I was glad to get your card & to hear that your
health was improved. I thought surely we should see you
as you returned from Canada in Sept. I had made great reckoning
of a long visit with you. We have all been well. I send you
a late picture of Julian, but it does not flatter
him. He talks everything
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I showed him your picture in Scribner, & asked him
who it was. "It is uncle Alt" he said. I think
that picture a good one, better than the photo from which
it was taken. Stedman was here in June & I let
him have two or three pictures to choose from. He said
he had had a big fight with Holland, but had conquered,
Holland would have neither piece nor picture. I am
satisfied with the essay. It is better than I expected
It is my philosophy always
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to accept the good & let the bad go to the dogs. The good
in the essay will help us; the bad no body will heed
It will bring you readers & friends & that is enough. The
article is candid & respectful & that is all we can ask.
This is a free country & Stedman can think & say what he
pleases, so long as he keeps within the bounds of legitimate
criticism. His argument is very weak in places, notably
on the procreation business. To
compare sex & what goes with it, to mud & slime that
nature covers up, is a fatal error. In fact it seems
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to me that the adverse criticisms in the paper are all
weak & ineffectual, & that he is truly at home only when
he is appreciative. How gingerly he does walk at times to be
sure, as if he feared the ground underfoot was mined. He
wrote a propitiatory letter to both me & O'Connor, before
the article appeared. He evidently had a wholesome
dread of O'Connor's war whoop & scalping knife. But
S. is a generous fellow, think how much better he is than
the set to which he belongs.
A young man from Cambridge Mass. (W.S. Kennedy)
writes me that he had a
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furious talk with Stedman about the article, & that he
himself has written a paper that will appear in the
Californian soon, which he
thinks does you fuller justice. I do not know him, but he says he expects
to go to Phila. soon to work
on the American, a news
paper started there. He says
his paper was accepted by the International, & then
returned on account of Mr Lodge, one of the editors.
Dr Bucke is a good fellow, but between me &
you, I am a little shy of him; I fear he lacks
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balance & proportion & that his book will not be
pitched in the right key. But I hope I do him
injustice.
It is a lovely day here & I am in a mood to bet that Garfield will carry every Northern State. When this reaches you you will know whether I would have lost or won. Write to me.
Love from us all John BurroughsCorrespondent:
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).