I cannot tell you what joy your message has given me, both as proof of your improvement and your remembrance.1 I had feared that you were too ill to look at flowers or to identify, even in thoughts, those who think of you. With what joyful smiling I thank God that you are better, as I wept loc_sf.00067_large.jpg from my heart, at hearing of your extremity.
In Specimen Days2 I found that an ancestor of yours settled very early in Weymouth, this portion of which where I am now staying was my father's3 native place. I suppose from what I gather, that Whitman's Pond4 takes its name from a branch of your family-tree.
I am hoping some day of late summer or early autumn to see you at Camden. If you should then be able to say a few words yourself loc_sf.00068_large.jpg and hear me talk a little, without exhaustion, the visit would be a satisfaction.
During your illness I have often wished to tell you what I have said both in public and private:—what, in one sense, no other writer of any age, has, in his work, laid so far-reaching and sympathetic a grasp on the heart of the future as you have done. Hundreds of years hence yes, as long as books last, men will feel on reading the Sun-Down Poem5 and others loc_sf.00069_large.jpg of like nature, that your very existence touches theirs: that your vital presence is with them: and, with what comforting confirmation of immortality, will these words meet them:—
"This is no book, Who touches this, touches aGod give you his nearness, yes keep you with us in the body's book many a happy year!
Your affectionate friend, Charlotte Fiske Bates.Correspondent:
Charlotte Fiske Bates
(1838–1916) was a poet and editor. She published Risks
and Other Poems (1879), a collection of around 120 poems, and she
edited the Cambridge Book of Poetry and Song (1882). She
contributed to numerous magazines and worked as an instructor in English at the
Salisbury School for Young Ladies. She later married M. Adolphe Rogé. For
more information on Bates, see American Women: Fifteen Hundred
Biographies with over 1,400 Portraits, eds. Frances E. Willard and
Mary A. Livermore, (New York: Mast. Crowell and Kirkpatrick, 1897),
2: 617–618.