EARLY LETTERS TO JOHN S. DWIGHT (continued 3)

I long to leave the city, but I shall yet stay some time, for I shall not see my Father and Mother much during the Summer, and we shall sail probably by the first of August. Perhaps I can arrange so as to return with you if you come. I meant to have passed two or three days at Brook Farm. I could write till you were tired, but I have no time or paper. Cranch is well and sketching. He says something of coming to Boston during the Summer. Come immediately, and believe me as ever,

G.W.C.

XXXIII

NEW YORK, Saturday, May 16, '46.

My dear Friend,—I learn from Mr. Timm that the concert will take place at the Castle Garden, a spacious enclosure adjoining the Battery. The Choral Symphony, the overtures to "Der Freischutz" and "The Midsummer-Night's Dream," Rico's singing, Burke's playing, and De Meyer's, if he is in town, will make up the bill. The rehearsals of the chorus and orchestra are separate until the night before (I believe); and the Symphony is found so difficult that they almost repent having undertaken it. I suppose there would be no difficulty in your getting to the rehearsals through some of your friends, as you did before. The orchestra is to consist of 150 and the chorus of 300 or 400 persons. "The Desert" is to be played for the fifth time on Monday evening. Trinity Church is to be consecrated on Thursday, the day after the concert, and Pico will doubtless sing somewhere during the week. I heard her and Julia Northall last evening in "The Messiah." Their voices were glorious. After the "Pastoral Symphony" the clear, rich, sunny voice of Miss Northall in the recitative "While Shepherds watched," etc., was most fitting and beautiful. It was a soft stream of pearly light, as the hope of Christ was upon the darkness of his time. Pico sang, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," simply and sweetly, and was obliged to repeat it. The choruses were weak; they did not smite steadily upon the ear, but wavered, ghost-like, through the great tabernacle. The "Hallelujah" seemed to awaken the singers, and there was some tolerable body in that.

I heard Walker at his room with the greatest delight. He is so delicately feminine that I felt with him as with a splendid woman in whose nature you do not feel the want of masculine elements, since there is strength enough in a feminine way; with Rakemann I always feel the man with the womanly tenderness and sweetness which belongs to a real man. It was very pleasant to feel such a harmonious difference, as when you see a beautiful man and wife.

This being anniversary week, the Unitarians have been holding meetings and discussions. I do not feel impressed by them very much, they stand in such a negative position, "one stocking off and the other stocking on."

At Isaac's request I have been reading the life of the founder of his order, St. Alphonse of Liguori. He was a very pious man, and the Church was very jealous of him. It is a painful book to read, for the Catholic Church seems to use heaven as a weapon whereby to conquer the earth. I have not yet written Isaac, as he wanted me to read the book first; but if his promised prayers fall as short as the history, I shall be delivered incontinently to the buffetings of Satan.

I hope this will not find you at Brook Farm, for it cannot reach there until Monday; the concert is on Wednesday, if it is pleasant. Charles Newcomb and his mother are here.

Yours ever,

G.W.C.

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.

XXXV

CONCORD, June 29, '46.

My dear Friend,—I had hoped that you would have come to Concord yesterday, because to-morrow early I leave, and shall be here only one day more, towards the close of the next week. I had not expected to have gone so soon, but I shall accompany a sick friend to Saratoga by slow stages, and, returning to Worcester, make a short visit among my kindred there, and then return to Concord to take my final departure. I shall try to secure some day about that time to come to Brook Farm, if only to say farewell to you; but just now I cannot specify the day.

My trip to Monadnock was very beautiful. The minister, Jno. Brown, is the same Brook Farmer in a black coat; and I enjoyed a few days at his house exceedingly. I wrote a long journal while there, and cannot say anything about it here, therefore.

This afternoon I have answered Isaac's letter which I received during the winter. With great modesty I attempted to show him how, in the nature of things, proselyting was hopeless, at least upon any who are really worth converting. But the tone, like my feeling, was friendly and gentle. If it does not change his course towards me, he will better understand my feeling and position, for I told him that in men of his nature and tendency the zeal of proselytism is a part of the fervor of sentiment, and therefore I expected and willingly accepted his exhortations, and only deplored them as a loss of time and misuse of opportunities of communication. The Roman Church was such an unavoidable goal for Isaac that one who knows him well cannot possibly grieve to see him prostrate before the altar, and ought to understand and anticipate what was called his arrogance, which is a necessary portion of the sentiment and position.

