My daughter has recovered and returned to Los Angeles.
Please thank Miss * * * for the beautiful photographs--I mean for being so beautiful as to "take" them, for doubtless I owe their possession to you.
I wrote Doyle about you and he cordially praised your work as incomparably superior to his own and asked that you visit him. He's a lovable fellow and you'd not regret going to Santa Cruz and boozing with him.
Thank you for the picture of Grizzly and the cub of him.
Sincerely yours, with best regards to the pretty ever-so-much-better half of you,
[The Olympia, Washington, D. C., March 15, 1902.]
Where are you going to stop?--I mean at what stage of development? I presume you have not a "whole lot" of poems really writ, and have not been feeding them to me, the least good first, and not in the order of their production. So it must be that you are advancing at a stupendous rate. This last[5] beats any and all that went before--or I am bewitched and befuddled. I dare not trust myself to say what I think of it. In manner it is great, but the greatness of the theme!--that is beyond anything.
It is a new field, the broadest yet discovered. To paraphrase Coleridge,
You are the first that ever burst Into that silent [unknown] sea--
a silent sea _because_ no one else has burst into it in full song. True, there have been short incursions across the "border," but only by way of episode. The tremendous phenomena of Astronomy have never had adequate poetic treatment, their meaning adequate expression. You must make it your own domain. You shall be the poet of the skies, the prophet of the suns. Don't fiddle-faddle with such infinitesimal and tiresome trivialities as (for example) the immemorial squabbles of "rich" and "poor" on this "mote in the sun-beam." (Both "classes," when you come to that, are about equally disgusting and unworthy--there's not a pin's moral difference between them.) Let them cheat and pick pockets and cut throats to the satisfaction of their base instincts, but do thou regard them not. Moreover, by that great law of change which you so clearly discern, there can be no permanent composition of their nasty strife. "Settle" it how they will--another beat of the pendulum and all is as before; and ere another, Man will again be savage, sitting on his naked haunches and gnawing raw bones.