CORRESPONDENCE. 31 



Boston, 25 Brimmer St., Dec. 14, 1880. 

 My Dear Sir : 



I reluctantly find myself unable to attend the 

 meeting of the Essex Institute this evening, which is to be de- 

 voted to a commemoration of Jones Very. There would have 

 been a special pleasure in sharing in the tribute of respect and honor 

 which all of us his fellow-townspeople owe to the memory of one 

 who has signally illustrated the honorable name of old Salem by his 

 pure fame, and whose character is so perfectly mirrored in his ex- 

 quisite verse. My own earliest recollections of Mr. Very go back to 

 the years closely following the publication of that early volume of 

 "Poems and Essays" which still stands alone among the choice 

 flowers of American genius; and the poet then seemed, as he always 

 continued, to be one from another world, a pure spirit, veiled from 

 intimate human converse by his intent communion with higher 

 thoughts, yet descending therefrom to put aside the veil of shy re- 

 serve for some word or look, which revealed the inner nature of the 

 man himself. There was always the same courtesy of a soul rarely 

 gentle and refined, whether as I first remember him, he was showing 

 some kindness to a child, or in later years in his greeting of a younger 

 brother in the profession which he clearly loved; and one always felt 

 that in seeing him we entertained an angel, hardly unawares. 



His fame as a poet is secure; the highest point of spiritual feeling 

 and expression has been reached in his most perfect poems ; and he 

 will not be forgotten among those singers of Christian mysticism, 

 who form a class apart and go down through the generations with 

 singing-robes of white and with the light of Divine Contemplation in 

 their eyes. 



Such a genius as his and that of Hawthorne would seem to show 

 that out of the Puritan ancestry and the conditions of our old town, 

 the rarest and most delicate blooms of sentiment and spiritual life 

 may spring. I have sometimes thought in meeting Mr. Very in search 

 of the earliest flowers of our rocky pastures, that his own spirit and 

 writings might fitly be compared to the blossoms he was seeking, 

 springing up like the columbine or the houstonia, which nestle close 

 to our gray ledges, with an ethereal beauty more vivid by contrast, 

 and seeming as much akin to the serene sky which bends over them 

 as they do to the earth out of which they spring. 



I should have been particularly interested in listening to Mr. 

 Andrews' study of Mr. Very's genius, and am confident that that and 

 the whole commemoration will worthily manifest the true and deep 

 feeling in which the man and his poetry are enshrined, in all who 

 know them. What President Walker said of another rarely refined 



