the most alluring of mysteries, so much so that I must leave it even unexpressed.  Since so little may be known, I will not bring it into the melancholy purlieus of theory, but see it and hear it and feel it in echoes and glimpses.  Yet all these rainbows which span the heaven of thought, finely woven of the tears of humility, one would sometimes grasp and crystallize forever.  In that I find my satisfaction in what I know of Fourier; but to clutch at the rainbow! can it be crystallized?

Let not the spasm of infidelity mar my letter in your eyes or heart, and on your anniversary let one stream flow to the memory of your friend,

G.W.C.

XXIV

CONCORD, April 17th, 1845.