3–9 May 1841

Aunt Mary, whose letters I read all yesterday afternoon, is Genius always new, subtle, frolic- some, musical, unpredictable. All your learning of all literatures and states of society, Platon- istic, Calvinistic, English or Chinese, would never enable you to anticipate one thought or expression. She is embarrassed by no Moses or Paul, no Angelo or Shakspeare, after whose type she is to fashion her speech : her wit is the wild horse of the desart, who snufFs the si- rocco and scours the palm-grove without having learned his paces in the Stadium or at Tatter- sail's. What liberal, joyful architecture, liberal and manifold as the vegetation from the earth's bosom, or the creations of frostwork on the window ! Nothing can excel the freedom and felicity of her letters, — such nobility is in this self-rule, this absence of all reference to style or standard: it is the march of the mountain winds, the waving of flowers, or the flight of birds. But a man can hardly be a reader of books without acquiring their average tone, as one who walks with a military procession invol- untarily falls into step.

These letters revive my faded purpose of writing the oft-requested memoir of Charles. That certainly would have been unfit : it was right for the young and the dear friend to ask : it had been wrong in me to undertake ; the very noble- ness of the promise should make us more reluc- tant to recite the disappointment of the promise. Let us not stoop to write the annals of sickness and disproportion. Charles delighted in strength, in grace, in poetry, in success ; — shall we wrong promise, only one evidence of which was his standing at the head of his college class at graduation. I recall a tender and most impressive tribute of Mr. Everett's to his memory at one of our annual $ B K meetings. He spoke of the blow which had jarred the strings of his fine intellect and made them return a sound, him so far as to make him the unwilling object of pity, the centre of a group of pain, a caryatid statue in our temple of Destiny ? Yet now, as I read these yellowing letters of Aunt Mary, I begin to entertain the project in a new form. I doubt if the interior and spiritual history of New England could be trulier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the pic- ture of this group of Aunt Mary and the boys, mainly Charles. The genius of that woman, the key to her life is in the conflict of the new and the old ideas in New England. The heir of whatever was rich and profound and efficient in thought and emotion in the old religion which planted and peopled this land. She strangely united to this passionate piety the fatal gifts of penetration, a love of philosophy, an impatience of words, and was thus a religious skeptic. She held on with both hands to the faith of the past generation as to the Palladium of all that was good and hopeful in the physical and metaphy- sical worlds ; and in all companies, and on all occasions, and especially with these darling neph- ews of her hope and pride, extolled and poetised this beloved Calvinism. Yet all the time she doubted and denied it, and could not tell whether to be more glad or sorry to find that these boys were irremediably born to the adoption and fur- therance of the new ideas. She reminds me of Margaret Graeme, the enthusiast in Scott's Abbot, who lives to infuse into the young Roland her enthusiasm for the Roman Church; only that our Margaret doubted whilst she loved. Milton and Young were the poets endeared to the gen- eration she represented. Of Milton they were proud, but I fancy their religion has never found so faithful a picture as in the Night Thoughts. These combined traits in Aunt Mary's charac- ter gave the new direction to her hope, that these boys should be richly and holily qualified and bred to purify the old faith of what narrowness and error adhered to it, and import all its fire into the new age, — such a gift should her Pro- metheus bring to men. She hated the poor, low, thin, unprofitable, unpoetical Humanitarians as the devastators of the Church and robbers of the soul, and never wearies with piling on them new terms of slight and weariness. "Ah ! " she said, " what a poet would Byron have been, if he had been born and bred a Calvinist."