“Sylvain is only a suggested picture; you would not know the figure by which it is drawn, if you could see it. Have no desire, I pray thee, ever to realize these ideals. The name I took from Fanny Ellsler’s partner. In the bridal dance, after movements of a bird-like joy, and overflowing sweetness, when he comes forward, she retires with a proud, timid grace, so beautiful; it said, ‘See what a man I am happy enough to love.’ And then came forward this well-taught dancer, springing and pirouetting without one tint of genius, one ray of soul; it was very painful and symbolized much, far more than I have expressed with Sylvain and Mariana.”[1]
“Summer on the Lakes” seems to have yielded nothing to the author but copies to give away. It is a pathetic compensation for an unsuccessful book, that the writer at least has an abundant supply of it; and when we consider that Thoreau, eight years later, was carrying up to his garret, as unsold, seven hundred out of the thousand copies of his “Week on the Concord and Merrimack,” we may well feel that Miss Fuller’s little book of travels was successful, if it cost her nothing. At any rate she distributed it with some freedom, writing to Mr. Emerson, May 22, 1845, “Thirteen copies of ‘Summer on the Lakes’ were sent to your address in Boston; five for you, four for Caroline [Sturgis], four to be sent to Sarah Clarke, through James, if you will take the trouble.” There must have been, at some time, a
- ↑ MS. (W. H. C.)
