Your friendly note of the 26th2
has just come to hand, and yesterday came your noble paper on Personalism3—for
both of which attentions you have my thanks. I shall look for your views of the aboriginal literature, fully
believing that your thought
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is on the track of Empire and sees the route to Personal Power for the nation, as for the individual.
And never a people needed more the Cosmic thought to inspire and guide its action.
Yet think of the progress out of the twilight since your star dawned upon our hazy horizon!
Some friend has sent me from time to time appreciative notices of
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yourself, knowing by some supreme instinct my hope in whatsoever promises expansion for our
hemisphere. You, too, kindly inform me of particulars about your personal position and prosperity.
I am interested in all you choose to communicate.
Emerson4 is just home from your city of steeples and
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tracks, but I have not spoken with him yet. I know how fully he shares in my appreciation of yourself and works.
Please accept the little sketch5 accompanying this, and oblige
Yours, A. Bronson Alcott. Walt Whitman.Correspondent:
Amos Bronson Alcott
(1799–1888) was an American educator and abolitionist and the father of
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), whose 1868 novel Little
Women (loosely based on the Alcott home) secured the financial
stability that her father had been unable to achieve through his own work as a
teacher and transcendentalist. See Odell Shepard, ed., The
Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938),
286–90.