Being totally without news from you since January this year I began to fear, that you may be severely ill; else I presume, that you would have let me hear from you, at least by papers and little parcels as ordinary. I wrote to you in April a forthnight before my marriage. If the letter1 should not have reached you, I hereby loc.01916.006_large.jpg tell you, that at the 14th May I married my dear faithfull little wife,2 to whom I have been betrothed since some years. I am a living example of the old sentence, that riches are no ingredient of happiness.
If you have duely received my letter from April, you will know, that I have made vain and to myself very humiliating efforts to arrange a demonstration in favour of you among the ladies of Copenhagen.
loc.01916.007_large.jpgMy thoughts were with on the 4th. Your name most surely had the best claims to be memorable at "the Centennial"; most probably it has not been it at all.
I think to write something about George Washington. Should you know some good memoirs and relations of contemporaries about the Anglo-American work?
My dear wife is greeting you as a friend. Your kind earnest face is looking loc.01916.008_large.jpg on us in this moment from our wall.
Tomorrow I dare reach the age of forty years.
I should be glad if these lines may meet you in good health and good temper.
Yours —Rudolf SchmidtCorrespondent:
The Danish writer Peter Carl
Rudolf Schmidt (1836–1899) was the editor of the idealist journal For Idé og Virkelighed ("For Idea and Reality") and
had translated Whitman's Democratic Vistas into Danish in
1874.