TO ——.

’Fishkill, 25 Nov., 1844.—­You would have been happy as I have been in the company of the mountains.  They are companions both bold and calm.  They exhilarate and they satisfy.  To live, too, on the bank of the great river so long, has been the realization of a dream.  Though I have been reading and thinking, yet this has been my life.’

‘After they were all in bed,’ she writes from the “Manse,” in Concord,

’I went out, and walked till near twelve.  The moonlight filled my heart.  These embowering elms stood in solemn black, the praying monastics of this holy night; full of grace, in every sense; their life so full, so hushed; not a leaf stirred.’

* * * * *

’You say that nature does not keep her promise; but, surely, she satisfies us now and then for the time.  The drama is always in progress, but here and there she speaks out a sentence, full in its cadence, complete in its structure; it occupies, for the time, the sense and the thought.  We have no care for promises.  Will you say it is the superficialness of my life, that I have known hours with men and nature, that bore their proper fruit,—­all present ate and were filled, and there were taken up of the fragments twelve baskets full?  Is it because of the superficial mind, or the believing heart, that I can say this?’

* * * * *

    ’Only through emotion do we know thee, Nature!  We lean upon
    thy breast, and feel its pulses vibrate to our own.  That is
    knowledge, for that is love.  Thought will never reach it.’

ART.

There are persons to whom a gallery is everywhere a home.  In this country, the antique is known only by plaster casts, and by drawings.  The BOSTON ATHENAEUM,—­on whose sunny roof and beautiful chambers may the benediction of centuries of students rest with mine!—­added to its library, in 1823, a small, but excellent museum of the antique sculpture, in plaster;—­the selection being dictated, it is said, by no less an adviser than Canova.  The Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venuses, Diana, the head of the Phidian Jove, Bacchus, Antinous, the Torso Hercules, the Discobolus, the Gladiator Borghese, the Apollino,—­all these, and more, the sumptuous gift of Augustus Thorndike.  It is much that one man should have power to confer on so many, who never saw him, a benefit so pure and enduring.

To these were soon added a heroic line of antique busts, and, at last, by Horatio Greenough, the Night and Day of Michel Angelo.  Here was old Greece and old Italy brought bodily to New England, and a verification given to all our dreams and readings.  It was easy to collect, from the drawing-rooms of the city, a respectable picture-gallery for a summer exhibition.  This was also done, and a new pleasure was invented for the studious, and a new home for the solitary.  The Brimmer donation, in 1838, added a costly series of engravings, chiefly of the French and Italian museums, and the drawings of Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and other masters.  The separate chamber in which these collections were at first contained, made a favorite place of meeting for Margaret and a few of her friends, who were lovers of these works.