University of Virginia Library

The sadness at the news of your letter, is so struggling for
the present with my resentment at your not coming to say adieu to
us, that I am doubting whether this will turn out a scolding or a
farewell. I can scarce see to write, for the tears that are in such
a silly hurry to forgive you—but how dreadfully unkind and hard-hearted
of you, to think of going without a word of good-bye! Is
it quite safe, do you think, to commit yourself to the retributive
ocean with a sin of such enormity on your shoulders?

But why do you go? I know little of your country, except
what I have learned from common opinion (and an occasional talk
with Mary Evenden and Mrs. Cleverly), but it seems to me that
you are much more in your proper place where you are. The statue
should not return to its quarry, my friend! If there were any
great question at stake—any call on your patriotism—it might be
different. Were the “stars and stripes” in danger, or were your
countrymen likely to starve or become paganized, without you,
there might be reason in flying home to turn your pencil into a
sword, or your palette into a loaf of bread or a Bible. America
is, still, pretty free, I hear however; and plenty to eat for everybody;
and no one has any occasion to continue a sinner, there,
except from pure choice, and in the exercise of his republican liberty!
So, why desert the temple where your genius has its fitting

pedestal, to go back to the cave where at best you will only serve
your country by seeming as patriotically unhewn as the stones
around you.

Observe, I mean no disparagement to America! The greatest
heroes of Europe began as babies (I have always understood);
and previous to their great achievements and glory, had worn the
unmentionable varieties of raiment rendered necessary by the
early stage of their progressive manners. History, of course, will
give your infant republic the usual century or two of cradle-rocking
and nurse-needing—passing over in silence, or without coming to
particulars, everything except the great infantine epochs, the
national weaning, rash, measles, and vaccination. And (seriously),
that there are great elements maturing under the rough surface—
great seed germinating among the weeds which America has had no
time as yet to eradicate—I fully believe. Pray consider me as
paying all honor to your transatlantic probabilities!

To return to yourself—it is not altogether the price you are to
receive for your pictures—not that, nor even the quantity of
renown with it—that is to make you happy, my dear Fane! For
an artist of your quality, most particularly, there must be discriminating
appreciation in the very atmosphere. You must be conscious
of appreciative eyes, always waiting for what you do. Call
it vanity, if you please, but inspiration faints for lack of praise
from judicious lips. And are you to have this (for your Europe-trained
pencil), in a country of no leisure? With nothing but
hurry and money-making around you, are you to feel sympathy, or
breathe freely?

Yet, you will go! Oh, I have moulded too often the quiet lines
of your very complying-looking mouth, not to know that there is
a will of steel within the velvet scabbard. You will go—and I

shall not see you first—for so you have made up your mind—but,
one word as to the more yielding heart you are to take with you,
after all! It will be more at home than your pencil in America—
indeed, the less play for the genius the more for the heart, is a
“Q. E. D.” in the mathematics of love.

Mary Evenden has been with me, as you know, for nearly two
years. I need not tell you how well I have studied her, in that
time. She was a new book of Nature to me, and I learned her by
heart. The wonder that she was!—a most lovely creature, with a
consciousness in the brain only! a woman whose heart beat to her
intellect alone! We have studied beauty together, as nothing but
sculpture can well teach it. But she herself being, as I say, an
intense study to me, I have seen the gradual deepening of her
character with her sense of beauty—and its warm sunshine (let
me tell you) has been tinting the leaves of a heart yet to flower.
The forgotten woman within that symmetry of sleeping Ariadne is
ready to awake. She must love soon—and with a new-blown
though belated freshness and fulness that will give a noon with
the dew of morning. Are you curious enough in your knowledge
of our sex to see the value of a phenomenon so rare?

And yet you came so near one of those loves of instinct, to
which genius, at least, should be the exception! Miss Paleford—
how beautiful she was!—how noble!—how romantically proud and
pure! Yet she forgot you—(with not much time either!)—and
for a man who was not much to be forgotten for! Would Mary
Evenden, with her soul first wrapped up in your genius, wake, at
last, to your lovableness as a man, and then forget you in a year!
You see what I wish to foreshadow for you. Mrs. Cleverly goes
soon home to America, and Mary with her. Watch this fair girl,

my dear Fane! and wake, for yourself, the love that, half-won
already, dreams of you unconsciously while it slumbers.

