Here I am back from Pokeepsie in my little study to-night with a maple & hickory fire burning in the
open fire place & thinking of you. This little shanty is a real solitude, cut
off from the house & standing alone here on the brow of the hill. A wild rabbit
lives under the floor & the wild wood mice scamper over head. But few of my friends
have
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visited me here, but here I sit by my open fire & have long long thoughts of
them. How I make them come trooping in. How many times have I planted you there in
my big chair by the window, or here in front of the open fire & talked the old
talk with you. Alas, alas, that I should never see you here in the body as well as
in the spirit. I talk at O'Connors2 picture & think of him
too so often, the brilliant one whom I shall see no more.
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How sacred is memory! as we grow old how much he lives in the past, how trivial &
cheap seems the present. A tender & beautiful light fills my mind when I think
of those years in Washington when we were all there; a light I know that never was
on sea or land. How solemn & pathetic, as well as beautiful it must seem to you,
considering all you passed through there!
Chas. Eldridge3 sends me his wedding cards from California. I am
glad he is married & hope he is happy & prosperous. I must write to him.
Give him
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my love if you write him. I think I told you we were housekeeping in Pokeepsie for the winter. Mrs B4 & Julian5 are there now, but I am back on my farm & at work
for the past two days, & I find it much better than hanging about the miserable
little city. My winter has been flat stale & unprofitable. I mean to delve the
earth with vigor now to make up for it. I have seen nobody nor been anywhere. Should
probably have gone to W. had not wife been sick for 5 weeks with the gripe. I get a
glimpse of you now & then in the paper. I hope you are comfortable. Do drop me a
card if you can, or6 ask Trauble 7
to write me. Our winter has been a perpetual spring as I suppose yours has.
Correspondent:
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).