Boston, April 29th, 1860.
It was so pleasant, my dear Lothrop, to get a letter from
you. I have kept it a week or two so as to have something more to tell you, yet
I fear it will not be much after all. Yesterday, the Saturday Club had its
meeting, I carried your letter in my pocket, not to show to anybody, but to read
a sentence or two which I knew would interest them all, and especially your
kind message of remembrance. All were delighted with it; and on my proposing
your health, all of them would rise and drink it standing. We then, at my
suggestion, gave three times three in silence, on account of the public
character of the place and the gravity and position of the high assisting
personages. Be assured that you were heartily and affectionately, not to say
proudly, remembered. Your honours are our honours, and when we heard you had
received that superior tribute, which stamps any foreigner's reputation as
planetary, at the hands of the French Institute, it was as if each of us had
had a ribbon tied in his own button-hole. I hoped very much to pick up
something which might interest you from some of our friends which know more of
the political movements of the season than I do.
I vote with the Republican party. I cannot hesitate between
them and the Democrats. Yet what the Republican party is now doing it would
puzzle me to tell you. What its prospects are for the next campaign, perhaps I
ought to know, but I do not. I am struck with the fact that we talk very little
politics of late at the Club. Whether or not it is disgust at the aspect of the
present political parties, and especially at the people who represent them, I
cannot say; but the subject seems to have been dropped for the present in such
society as I move about in, and especially in the Club. We discuss first
principles, enunciate axioms, tell stories, make our harmless jokes, reveal
ourselves in confidence to our next neighbours after the Chateau Margaux has
reached the emotional centre, and enjoy ourselves mightily But we do not talk
politics. After the President's campaign is begun, it is very likely that we
may, and then I shall have something more to say about Mr. Seward and his
prospects than I have now.
How much pleasure your praise gave me I hardly dare to say.
I know that I can trust it. You would not bestow it unless you liked what I had
done, but you would like the same thing better if I had done it than coming
from a stranger. That is right and kind and good, and notwithstanding you said
so many things to please me, there were none too many. I love praise too well
always, and I have had a surfeit of some forms of it. Yours is of the kind that
is treasured and remembered. I have written in every number of the Atlantic since
it began. I should think myself industrious if I did not remember the labours
you have gone through, which simply astonish me. What delight it would be to
have you back here in our own circle of men — I think we can truly say whom you
would find worthy companions: Agassiz, organising the science of a hemisphere;
Longfellow, writing its songs; Lowell, than whom a larger, fresher, nobler, and
more fertile nature does not move among us; Emerson, with his strange, familiar
remoteness of character, I do not know what else to call it; and Hawthorne and Dana,
when he gets back from his voyage round the world, and all the rest of us
thrown in gratis. But you must not stay too long; if all the blood gets out of
your veins, I am afraid you will transfer your allegiance.
I am just going to Cambridge to an “exhibition,” in which
Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks a translation (expectatur versio in lingua
vernacula), the Apology for Socrates; Master O. W. Holmes, Jun., being now
a tall youth, almost six feet high, and lover of Plato and of Art.
I ought to have said something about your grand new book,
but I have not had time to do more than read some passages from it. My
impression is that of all your critics, that you have given us one of the noble
historical pictures of our time, instinct with life and glowing with the light
of a poetical imagination, which by itself would give pleasure, but which, shed
over a great epoch in the records of our race, is at once brilliant and
permanent. In the midst of so much that renders the very existence of a
civilisation amongst us problematical to the scholars of the Old World, it is a
great pleasure to have the cause of letters so represented by one of our own
countrymen, citizens, friends. Your honours belong to us all, but most to those
who have watched your upward course from the first, who have shared many of the
influences which have formed your own mind and character, and who now regard
you as the plenipotentiary of the true Republic accredited to every Court in
Europe.
SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Volume 1,
p. 340-2
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