I should be grateful for another postcard. With all love,
I feel as if this beautiful spring morning here in England must send you greetings through me. Our sunny little mound of garden, which runs down toward the south, is fragrant with hyacinths and wall-flowers (beautiful, tawny, reddish, yellow fellows laden with rich perfume)--and at the bottom is a big old cherry tree--one mass of snowy blossom; in a neighbour's gay garden & beyond is a distant glimpse of some tall elms just putting on their first tender green: our little breakfast room where I always sit of a morning opens with glass doors into this garden. Herby is gone with the "Sunday Tramps," of whom he is a member, for a ten or fifteen-mile walk. Said tramps are some half dozen friends & neighbours, some of them very learned professors but genial good fellows withal, who agree to spend every other Sunday morning in taking one of their long walks together--& a very good time they have. Giddy is gone to hear a lecture; our bonnie Scotch girl is roasting the beef for dinner, singing the while in the kitchen; and pussy & I are sitting very companionable & meditative in the little room before described.
You cannot think, dear friend, what a pleasure it was to have a whole big letter from you (not that I despise Postcards--they are good stop-gaps, but not the real thing). Yes, I have & prize the article on the Hebrew Scriptures. How I wish you could make up your mind to spend your summer holiday with us.
I am still struggling along, striving to say something which, if I can say it to my mind, will be useful--will clear away a little of the rubbish that hides you from men's eyes. I hear the "Eminent Women Series" is having quite a large sale in America. Good-bye. Love to Mrs. Whitman. Greetings to your brother. Love from us all to you.
Lazy me, that have been thinking letters to you instead of writing them! We have Dr. Bucke's book at last; could not succeed in buying one at Türbner's--I believe they all sold directly--but he has sent us one. There are some things in it I prize very highly--namely, Helen Price's "Memoranda" and Thomas A. Gere's. These I like far better than any personal reminiscences of you I have ever read & I feel much drawn to the writers of them. Also your letter to Mrs. Price from the Hospitals, dear Friend. That makes one hand-in-hand with you--then & there--& gives one a glimpse of a very beautiful friendship. But why & why did Dr. Bucke set himself to counteract that beneficient law of nature's by which the dust tends to lay itself? And carefully gathering together again all the rubbish stupid or malevolent that has been written of you, toss it up in the air again to choke and blind or disgust as many as it may? What a curious piece of perversity to mistake this for candour & a judicial spirit.[39] Then again, how do I hate all that unmeaning, irrelevant clatter about what Rabelais or Shakespeare or the ancients & their times tolerated in the way of coarseness or plainness of speech. As if you wanted apologizing for or could be apologized for on that ground! If these poems are to be _tolerated_, I, for one, could not tolerate them. If they are not the highest lesson that has yet been taught in refinement & purity, if they do not banish all possibility of coarseness of thought & feeling, there would be nothing to be said for them. But they do: I am as sure of that as of my own existence. When will men begin to understand them?