I was very glad to get your card,2 but sorry to hear you are under the weather. I trust the spring which is now near will set you up again. I keep pretty well, as do wife3 & Julian.4 We have been here all winter. I have been busy with my pen, turning out loc.01178.004_large.jpg pot-boilers, nothing else I shall keep an eye out for your N.A. article.5 I see it in the reading rooms in Po'keepsie. I have been sending some things to the Independent & to the Christian Union at the request of the editors. It is surprising how much heresy these papers can stand. I think they secretly like it. I see nothing in the literary horizon, no coming poet or philosopher My opinion is that life is loc.01178.005_large.jpg becoming pretty thin. Our civilization runs all to head & crudeness, no character, no heart in anything now adays Most of the magazine poetry is utterly barren. It is like poor mortar—too much sand for the lime.
I am in a hurry to see spring. I want to taste the earth again. The ground here has been deeply covered since early in Dec. Rain & fog to-day.
With much love John Burroughs loc.01178.006_large.jpg loc.01178.001_large.jpg see notes | Feb. 18, '91 loc.01178.002_zs.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).