I have been back home since 21st of July. I had to come back to look after my farm. The heavy rains came near washing it away. Wife & Julian1 are still up in the mountains & are well. I & my man live alone in the old house, I am chief cook & bottle washer I keep well & busy, & am not having a very bad time loc.01172.002_large.jpg after all. In a couple of weeks my grapes will be all off (only 1/2 crop this year) & I shall take another holiday
Hope to see you in Sept, I trust you keep well as usual. I rec'd a letter from you at Hobart which I sent on to Buck ,2 with one from Eldridge,3 I read Williams4 pamphlet on Donnelley's Reviewers5 with melancholy enjoyment. It is very brilliant & effective, quite equal to his best work I think. If he had only left out some of his mud-Epithets, and if he had only not loc.01172.003_large.jpg claimed Montaignes Essays & Burtons Melancholy for Bacon! How such a claim as that does discredit the whole business. I suppose the evidence that Montaigne wrote his Essays is as good as that Bacon wrote the Essays that bear his name. Wm was fated to slop over in just this way, & to steel his reader against him. I have as yet seen no allusion to his book in the literary journals.
I wish you were here to enjoy this view, & this air, & also my grapes & peaches. Drop me a card.
With love John Burroughs loc.01172.004_large.jpgCorrespondent:
The naturalist John Burroughs
(1837–1921) met Whitman on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 1864. After
returning to Brooklyn in 1864, Whitman commenced what was to become a decades-long
correspondence with Burroughs. Burroughs was magnetically drawn to Whitman.
However, the correspondence between the two men is, as Burroughs acknowledged,
curiously "matter-of-fact." Burroughs would write several books involving or
devoted to Whitman's work: Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and
Person (1867), Birds and Poets (1877), Whitman, A Study (1896), and Accepting
the Universe (1924). For more on Whitman's relationship with Burroughs,
see Carmine Sarracino, "Burroughs, John [1837–1921] and Ursula [1836–1917]," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and
Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).