Part 43 (1/2)

dwellers and visitors, when Prospero and his companions had bade farewell to it, when Caliban was grunting and grubbing and groveling in his favorite cave again, when Ariel was hovering like a humming-bird over the flower draperies of the woods, where the footprints of men were still stamped on the wet sand of the s.h.i.+ning sh.o.r.e, but their voices silent and their forms vanished, and utter solitude, and a strange dream of the past, filling the haunts where human life, its sin and sorrow, and joy and hope, and love and hate, had breathed and palpitated, and were now forever gone. The notion of that desert once, but now deserted, paradise, whose flowers had looked up at Miranda, whose skies had shed wisdom on Prospero, always seems to me full of melancholy. The girl's sweet voice singing no more in the sunny, still noon, the grave, tender converse of the father and child charming no more the solemn eventide, the forsaken island dwells in my imagination as at once desecrated and hallowed by its mortal sojourners; no longer savage quite, and never to be civilized; the supernatural element disturbed, the human element withdrawn; a sad, beautiful place, stranger than any other in the world. Perhaps the sea went over it; it has never been found since Shakespeare landed on it. I love that poem beyond words....

I shall ruin you in postage; if there is any chance of that, keep Mrs. Norton's five guineas to pay for my American epistles.

Ever your affectionate F. A. K.

DEAREST H----,

I have received your letter, acknowledging my first to you.... As for letters, they are like everything else we experience here, sources of to the full as much suffering as satisfaction. Who has not felt their whole blood run backward at sight of one of these folded fate-bearers? I declare, breaking an envelope always has something of the character of pulling a shower-bath string over one's own head; I wonder anybody ever has the courage to do it....

Your dread of our finding New York quite a desert would have been literally fulfilled had we reached it a fortnight sooner; but the dreadful malady, the cholera, had taken its departure, and though private bereavements and general stagnation of business rendered the season a very unfavorable one for our experiment, yet, upon the whole, we have every reason to be well satisfied with the result of it, and think we did well not to postpone the beginning of our campaign.... The first serious experiences of our youth seem to me like the breaking asunder of some curious, beautiful, and mystical pattern or device.... All our lives long we are more or less intent on replacing the bright scattered fragments in their original shape: most of us die with the bits still scattered round us--that is to say, such of the bits as have not been ground into powder, or soiled and defaced beyond recognition, in the life-process. The few very wise find and place them in a coherent form at last, but it is quite another curious, beautiful, and mystical device or pattern from the original one.

The deaths of the young Napoleon, the Duke of Reichstadt, and Walter Scott have excited universal interest here, naturally of a very dissimilar kind. One's heart burns to think of that young eagle falling like a weakly winter flower, or a faded, sickly girl, into his untimely grave.... There was nothing for him but death. If he had been anything, it could only have been a wild spark of the mad meteor from which he sprang; and as Heaven in its wisdom forbade that, I think it much of its mercy that it extinguished him early and utterly, and did not leave him to flare and flicker and burn himself out with foul gunpowder smoke, and smell of dead men slain in battle, in the middle of the smoldering ashes of his father's European empire.

My admiration and respect for Walter Scott are unbounded, and were I the n.o.blest, richest, and charmingest man in the world, I would lay myself at Anne Scott's feet out of sheer love and veneration for her father....

You ask me if I wrote anything on board s.h.i.+p? Nothing but odds and ends of doggerel. Since I have been here I have written some verses on the beautiful American autumn, which have been published with commendation. I am thinking of writing a prose story, if ever again I can get two minutes and a half of leisure.... Your entreaties for minute details of our life make me sad, for how little of what we do, be, or suffer can be conveyed to you in this miserable sc.r.a.p of paper!... Our dinner-hour is three when we are actors, five when we are ladies and gentlemen. The food we get here in New York is very indifferent. It was excellent in quality in Philadelphia, but wherever we have been there is a want of niceness and refinement in the cooking and serving everything that is very disagreeable....

