Shady Hill
Monday evening, 21 September, 1863.
. . . I was glad to
see Olmsted,1 but I wish I had known him before he was just going to
leave this quarter of the world. It is hard that he should have to give up the
civilization that he likes for the barbarism that he does not like. All the
lines of his face imply refinement and sensibility to such a degree that it is
not till one has looked through them to what is underneath, that the force of
his will and the reserved power of his character become evident. It is a pity
that we cannot keep him here. Our society needs organizers almost as much as
the Mariposa settlers, miners and squatters need one. However, thanks to the
war, the Atlantic and the Pacific States have been bound far closer together
than of old, and are every day drawn nearer and nearer. — A ring at the door
bell is the occasion of that [ink spot], — and I hear William James's pleasant
and manly voice in the other room from which the sound of my Mother's voice has
been coming to me as she read aloud the Consular Experiences of the most
original of consuls. To-night I am half annoyed, half amused at Hawthorne. He
is nearly as bad as Carlyle. His dedication to F. Pierce, — the correspondent
of Jefferson Davis, the flatterer of traitors, and the emissary of treason, —
reads like the bitterest of satires; and in that I have my satisfaction. The
public will laugh. “Praise undeserved” (say the copybooks) “is satire in disguise,”
— and what a blow his friend has dealt to the weakest of ex-Presidents. . . .
_______________
1 Frederick Law Olmsted, whose books on the
South had already interested Norton deeply. Their immediate sympathy led to
enduring bonds of friendship and cooperation in work for public good.
SOURCE: Sara Norton
and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton,
Volume 1, p. 264-5
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