Dearest Emily,
Reflecting upon the loss I have sustained in the death of my dear Dall, you exclaim, "How difficult it is to realize that life has become eternity, hope is become certainty! How strange, how impossible, it seems to conceive a state of existence without expectation, and where all is fulfillment!" I have marked under the word "impossible," because such a belief is literally impossible to my mind; the sense of activity, of desire for, and aiming at, and striving after something better than what I am, is so essential a portion of the idea of happiness to me that I absolutely can conceive of no happiness but in the attempt at, and consciousness of, progress. The state where that hope did not exist, and where the spiritual energies were not presented with deeper and higher objects of attainment, would be no state of enjoyment to me. I cannot imagine heaven without inexhaustible means of increasing knowledge and excellence.... Perhaps in that state, dear Emily, we shall be able to find out how a mummy of the days of Memnon should have preserved in its dead grasp a living germ for 3000 years.... [This last sentence referred to a striking fact, which Miss Fitz Hugh's uncle, Mr. William Hamilton, told us, of a bulb found in the sarcophagus of a mummy, which was planted, and actually began to germinate and grow.]
Branchtown, May 27th, 1835.
My Dearest H——,
... It is curious that in a comparatively inactive state of life, the sense of the infinite business of living has become far more vivid to me than it ever was before; existence seems so abounding in duties, in objects of interest and energy, in means of excellence and pleasure—happiness, I ought rather to say,—the immense and important happiness of constant endeavor after improvement.... Dear H——, my letter was interrupted here yesterday by a visitor. I will join my thread, and go on with a few words which I have this moment read in Hayward's Appendix to Goethe's "Faust." When Goethe had to bear the death of his only son, he wrote to Zelter thus: "Here then can the mighty conception of duty alone hold us erect—I have no other care than to keep myself in equipoise. The body must, the spirit will, and he who sees a necessary path prescribed to his will has no need to ponder much." The first part of this is noble; but I am not going to do what I used to quarrel so much with you for doing—fill my letters with quotations, or even make disquisitions of them; at any rate, till I have answered your last.
MY PICTURE. I am extremely vexed at all the trouble you and Emily have taken about my picture: for the artist himself (Mr. Sully, of Philadelphia) is not satisfied with it, and I am sure would be rather sorry than glad that it were exhibited. That artist is a charming person; and I must tell you how he proceeded about that picture. When your letter came, acknowledging the receipt of it, he asked how you were satisfied: I told him the truth, and what you had written on the subject of the likeness. He did not appear stupidly annoyed, but sorry for your disappointment, and told me that he had been from the first dissatisfied with it as a likeness, himself. He pressed upon my acceptance for you a little melancholy head of me, an admirable and not too much flattered likeness; but as he had given that to his wife, of whom I am very fond, of course I would not deprive her of it; and there the matter rested. But when, some time after, some pictures he had painted for us were paid for, he steadfastly refused the price agreed upon for yours, because it had not satisfied him himself. He said that had you been even less pleased with it, he should not therefore have refused the money; but his own conscience, he added, bore witness to the truth of your objections, and when that was the case, he invariably acted in the same way, and declined to receive payment for what he didn't consider worth it. As he is our friend, we could not press the money upon him; but we have got him to undertake a portrait of Dr. Mease, and I have added sundry grains more to my regard for him. As to the likeness, had you seen me about three months after my marriage, you would have thought better of it. [The portrait in question, painted for my friend, and now, I believe, still at Ardgillan Castle, was one of six that my friend, Mr. Sully, painted of me at various times, the best likeness of them all being one that he took of me in the part of Beatrice, for which I did not sit.] You talk of "nailing me down," to send me to the Academy, and the expression brought a sudden shuddering recollection to my mind of the dismal night I passed in Boston packing up our stage clothes in dear Dall's bedroom while she was lying in her coffin. I know not why your words recalled that miserable circumstance to me, and all the mingled feelings that accompanied such an occupation in such company....
You ask me if I do not love the country as I used to do. Indeed I do; for, like all best good things, it seems the lovelier for near and intimate acquaintance. Yet the country here, and this place in particular, is not to me what it might be, and will be yet. This place is not ours, and during the life of an old Miss B. will not belong to us: this, of course, keeps my spirit of improvement in check, and indeed, even if it were made over to us, with signing and sealing and all due legal ceremonies, I should still feel some delicacy in making wholesale alterations in a place which an elderly person, to whom it has belonged, remembers such as it is for many years.
The absolute absence of all taste in matters of ornamental cultivation is lamentably evident in the country dwellings of rich and poor alike, as far as I have yet seen in this neighborhood. No natural beauty seems to be perceived and taken advantage of, no defect hidden or adorned; proximity to the road, for obvious purposes of mere convenience, seems to have been the one idea in the selection of building sites; and straight, ungraveled paths, straight rows of trees, straight strips of coarse grass, straight box borders, dividing straight narrow flower-beds, the prevailing idea of a garden; together with a deplorable dearth of flowers, shrubberies, ornamental trees, and everything that really deserves the name.
Good-bye, and God bless you.