It is for me that your departure is the saddest. America is far
off, and it will be long before you return to Europe—if ever. I
shall not see you again in this world, or I shall see you when I am
old and changed. And it were not because you had ever positively
thought me to be beautiful, that this latter alternative were
painful, but because the memory beautifies with time and absence,
and we do not even meet with the eyes with which we parted—
expecting more, besides not having seen the reconciling gradations
with which there has become less. Spite of the most loyal attachment—the
most faithful constancy—you would not see me, after
ten years or twenty, without wondering (vexed with yourself, perhaps,
that you were compelled to do so) how you had ever paid
the homage to me which you still remembered—how the ideal
which you had so long cherished, and which had thus suddenly
vanished, never to return, had possibly found form and color!
For I have, thus far, contrived to charm your eye, I know very
well; and I should continue to charm it, were you not absent long.

Part, however, though, it appears, we must (and, if for more
than a year or two, I would rather it should be for ever), we have
something even more precious to preserve than the hope of meeting
again—the memory, my dear Paul, of a friendship irreproachable!
I began, thinking it would not be so, I confess. My life, as
you know, is all darkness within, as it is all sunshine without; and
the forbidden moonlight I had dreamed of was in your tenderness
of looks and ways. But as your mind gradually elevated the tone
of courtesy between us, overruling and correcting the first superficial
fascination of your manners and person, I found reverence

for woman among the graces that had pleased me. I was hedged
about, for you, with the sacred circle of purity—of the light of
which I had been (God forgive me!) ready to be forgetful. It
was necessary to be still pure, to be so thought of still. And this,
to me, was the renewal of a dream!

Yes, for I had begun life with romantic, but sinless friendship
for my vision of happiness—the sacrifice of name and hand for
court policy and fortune, but the belief that I was thus free of
control, and could choose where I would for a pure interchange of
heart. I went on trustingly. I tried many of your sex—less and
less joyfully or believingly, each one—and when we first met, you
and I, it was a long dream, well-nigh over. I was weary of making
friends, finding them unworthy, and rejecting them. Though surprised
into an irresistible preference and tenderness for you, I felt
no confidence in the nature of the return.

“Ah, with a deference like yours—tempting a woman to be only
what she wills to be—most of my sex would run little risk! I knew
your nature—its passion, and its adventurousness—and that the
world to you was new, and to be well tried. A word from my lips
would have broken the spell, I was, many a moment, tremblingly
aware. But there was ever between us that unseen wall of adamant—your
honoring deference, your blind belief in me—and,
with unblemished memories of each other, thank God! we are
parting now!

I have now confessed to you, I repeat, what an experiment this
has been to me—an experiment as to you, but no less as to myself.
Pursuits and tastes in sympathy—opportunities without restraint—
incidental circumstances in the situation of both facilitating an
intimacy—and (I may say now) yourself, for lovableness, quite

unsurpassed in my knowledge of men—it was an ordeal study of
your standard of woman, as it was of the strength to be true to it,
in my own soul. Through, oh, what temptation and passion I was
to represent, for you, that standard's unsullied brightness! There
were times (we may remember them if we are to meet no more!)
when the heart seemed too human for the test. I have driven into
the marble with my chisel, when at work, with you by my side,
many an impulse, that, with but one nerve unguarded, would have
flung the inspiration around your neck! I saw your own thought
—the rally against your own share of the moment's trial, in the
curve of the trembling lip, that still told of your honor for woman.
My triumph was in it! I was strong again. And I know, now,
thank God! that there may be friendship sweet and pure, even
though the wild love that might embitter it has stood near and
ready.

But the curtain has dropped upon our drama, at last. We retire,
to hat and shawl ourselves like other people, and take our common
way upon the sidewalk, with the crowd. Though our audience of
hopes and fears is dispersed, however—the lights out, and the
orchestra vocal no longer—let us keep the interest of the play
under our own shut eyelids, for a dream and a memory! You will be
to me, always, the unsuspected hero of my most trying life-drama.
Let me be something, to you, longer remembered than the foot-lamps
that are to burn for us no more! Let me be to you, as you
will certainly be to me, a romance of the past.

For news—I have a statue of Egeria in model, that I had thought
you were to see. Its inspiration will be wanting, I fear, now that
you are to be gone when it is finished. I worked so much better
with the thought of your sweet earnest eyes over my shoulder!

But, farewell, my dear Paul! I would write these tears into my
parting words, if I knew how. My heart follows you, believe me!
May God bless you!