_ Early Letters To John S. Dwight
Chapter XXXIV
CONCORD,
June 6, 1846. My dear Friend,--I send you some verses for the Harbinger, which are not a conceit, although they relate to no actual personal experience except that I am sometimes conscious of the main fact, for my dreams do sometimes so surpass the waking reality that the charm of the suggesting person, if not lost, is indefinitely subdued and postponed. It is very pleasant here at Minot's. The family are still, the household goes smoothly on, and we live in a house 150 years old, under a tree of apparently almost equal age and looking across a green meadow to a clump of pines and birches beyond. The scenery in Concord is very gentle but pleasant. I have become attached to it as to a taciturn friend who has no splendid bursts of passion but wears always a soft smile.
All the morning we are busy working, and in the afternoons I have been reading Goethe's "Rome." It is very fine, and full of wisdom and beauty. His thoughts are clear and just and profound, and he looks on every side. He was so ready for Italy, too, as the home of art--he a lover and student of art, an artist by nature, and always too much a man. But Goethe, though he is constantly a wise friend, is never a lover. You could not take him always, personally, as the companion of your rambles, your jokes, your silence and sorrows. I think of several persons among those I know, who are by no means lights upon a hill, whom I should select as companions for a journey rather than him. In Rome one would wish to see him as he would Jupiter, and hear all his simple, grave, and catholic discourse; but has he that ineffable and inexplicable human delicacy and sympathy which is worth so much more in a man, as the innocence of the dove is than the wisdom of the serpent. And yet, in the "Elective Affinities," does he not show all that one could wish? But why should he be haunted by the thought that he does not have it and think of particular things to prove it, except that he does not have it? It is like feeling the beauty of single lines which a man writes without being impressed by the whole poem that he is a poet.
I had yesterday a long letter from Cranch and his wife. They are now in Washington, and are enjoying the same June weather that we have here. They have a peculiar interest to me as those who are to take the leap into the ocean whence we do not know whether we shall emerge upon some fairy island or upon desolate rocks or shall sink forever deeper and deeper in the sea-caves where the mermaids are. For a residence in Italy is certainly, in its entire uncertainty, in its new enclosures of circumstances and influences, like leaping into an unknown sea. It is a lover's leap, however, and love is beyond the hopes or arrangements of wisdom.
The Concordians are all well. I feel a pang in going to-night to take leave of Elizabeth Hoar, who is going away for several weeks, and who will not return until after I have left Concord. She seems to me one who may at any moment become invisible, like a pure flame. Almira is well, and sends love to you. She hopes you will come and make her a visit during the summer, and I hope it may be made in June, as I shall go away by the 1st of July, and move by slow stages towards New York. The summer will fly by on swift wings, and more beautiful than those of a gorgeous butterfly which we examined today; it flitted away among the dark pines, as the summer will disappear in the shadowy pines of autumn, so grave and at last solemn.
I hope this late afternoon is as beautiful with you as it is here.
Your friend,
G.W.C.
DESTINY
That dream was life, but waking came,
Dead silence after living speech,
Cold darkness after golden flame,
And now in vain I seek to reach,
In thought that radiant delight
Which girt me with a splendid night.
No art can bring again to me
Thy figure's grace, lithe-limbed by sleep;
No echo drank the melody
An after-festival to keep
With me, and memory from that place
Glides outward with averted face.
I loved thy beauty as a gleam
Of a sweet soul by beauty nursed,
But the strange splendor of that dream
All other loves and hopes has cursed--
One ray of the serenest star
Is dearer than all diamonds are.
Yet would I give my love of thee,
If thus of thee I had not dreamed,
Nor known that in thine eyes might be
What never on my waking gleamed,
For Night had then not swept away
The possibilities of Day.
For had my love of thee been less,
Still of my life thou hadst been queen,
And that imperial loveliness
Hinted by thee I had not seen;
Yet proudly shall that love expire
The spark of dawn in morning's fire.
How was it that we loved so well,
From love's excess to such sweet woe,
Such bitter honey--for will swell
Across my grief that visioned glow
Which steals the soul of grief away
As sunlight soothes a wintry day.
And so we part, who are to each
The only one the earth can give.
How vainly words will strive to reach
Why we together may not live,
When barely thought can learn to know
The depth of this sublimest woe. _