Just now received the "New York Commercial Advertiser",1 which was
for some days ago preceded by your kind letter.2
When returned to Washington, Clausen,3
who has taken a strong and sincere attachment to you, most certainly will be willing
to translate the whole article verbally to you. I should be glad, if after a
throughout
knowledge you still would be pleased with it. I have had very
great pleasure in introducing you to the Scandinavian public and most probably in no
European country you would find the questions
of the mind so fa loc.01906.006_large.jpgvourable
for the understanding of your poetry. Your books and portraits have in the last month
circulated amongst the ladies of my acquaintance, for especially it is the women that
are your friends. Bjornson4 writes of your article: "Walt Whitman
makes me a joy as no new man in many years and in one respect the greatest I have ever
had. Never had I thought in my days (during my
life-time) to get a spirit (or ghost, none of the expressions signify exactly our stand)
for my help—from America. But such and in no other shape of course it must come.
I thank him and thee from my full heart. I went amazed during some days and still the
great impressions are haunting me, as were I on the ocean looking on the driving
loc.01906.007_large.jpg
ice-bergs, that are inaugurating the spring."
I am very curious to know how you did like Clemens Petersen.5 Of course you did not like him. But if you have not found him broken by sickness and bad humors you must have felt, that here is a mind with perhaps the finest nerves for beauty, you ever met.
Will you do me a service? I should like to write an article on "American Fancy"
comparating
the grotesque humor that is scattered with no pretension in your newspapers with the humor
of Luther and Shakespeare. Our own papers are some times bringing such specimens of wit and
humour extracted
fra
the American papers. Could you not find for me about a dozen
loc.01906.008_large.jpg
jokes of this sort. That is all I want. For instance: I saw in "Harpers Weekly"6
one of your leading political men (whom as Cincinnatus7
by the plough bringing himself
an address, the same person making (in two figures) compliments to himself. Another instance:
A teacher explains to his pupils the meaning of a phenomenon. An apple
tree is no phenomena; a cow is none. But if you were seeing a cow in an apple-tree plucking
apples with the tail: that would be a phenomenon!
At present you will understand my meaning! Good by.
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.