The review of Mr. Hawthorne's book in the last Harbinger is delicately appreciative. The introductory chapter is one of the softest, clearest pictures I know in literature. His feeling is so deep, and so unexaggerated, that it is a profoundly subtle interpreter of life to him, and the pensiveness which throws such a mellow sombreness upon his imagination is only the pensiveness which is the shadow of extreme beauty. There is no companion superior to him in genial sympathy with human feeling. He seems to me no less a successful man than Mr. Emerson, although at the opposite end of the village.

For a week or two, if you write, continue to address me at Concord, and believe me, in constant unitary feeling,

Your friend,

G.W.C.

XXXVI

CONCORD, July 14th, '46, Sunday night.

My dear Friend,—I have just returned from Almira's, who sends her love, and will be very happy to see you. I have written Mr. Hawthorne to go to Monadnock with me this week, but I suppose his duties will prevent. If I go I shall probably return before Sunday, as that is John Brown's working day, and we shall stay with him.

The night was glorious as I came from Almira's. The late summer twilight held the stars at bay; and in the meadows the fire-flies were flitting everywhere. Suddenly in the north, directly before me, began the flashings of the aurora—piles of splendor, a celestial colonnade to the invisible palace. It is a fitting close for a day so soft and beautiful. We took a long sauntering walk this morning and found the mountain laurel, which is very rare here.

I have been busy all my afternoons reading Roman history. Niebuhr and Arnold are fine historians. They are such wise, sincere men and scholars. I sit at the western door of the barn, looking across a meadow and rye-field to a group of pines beyond. My eye fixes upon some point in the landscape which constantly grows more beautiful, winning my eyes from the rest, until they gradually slide along, finding each as pleasant until the whole has a separate and individual beauty like a fall whose expressions you know intimately. It is a "Summer of Summers," as Lizzie Curzon writes me, and I am glad that my last hours in my own country will be so consecrated by beauty in my memory.

Burrill goes again to the Hudson to see Mr. Downing on Thursday. He will remain a week, I suppose, and go again to New York in August, when I sail.

Let me have my answer in person, for so short and poor a letter does not deserve the exclusive attention of writing.

Remember me kindly to all at Brook Farm, to Wm. Channing particularly, if he is there.

Your friend ever,

G.W.C.

XXXVII

CONCORD, July 13th, 1846.

My dear Friend,—It is a miserable piece of business to say my farewell to this blank sheet and send it to you, instead of having you say good-bye to my blank face. But, unless you can come to Ida's on Wednesday or Thursday, it must be so. A sudden trip to Saratoga has deranged my plans.

Will you now send my copy of the Harbinger to Almira?

We have been too happy together in times past and mean to be so so much more, here or somewhere, that we will not be very serious in our farewells, for we have been as far apart since I left you as we shall be when you are at Brook Farm and I at Palmyra. So good-bye, whether for two or three years, or an indefinite period. When we see each other again we shall meet, for our friendship has been of a fine gold which the moth and rust of years cannot corrupt.

Will you give my love and say good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Ripley and my other friends with you? and remember, as he deserves,

Your friend,

G.W.C.

XXXVIII

MILTON HILL, Midnight, July 16, '46.

My dear Friend,—I could not come this evening, and shall only have time in the morning to go to Boston and take the cars; so we must part so. I will copy some of my verses for you if I can steal the time, and write you from Europe if David Jones permits me to arrive.

I must say good-bye and good-night in some lines of Burns's which haunt me at this time, though they have no appropriateness; but they have a speechless woe of farewell, like a wailing wind:

"Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met or never parted, We had never been broken hearted."

Yr friend

G.W.C.

I shall write you again. Will you give this to Jno. Cheever? I have no wafer.

XXXIX

FORT HAMILTON, LONG ISLAND, July 30, '46.

My dear Friend,—It is very shabby, but I have been so unexpectedly and constantly separated from my manuscripts that I cannot copy, as I hoped, some of my verses. I have but one more day on land, and more than I can well do in it.

