Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/154

Rh LETTER XXI.

often, my valued friend, have I thought of you in this hemisphere, so distant from your country and your home; how often have I wished it was in my power to tell you something about this great, steadily-progressing portion of the world, upon which your eye also rests with the interest of an inquirer. Of all my friends in Copenhagen you were the only one who understood that longing which impelled me to the New World; and when I put the question to you, “Does it appear to you extraordinary and irrational that I desire to see America?” you replied, “No! It is a great and remarkable formation of that creative mind which cannot but be in the highest degree interesting to study more nearly!” Oh, yes; and so it is, and far more so than I had any idea of, and it is far richer than I can yet understand; and I have been more willing to wait before I wrote to you until this New World with all its various phenomena and their living unity had become more intelligible to myself. And for this purpose I might have waited yet much longer, because there is much here which I have not yet seen, which I have not yet well considered, and so to say, have not yet digested!

But I cannot, any longer, defer writing to you. The necessity to thank you compels me to write. I must—I will thank you for that great, unexpected pleasure which your spirit has afforded me here upon this foreign coast, many thousand miles distant from you. For here, on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, here where constellations ascend which we do not behold in our horizon, here, have I read the last-published portion of your work,