Monday, May 11, 2015

Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, Monday Evening, September 21, 1863

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. . . .
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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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