Could you hear how the sea moans and roars in the moonlight at this moment, it would be a siren song to draw you far away. I strain my eyes over the water as one struggles to comprehend the end of life, but the beauty of the future lies unseen and untouched.

God bless you always, my dear Friend; and do not fail to write me often.

Affly. yr friend,

G.W.C.

XL

ROME, November 22d, 1846.

My dear Friend,—Italy is no fable, and the wonderful depth of purity in the air and blue in the sky constantly makes real all the hopes of our American imagination. Sometimes the sky is an intensely blue and distant arch, and sometimes it melts in the sunlight and lies pale and rare and delicate upon the eye, so that one feels that he is breathing the sky and moving in it. The memory of a week is full of pictures of this atmospheric beauty. I looked from a lofty balcony at the Vatican upon broad gardens lustrously green with evergreen and box and orange trees, in whose dusk gleamed the large planets of golden fruit. Palms, and the rich, rounding tuft of Italian pines, and the solemn shafts of cypresses, stood beside fountains which spouted rainbows into the air, which was silver-clear and transparent, and on which the outline of the landscape was drawn as vividly as a flame against the sky at night. Beside me rose floating into the air the dome of St. Peter's, which is not a nucleus of the city, like the Duomo of Florence, but a crown more majestic and imposing as the spectator is farther removed. I had come to this balcony and its realm of sunny silence through the proper palace of the "Apollo" and the "Laocoon" and Raphael's "Transfiguration" and "Stanze." The Vatican is a wilderness of art and association, and in the allotted three hours I could only wander through the stately labyrinth and arrange the rooms, but not their contents, in my mind, but could not escape the "Apollo," which stands alone in a small cabinet opening upon a garden and fountain. It was greater to me than the "Venus de Medici" at Florence, although it has taught me better to appreciate that when I see it again. It is cold and pure and vast, the imagination of a man in the Divine Mind, given to marble because flesh was too recreant a material. The air of the statue is proudly commanding, with disdain that is not human, and a quiet consciousness of power. It does not resemble any figure we see of a man who has drawn a bow, but the ideal of a man in action. Like the "Venus," it shows how entire was the possible abstraction of the old Sculptors into a region of pure form as an expression of what was beyond human passion, with which color seems to correspond. Deities are properly the subject of sculpture because of color; colorless purity of marble accords with the divine superiority to human passion, and although the mythology degraded the gods into the sphere and influence of men, to the mind of the artist they would still sit upon unstained thrones.

This was one day. Upon another I stepped from a lovely road upon the Aventine into an old garden where, at the end of a long, lofty, and narrow alley of trimmed evergreens, stood the Dome of St. Peter's filling the vista against an afternoon sky. In these mossy and silent old places, the trees and plants seem to have sucked their vigor from the sun and soil of many long-gone centuries, and to remain ghosts of themselves and hoary reminiscences of their day in the soft splendor of modern light. Italy itself is that garden wherein everything hands you to the past, and stands dim-eyed towards the future. It is a vast university, endowed by the past with the choicest treasures of art, to which come crowds from all nations, as lovers and dreamers and students, who may be won to live among relics so dear, but who mostly return to stand as interpreters of the beauty they have seen. Therefore, Italy is a theme which cannot grow old, as love and beauty cannot. Every book should be a work of art, and Italy, like the Madonna, should have a fresh beauty in the hands of every new artist. It is no longer interesting, statistically, for the names and numbers have been told often enough; but the impression which it leaves upon the mind of men of character and taste is the picture which should be novel and interesting.

