I was delighted with your delight, as expressed in your beautiful letter upon the Hebrew ceremonial. Hebrew literature has been my hobby for some time past: I have Hershon's "Talmudic Miscellany;" Stauben's "Scènes de la Vie Juive" (full of delicious traditions); Kompert's "Studies of Jewish Life," which you have no doubt read in the original German; and Schwab's French translation of the beginning of the Jerusalem Talmud (together with the Babylonian Berachoth), 5 vols. I confess the latter is, as a whole, unreadable; but the legends in it are without parallel in weirdness and singularity. Such miscellaneous reading of this sort as I have done has given new luminosity to my ideas of the antique Hebrew life; and enabled me to review them without the gloom of Biblical tradition,--especially the nightmarish darkness of the Pentateuch. I like to associate Hebrew ceremonies rather with the wonderful Talmudic days of the Babylonian rabbonim than with the savage primitiveness of the years of Exodus and Deuteronomy. There are some queer things about music in the Talmud; but they are sometimes extravagant as that story about the conch-shell blown at the birth of Buddha--"where of the sound _rolled on unceasingly for four years_!" The swarthy fishermen of our swampy lakes do blow conch-shells by way of marine signalling; and whenever I hear them I think of that monstrous conch-shell told of in the Nidānakathā.
As I write it seemeth to me that I behold, overshadowing the paper, the most Dantesque silhouette of one who walked with me the streets of the far-off Western city by night, and with whom I exchanged ghostly fancies and phantom hopes. Now in New York! How the old night-forces have been scattered! But is it not pleasant to observe that the members of the broken circle have been mounting higher and higher toward the supreme hope? Perhaps we may all meet some day in the East; whence as legendary word hath it--"lightning ever cometh." Remember me very warmly to my old comrade Tunison.
But I think it more probable I shall see you here than that you shall see me there. New York has become something appalling to my imagination--perhaps because I have been drawing my ideas of it from caricatures: something cyclopean without solemnity, something pandemoniac without grotesqueness,--preadamite bridges,--superimpositions of iron roads higher than the aqueducts of the Romans,--gloom, vapour, roarings and lightnings. When I think of it, I feel more content with my sunlit marshes,--and the frogs,--and the gnats,--and the invisible plagues lurking in visible vapours,--and the ancientness,--and the vast languor of the land. Even our vegetation here, funereally drooping in the great heat, seems to dream of dead things--to mourn for the death of Pan. After a few years here the spirit of the land has entered into you,--and the languor of the place embraces you with an embrace that may not be broken;--thoughts come slowly, ideas take form sluggishly as shapes of smoke in heavy air; and a great horror of work and activity and noise and bustle roots itself within your soul,--I mean brain. Soul = Cerebral Activity = Soul.