I heard from a friend of the last Philharmonic in New York. It seems they have made Vieux-temps an honorary member, and he played for them. On the same evening they performed one of Beethoven's symphonies. It is one of those accounts whose beauty is their nakedness. To lovers of music a bare description is as an outline to a painter which he can readily fill up and supply with the shadows and sunlight. Yet not he so magnificently as sunlight and shadows sweep over this landscape. It seems to me that a century of splendor has been rushing by since I have been here.
The persons who make Concord famous I have hardly seen. The consciousness of their presence is like the feeling of lofty mountains whom the night and thick forests hide. Of one of them, E. Hoar, I need to say nothing to you. One evening I sat with her and Waldo Emerson and Geo. P. Bradford while Belinda Randall played and sang.
Isaac brings you this, and will himself best tell you of himself. Burrill is well, and unites with me in remembrance to all who remember.
Your friend,
G.W.C.
XV
CONCORD, June 26th, 1844.
These are Tophetic times. I doubt if the sturdy faith of those heroes, Shadrack and co., would carry them through this fervor unliquefied. Their much vaunted furnace was but a cool retreat where thoughts of great-coats were possible, compared with this. And if that nether region of whose fires so much is sung by poets and other men possessed, can offer hotter heats, let them be produced. Those Purgatorial ardencies for the gentle suggestion of torment to thin shades can have little in common with these perspiration-compelling torridities. Why does not some ingenious Yankee improve such times for the purchase, at a ruinous discount, of all thick clothes? I tremble lest some one should offer me an ice-cream for my best woollens! Is it human to resist such an offer? Does it not savor something of Devildom, and a too great familiarity with that lower Torrid Zone, to entertain such a proposition cool-ly? when such a word grows suddenly obsolete in such seasons? If I venture to move, such an atmosphere of heat is created immediately around my body that all cool breezes (if the imagination is competent to such a conception) are like arid airs when they reach my mouth. Perhaps we are tending to those final, fiery days of which Miller is a prophet. We are slowly sinking, perhaps, from heat to heat, until entire rarefication and evanishment in imperceptible vapor ensues; and so the great experiment of a world may end in smoke, as many minor ones have ended. If it were not so hot, I should love to think about these things.
June 28th. So far I had proceeded on the afternoon I returned to Concord. When I desisted I supposed I had inscribed my final manuscript, and that only a cinder would be found sitting over it when some one should enter. Yet by the providence of God I am preserved for the experience of greater heats. I did not know before what was the capacity of endurance of the human frame. I begin to suspect we are of nearer kin to the Salamander than our pride will allow; and since Devils only are admitted to nether fire, I begin to lapse into the credence of total depravity!! Reflect upon my deplorable condition! As Shelley's body, when lifeless, was caused to disappear in flames and smoke, so may mine before its tenant is departed. Was it not prophetic that on Sunday afternoon the following lines came to me while thinking of that poet?