But it is the relics of the summer prime of the Rome of distant scholars and lovers, and the art which shines with an Indian-summer softness in the autumn of its decay, that rule here yet; for the imperial days have breathed a spirit into the air which broods over the city still. Although it is a modern capital, with noise and dirt and smells and nobility and fashionable drives, and walks and shops, and the red splendor of lacquered cardinals, and the triple-crowned Pope, in the arches which rise over modern chapels and of which they are built, in the ruined forum and acqueducts and baths and walls, are the decayed features of what was once greatest in this world, and which rules it from its grave. My first view of old Rome was in the moonlight. We passed through the silent Forum, not on the level of the ancient city, which recoils from modern footsteps and goes downward towards the dust of those who made it famous, but by the ruined temples and columns whose rent seams were shaped anew into graceful perfection by the magical light, by the wilderness of the ruined Caesar's palace, until we looked wonderingly into the intricacy of arch and corridor and column of which was built the arch-temple of Paganism, the Coliseum. The moonlight silvered the broad spaces of scornful silence as if Fate mused mournfully upon the work it must needs do. Grass and flowers in their luxuriant prime waved where the heads of Roman beauties nodded in theirs; and yet how true to the instincts of their nature were the Romans, who nourished by their recreations the stern will which had won the world for them. And since literature and art and science depend in a certain measure for their development and perfection upon a strong government, the same Roman beauty, in dooming to a bloody death before her eyes the man upon whose life depended other and far-away beauties and loves, may have breathed a sweeter strain into the song of the poet. The Popes have not refrained from obtruding a cross and shrines upon this defenceless ruin. They would not render unto Caesar the things which were his, and although they are shocking at first, the magnificence of silence and decay soon swallows them, and they appear no more except as emblems of modern Rome lost in the broad desolation of the imperial city.

One cannot see the present Pope without a hope for Italy. I first saw him at high mass, with the cardinals, in the Palace chapel. The college of cardinals resembled a political and not a religious body, which, although the council of government, it ought to resemble upon religious occasions. When the Pope entered they kissed his hand through his mantle. He is a noble-looking man, of a dignified and graceful presence, and already very dear to the people for what he has done and what he has promised. I could not look at him without sadness as a man sequestered in splendor and removed from the small sympathies in which lies the mass of human happiness. The service seemed a worship of him, but no homage could recompense a man for what a Pope had lost. I have seen him often since, and his demeanor is always marked by the same air of lofty independence. It is good to see him appear equal to a position so solitary and so commanding, and to indicate this vigor of life and the conscience which would prevent him from making his seclusion a bower for his own ease.

From one of these wonderful days passed in the Villa Borghese, a spacious estate near the city, equally charming for its nature and art, I went, a day or two since, to watch by the deathbed of a young American. Hicks (a young artist, whom I love and whom the MacDaniels will know) and myself stood by him and closed his eyes. He was without immediate friends, except a connection by marriage who has recently arrived, and who was with him at the last. I was glad that I was here to be with him and lay him decently in his coffin. The handful of Americans in Rome followed him last evening at dusk, close by twilight, and buried him in the Protestant graveyard, near the grave of Shelley's ashes and heart. The roses were in full blossom, as Shelley says they used to be in midwinter. It is a green and sequestered spot under the walls of old Rome, where the sunlight lingers long, and where in the sweet society of roses whose bloom does not wither, Shelley and Keats sleep always a summer sleep. Fate is no less delicate than stern, which has here united them after such lives and deaths. And yet here one feels also the grimness of the Fate which strikes such lips into silence.

I force myself to send you this letter, because I want to write you. It is a shadowy hint of what I think and feel, as all letters must be. Cranch and his wife are with me, and will stay the winter. There are not many Americans, but I look every day for Burrill. Hicks I have seen a good deal and like very much. He speaks to me of the MacDaniels. Give my love to all at Brook Farm, and forgive a letter which you will not believe was written in Italy. Cranch sends much love.

Always yr

G.W.C.

How I wish you were going with us this sweet sunny day (23 Nov.), on which I am writing this at my open window, without a fire, to see the "Gladiator" at the capitol. It is a great responsibility to be in Italy, one may justly demand so much of you afterwards. Once more, good-bye, and some day send me a ray from the beautiful past which Brook Farm is to me.

G.W.C.

XLI

NAPLES, April 27th, 1847.

My dear Friend,—If it would be hopeless and dispiriting to paint the constantly shifting lights and beauties of a summer day, it is no less so to write now and then a letter from Italy to one who would so warmly enjoy all that I see and hear. Every omitted day makes the case worse, a month makes it hopeless; and so I lived in Rome for five months and wrote you only one letter at the beginning. Yet is the magnetism of friendship not yet fine enough for you to know how constantly you were remembered, how I lingered in the moonlit Coliseum, how I felt the commanding beauty of the "Apollo" thrill through me, and the "Laocoon" and the proud heads of Antinous, and the pictures which are what our imaginations demand for Raphael and Leonardo and Michel Angelo, how I stood in the flood of the "Miserere," which was and was not what I knew it must be, how I plucked roses from the graves of Shelley and Keats, and led a Roman life for a winter, not for myself only, but for you!

