All To Be Worn Remember me to all Friends with you as if nam'd. I am call'd upon & must obey. I have sent you by Doc Church in a paper Box Directed to you, the following things, for your acceptance, & which I do insist you wear, if you do not, I shall think the Donor is the objection: 2 pair white silk stockings which I p. Black Calem Co. J Shall be sent when done. I very pretty light Hat. I neat Airy Summer Cloak. (I ask Docr. Church) 2 caps I Fann I wish these may please you, I shall be gratified if they do, pray write me, I will attend to all your Commands. Adieu my Dr Girl, and believe me to be with great Esteem & Affection. Yours without Reserve, Remember me to Katy Brackett. JOHN HANCOCK John Adams greets his wife, and desires her presence here and hereafter PHILADELPHIA, I January, 1795 Y DEAREST FRIEND, MY I wish you a happy new year, and a repetition of happy new years as long as time shall endure; not here below, because I shall want you in another country, better than this. "The shadow and the light" (Two letters from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody) EAREST, DEA that I SALEM, Nov. 27, 1840 Whenever I return to Salem, I feel how dark my life would be without the light shed you upon it, how cold, without the warmth of your love. Sitting in this chamber, where my youth wasted itself in vain, I can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as if the better part of me had been born since then. I had walked those many years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with only a dreamy notion that there was any light in the universe, if you had not kissed my eyelids and given me to see. You, dearest, have always been positively happy. Not so I, I have only not been miserable. Then which of us has gained the most? I, assuredly! When a beam of heavenly sunshine incorporates itself with a dark cloud, is not the cloud benefited more than the sunshine? Nothing at all has happened to me since I left you. It puzzles me to conceive how you meet with so many more events than I. You will have a volume to tell me, when we meet, and you will pour your beloved voice into my ears in a long stream; at length you will pause and say, "But what has your life been?" and then will stupid I look back upon what I call my life, for three or four days past, and behold, a blank ! I am enduring my banishment here as best I may; methinks, all enormous sinners should be sent on pilgrimage to Salem, and compelled to spend a length of time there, proportioned to the enormity of their offences. Such punishment would be suited to crimes that do not quite deserve Sinless Eve hanging, yet are too aggravated for State's Prison. Oh, naughty I! If it be a punishment, I deserve to suffer a lifelong infliction of it, were it only for slandering my native town so vilely. But any place is strange and lonesome to me where you are not; and where you are, any place will be home. I ought to love Salem better than I do; for the people have always had a pretty generous faith in me, ever since they knew me at all. I fear I must be undeserving of their praise, else I should never get it. What an ungrateful blockhead am I! . . . God bless you, you sinless Eve! . . . I II SALEM, Sept. 3, 1841 HAVE been out only once, in the daytime, since my arrival. How immediately and irrecoverably (if you did not keep me out of the abyss) should I relapse into the way of life in which I spent my youth! If it were not for you, this present world would see no more of me forever. The sunshine would never fall on me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a while people might discern my figure gliding stealthily through the dim evening, — that would be all. I should only be a shadow of the night; it is you that give me reality, and make all things real for me. If, in the interval since I quitted this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and you were the only possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have come back hither ere now, with a feeling that all was a dream and a mockery. Do you rejoice that you have saved me from such a fate? Yes; it is a miracle worthy even of you, to have converted a life of shadows into the deepest truth by your magic touch. . . Charles Loring Brace thinks of his wife [STRATFORD-ON-AVON] Sunday, June 25th. [1865] DEAREST WIFE: I was thinking to-day in the old church of you- of your wonderful unselfishness and richness of love and spirituality of nature, and how you would be to me when we had entered the unseen— as if you would be nearer God than I, and I would see you in a purer light and much higher than here, and whether you would be my helper there, and of how sweet and good you are here, and how elevated sometimes you seem when near to God, and what a treasure your love was, and all such pleasant thoughts. Yesterday we were in an old chapel of the Warwicks in Warwick, and there were two effigies side by side, hand and hand, of some old Warwick and his wife. Together they had fought the great battle, and then were laid to rest together, and four hundred years had surged over the silent tomb, not much effacing it. How much I miss you! I am better with you, less disturbed. May God bless and keep you ever! . . . As does also William H. Prescott ANTWERP, July 23, 1850 DEAR EAR SUSAN, I never see anything beautiful in nature or art, or hear heart-stirring music in the churches, the only place where music does stir my heart, without thinking of you, and wishing you could be by my side, if only for a moment. Your affectionate husband, WM. H. PRESCOTT A Musical Love Letter "Music is Love in search of a word" (Sidney Lanier to his wife) NEW YORK, September 28, 1871 I AM just come from St. Paul's Church, where I went at eleven this morning, by invitation of Mr. John Cornell, to hear some music composed by him for the organ and trombone; not the old slide-in-and-out trombone, but a sort of baritone cornet-à-pistons, of rare, mellow, yet majestic tone. This was played by one of Theo. Thomas' orchestra. The pieces were a funeral march, a religious air, and a cornet-piece. Hadst thou been with me to hear these horn-tones, so pure, so noble, so full of confident repose, striking forth the melody in midst of the thousandfold modulations (in which Cornell always runs riot), like a calm manhood asserting itself through a multitude of distractions and discouragements and miseries of life, hadst thou been there, then how fair and how happy had been my day. For I mostly have great pain when music, or any beauty, comes past my way, and thou art not by. Perhaps this is because music takes us out of prison, and I do not like to leave prison unless thou goest also. For in the smile of love my life cometh to life, even as a flower under water gleameth only when the sun-ray striketh down thereon. . . An itinerant courtship decorously pursued (From Eliza Southgate) SALEM, September 9, 1802 Y DEAREST MOTHER: MY Once more I am safe in Salem and my first thoughts turn toward home. . . . I have received more attentions |