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Early Letters of George William Curtis, a non-fiction book by George William Curtis |
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Early Letters To John S. Dwight - Chapter 22 |
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_ Early Letters To John S. Dwight Chapter 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 by many small ones? And as I stood to-day, as if hearing the throb of the new active life in nature, for winter is more like the unchanged dead face of an intellectual person, the contrast of this steaming and heating life was suggested to me as is always the case, and necessarily so to the perfection of the thought. The idea of day is not symmetrical except when night is implied in thought, for if one could paint a portrait of the day, it would be brightness against darkness. Why are we so troubled or moved at death, elated or depressed? It cannot give anything, nor take. Every sphere satisfies its desires by its hopes, and so seems to show that life is only an effort at equilibrium. At least it does show that to this state. There is a perpetual balance in every experience, never a permanence, as night follows day, but never survives the sunrise. Plato nor Shakespeare have drunk all this beauty, and it seems not right to become cold and callous towards it, externally, as the dead are. If they see the soul of things, do they see the form of nature without the soul, as we do now? If death mark only a general expansion of life and nature, it is no more pleasant. With greater hopes greater desires; and, after all, it is only keeping a larger set of books. There is no standard of life, as there is none of character. A flower is sometimes as pure a satisfaction as a man or the thought of an archangel. It passes into a proverb that the beggar is happier than a king, and proverbs are only the homely disguises in which wisdom roams the world. The "Polarity" which Emerson talks about is the nearest approximation to the universal form of life, but this is constantly marred by a stray thought of permanence and the confusing hint of the passive mind that we suppose the balance to be the law, and are glad to accept night with day, and cold with heat, because there is a blindness in the spiritual eye which will not let us see the riper spirits who are not sated but satisfied with permanency. For there, too, is a reason that we are so glad to hide in the equipoise as an eternal fact that we are surfeited with constancy. Drowning in the malmsey-butt is no better than the Thames. Enjoyment to-day is secured by the certain prospect of sorrow to-morrow, which is not wilful, but a lesson of life, and as we suppose, at last, of the central life, just as the creation at daybreak is supported and adorned in the mind by the prospective tenderness of twilight. And this balancing, so universal in this sphere, in outward if not in real life, is therefore a fact, and why not as profound as any, since there is no standard of life? Is there any law at last? Nature seems so general and yet so intensely individual. As fine harmony results from the accord of distinct tones, and each tone an infinite division of vibrations. At bottom no things are similar. Harmony is only unison, not identity. Nature is like the ocean, which bears whole forests hewn into ships laden with treasure; but no bottom is found to support all the weight, only a drop resting upon a drop forever. The elephant that bore the earth stood upon a tortoise, who fortunately could keep his feet in his shell, and so had no need to stand anywhere! 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. _ |
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