I have written quite regularly to my family, and described some of the many matters which were new and picturesque, but have scarcely snatched a line to a friend except to Lizzie Curson and two letters to Geo. Bradford, who had some intention of coming out to join us in this enchanted land. In my last letter to him, which I wrote at the end of the Holy Week, I mentioned the "Miserere" and the news of that time. He will show you the letter, I suppose, if you wish to see it. But from Rome I broke suddenly off and came to Naples.

Is it not fine when things are beautifully different, when you part from one as if you were leaving everything, and find satisfaction in another—not a superiority, but equal difference? So is Naples after Rome. There is nothing solemn or grand in it. It rises in solid banks of cheerful houses from the spacious streets upon the water to the grim castle of St. Elmo, which hovers almost perpendicularly over it. These houses are white and bright, and turn themselves into the sunlight, and stretch in long lines around the bay, blending with the neighboring towns so that the base of Vesuvius is marked with a line of white houses, which go on undistinguishably from Naples. Farther round is Castellamare and Sorrento, whose promontory beyond is one corner of the bay, of which Capri seems like a portion sailed away into the sea. And the bay of Naples is so spacious and stately, so broad and deep, its lines those of mountains and the sea, its gem the sunny city, and the islands of Capri, Ischia, and Procida, so large and high and springing so proudly from the water, that it satisfies the expectation; and sometimes this broad water dashes and rolls like the ocean, then subsides into sunny ripples and gleams like glass in the moonlight. Two or three old castles stand out upon the bay from the city, picturesque objects for artists and lookers on, and in the hazy moonlight black and sharp masses reflected in the water. Sails and steamers and boats of all sorts are constantly dotting this space, and I am never weary of wandering along the shore on which lie the fishermen among their boats, with mournful looking women and black, matted-haired, gypsy-like children.

The picturesqueness of cities and life in Italy is more striking to me than anything else. The people are so poetic that, although lazy and dirty and mean, what they do and wear is like an animated picture. The gay costumes of the women—ribbons and bodices and trinkets—with their deep olive skins and bare heads, with hair that is most luxuriantly black, and beautifully twisted and folded in heavy, graceful braids, the broad-browed and outlined Roman women, majestic and handsome, not lovely or interesting, but showing as the remains of an imperial beauty; and in Naples the little figures and arch eyes and Oriental mien of the girls—these persons living in quaint old cities where the brightest flowers bloom amid hanging green over windows far and far above the street and walking in high-walled narrow lanes over which hang the sun-sucking leaves of the indolent aloe, and in which gleam the rich orange and lemon trees, or, as now, the keen lustrous green of just-budding fig-trees, and vines, or entering with quiet enthusiasm into festivals of saints, sprinkling the churches and streets with glossy, fragrant bay-leaves, hanging garlands upon the altars while a troop of virgins, clad in white and crowned, pass with lighted tapers to the Bishop's feet for a blessing, or more grandly drawing St. Peter's in fire upon the wild gloom of a March night, and in vast procession of two or three thousand marching down the narrow Corso singing a national song to the Pope—all this, if you can unravel it, paints for the eye what can never be seen at home. "I pack my trunk and wake up in Naples," and find myself, for which I am grateful; but I also find Italian beauty, which is like American as oranges are like apples. Such deep passionate eyes, such proud, queenly motions, such groups of peasants and girls in gardens listening to music, and lying asleep in the shade of trees, all this material of poetry is also material of life here. This is the true Lotos Eaters' island, this the grateful land of leisure; here people walk slowly and eat slowly and ride slowly, and, I must say, think slowly. But that also is corn to my mill. I find some sympathy with the happy Guy of Emerson's book, for there is no public opinion in Italy. A man feels that he stands alone and enjoys all the joys and sorrows of that consciousness and that position. Your room is your castle. If a man knows where it is he comes to see you, but whatever you do or say (of course excepting what is political) is your own business and not that of infernal society, which at home is grand arbiter of men's destinies. Except you care to do so, you have no state to keep up. The card for a royal ball finds you as readily in your fourth story as in the neighboring palace it finds My Lord; and so you are released from that thraldom which one cannot explain, but which one feels at home whether he consents to it or not.

