Something
nearer "picturesqueness" and "the beautiful" came to please the sense
and to soothe the spirit at Oak Knoll. He did not often make record in
his letters of these things; but once he speaks charmingly of the
young girl in a red cloak, on horseback, with the dog at her side,
scampering over the lawn and brushing under the sloping branches of
the trees. The sunset of his life burned slowly down; and in spite of
illness and loss of power, he possessed his soul in patience. After a
period when he usually felt unable to write, he revived and wrote a
letter, in which he spoke as follows of a poem which had been sent for
his revision: "The poem is solemn and tender; it is as if a wind from
the Unseen World blew over it, in which the voice of sorrow is sweeter
than that of gladness--a holy fear mingled with holier hope. For
myself, my hope is always associated with dread, like the shining of a
star through mist. I feel, indeed, that Love is victorious, that there
is no dark it cannot light, no depth it cannot reach; but I imagine
that between the Seen and the Unseen there is a sort of neutral
ground, a land of shadow and mystery, of strange voices and
undistinguished forms. There are some, as Charles Lamb says, 'who
stalk into futurity on stilts,' without awe or self-distrust. But I
can only repeat the words of the poem before me."....
One of the last, perhaps the very last visit he made to his friends in
Boston was in the beautiful autumn weather.
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