Thursday, Nov. 27th. This is my birthday--in England always one of the gloomiest days of this gloomy month; here my windows are all open, and the warm sun streaming in as it might on the finest of early September days with us. I am to-day three-and-twenty. Where is my life gone to? As the child said, ”Where does the light go when the candle is out?” ... Since last I wrote to you I have been forty miles up the Hudson, and seen such n.o.ble waters and beautiful hills, such glory of color and magnificent breadth in the grand river and its autumn woods, as I cannot describe.

This is our last night but one of acting here. We play ”The Hunchback” on Sat.u.r.day, and on Monday go back to Philadelphia for three weeks; thence to Baltimore and Was.h.i.+ngton, and then return here. I must go now and rehea.r.s.e Katharine and Petruchio.

I have just finished Graham's ”History,” and am beginning John Smith. By the by, a gentleman here is writing a play, in which I am to act Pocahontas and my father Captain Smith. Come out and see it, won't you? Good-by, dear. Think always of your affectionate

F. A. K.

December 9, 1832.

MY DEAREST H----,

I received yours of October 16th yesterday.... You are not healthily natured enough to be inconstant. Yours is one of those morbid organizations for whom the present never does its wholesome, proper office of superseding the past, and your thoughts and feelings, your whole inner life, in short, is always out of perspective, because your background is forever your foreground, and with you, half the time, nothing is but what is not; not in consequence of looking forward, like Macbeth, but the reverse.... I am delighted that you are going to Scotland to know my dear Mrs.

Harry Siddons.

Before this letter reaches you, however, you will have returned to your castle, and your visit to Edinburgh will be over.... Mercy on me! what disputations you and Mr. Combe will have had--on matters physiological, psychological, phrenological, and philosophical! My brains ache to imagine them.... Spurzheim, you know, is dead lately in Boston. It is a matter of regret to me not to have seen him, and his death will be a grief to the Combes, who venerate him highly.... Making trial of people is running a foolish risk, and they who get disappointment by it reap the most probable result from such experiments. I am quite willing to trust my friends; G.o.d forbid I should ever try them!...

We have not yet been to Boston, and therefore I myself know nothing of Channing, and cannot answer your questions about him. All that I hear inclines me to like as well as respect him. His gentleness and kindness, his weak health, brought on by over-study, his perfect simplicity and unaffectedness--these are the usual details that follow any mention of him, and accord with the impression his writings produced upon me; but of his theological treatises I know nothing.

I am glad anything so universal as the blessed suns.h.i.+ne reminds you of me, because my remembrance must be present with you almost daily. The lights of heaven s.h.i.+ne more glowingly here than through the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me.... Four months are already gone out of the two years we are to pa.s.s out of England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country--that wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the map--so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral worth!...

I found Graham a little too much of a Republican for me, though his ”History” seemed to me upon the whole good and very impartial. I am now half way through Smith's ”Virginia,” which pleases me by its quaint old-world style. I am myself much inclined to be in love with Captain Smith. A man who fights three Turks and carries their heads on his s.h.i.+eld is to me an admirable man....

I answer the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury to be despised, however, to have, in the American fas.h.i.+on, on a hot summer's day, a deep plate presented to you full of peaches, cut up like apples for a pie, that have been standing in ice, and are then snowed over with sugar and frozen cream.]

We are now in Philadelphia, whence we go to Baltimore, Was.h.i.+ngton, and Charleston. The Southern States are at this moment in a state of violent excitement, which seems almost to threaten a dissolution of the Union. The tariff question is the point of disagreement; and as the interests of the North and South are in direct opposition on this subject, there is no foretelling the end.

Our success is very great, and we have every reason to be satisfied with and grateful for it. Our houses are full, and eke our pockets, and we have hitherto managed to live in tolerable privacy and very tolerable discomfort. But I believe the western part of the country has yet to teach us the extent of inconvenience to which travelers in America are sometimes liable. G.o.d bless you, dearest H----.

I am, ever yours affectionately, F. A. K.

My father and I took a moonlight walk the other night, from ten o'clock till half-past twelve, during which we neither of us uttered six words.

BALTIMORE, January 2, 1833.