And it is a broad and catholic teacher, this travelling. I have been quite unsphered since I have been here, in various ways, and have discovered how good every man's business is and how wide his horizon. There is a shabby Americanism which prowls proselyting through Europe, defying its spirit or its beauty or its difference to swerve it from what it calls its patriotism. Because America is contented and tolerably peaceful with a Republic, it prophesies that Europe shall see no happy days until all kings are prostrated; and belches that peculiar eloquence which prevails in small debating-clubs in retired villages at home. This is like taunting the bay of Naples with the bay of New York, or apples with oranges, or the dark lustrous beauty of Italian women with the blond fairness of Americans. Why should all men be governed alike rather than all look alike; the north is cold and the south is warm. These monarchies which are decried have been the fostering arms of genius and art; and in Italy and the rest of the countries here lie the grand achievements of all time, which draw the noblest and best from America to contemplate them and suck the heart of their beauty for the refining and adorning their own land. And why fear imitation! Men imitate when they stay at home more preposterously than when they see what is really beautiful and grand in other places; and a fine work of art repels imitation as the virgin beauty of a girl repels licentiousness. And we are elevated by art and mingling with men to know what is noble and best in attainment. We fancy a thousand things fine at home because we do not know how much finer the same may be, perhaps because we do not know that they are copies. Indeed, I feel as if it would be a good fruit of long travel to recover the knowledge of the fact which we so early lose—that we are born into the world with relations to men as men before we are citizens of a country with limited duties. A noble cosmopolitanism is the brightest jewel in a man's crown.

I have heard very little music in Italy—never so little in a winter. In Rome the opera was nothing, and there were only two or three concerts. That of a young Pole pianiste whom I knew was good, Maurice Strakosch (perhaps he will come to America). But the great gem of music was the singer Adelaide Kemble. You know she has left the stage and the public, but this was an amateur concert for the Irish. Her singing of "Casta Diva" was by far the finest gem heard. Such richness and volume, such possession and depth and passion, such purity and firmness and ease, I did not believe possible. Although a single song in a concert it seemed to embrace the whole spirit of the opera. She sang also the moon song from "Der Freischutz" simply and exquisitely, also in a trio of Mozart's and a Barcarolle, all of which showed the same genius. I do not see that she lacks anything, for although not beautiful, her face is flexible and really grand when she is excited. Cranch thought her voice not quite sweet in some parts. The "Miserere" was exquisitely beautiful, but not entirely what I expected to hear. In Naples I have heard the "Barber of Seville" and an opera of Mercadanti's. The last is refined street music, and reminds me of the mien and manners of a gentleman. The bands play every day, which is much better than at Rome. But it is unhappy for me that Verdi is the musical god of Italy at present, because the bands play entirely from his operas, which remind me of a diluted Donizetti. He has brought out a new opera, "Macbeth," within the month, at Florence. On the third evening he was called out thirty-eight times; the young men escorted him home in triumph, and the next night various princes and nobles presented him with a golden crown!

I have heard various rumors of Brook Farm, none agreeable. I feel as if my letter might not find you there; but what can you be doing anywhere else? I have received no letter from you, no direct news from Brook Farm, except through Lizzie Curzon and Geo. Bradford. But it floats on in my mind, a sort of Flying Dutchman in these unknown seas of life and experience, full of an old beauty and melody. I know how your time is used, and am not surprised at any length of silence. We go into the beautiful country about us for a fortnight, to Salerno, Sorrento, Pestum, and Capri, afterwards Rome again. Florence, the Apennines, Venice, Milan, Como, the Tyrol, Switzerland, and Germany lie before us. What a spring which promises such a summer! You will still go with me as silently as before.

At this moment I raise my eyes to Vesuvius, which is opposite my window, and the blue bay beneath. I can see the line of the Mediterranean blending with the sky, and remember that you are at the other side. I write as if Brook Farm still was there, and am more than ever

Yr friend

G.W.C.