Macready has gone and I did not see him; he played nothing of Shakespeare.
Shall I direct to Brook Farm or Boston? More anon. Yrs ever,

G.W.C.


VII

NEW YORK, _Friday, Dec. 22, '43._

A merry Christmas to you, and to all Christian souls. How brave goes the
year to its setting! These calm, cold days impress me like the fine
characters of history and the elder time, inspired with a generous wisdom,
and prophesying what shall be the newest and best word of hope in our day.
The season embraces and surpasses those old men, even the finest. To-day,
as I walked, the magnificence of the closing year, so steadfast and sure,
sparing no sunshine nor rain, passing quietly out to be renewed nevermore,
quite reproved the solemn martyrdoms of men, upon which we hang our hopes.

Nature is great that she does not suffer us to define her influence upon
ourselves. Like all greatness, she suggests to us beauty and grace, not as
attributes of hers, but fair buds and flowers of the soul. Therefore, in
the full presence of nature, the grandest deeds seem harmonious and the
wisdom of Plato, and actions whose greatness is the centre, not the utmost
compression, of our life are harmonious and symmetrical. To the Greeks and
Jews the Gospel is blindness and a stumbling-block, but joy and peace to
the elect.

Nothing is so stern and lofty a cordial to me as this severe
inscrutability of nature. I must obey or die, and dying is no help to me,