I found your letter here yesterday on my return from N. J. whither I had
gone on Saturday to visit Mr. Mabie. I was glad to hear from you. You
must write at least once a week. Get the rowing pants you refer to and
anything else you really need.... Do not try to live on less than $3.50
a week, Select the simplest and most nourishing food--meat only once a
day--no pie but fruit and puddings. The weather still keeps fine here
and dry; no rain yet and no heavy frosts.
Celery is most off; not more than $175 for this second crop. I am taking
out the Niagaras below the hill--nothing pays, but Delawares in the
grape line. I have had a good deal of company as usual. It cheers me
up and keeps me from the blue devils. Your mother is cleaning house and
groaning as usual. I can only keep my temper by flight to SS.
Hiram goes to Roxbury to-morrow for two months or more. I shall miss him
very much. He stands to me for father and mother and the old home. He
is part of all those things. When he is here my chronic homesickness is
alleviated.
I hope you will do some reading outside of your courses. Read and study
and soak yourself in some great author for his style. Try Hawthorne
or Emerson or Ruskin or Arnold. The most pregnant style of all is in
Shakespeare. Go into the laboratory some day and have your strength
tested. Binder says they can tell you what part is weakest. Watch your
health and keep regular hours. Write us as often as you can. How I wish
I was a Harvard student too.
With deepest affection, JOHN BURROUGHS.
Doubtless it is a wise provision of Nature that we find our mates in
our opposites. It is some natural law working for the good of the race,
something to maintain the balance and uniformity of mankind. Certainly
in many ways two people could not have been more unlike than Father and
Mother. She said he was as weak as water, and he said he could get tipsy
on a glass of water. He always said that Mother made the housekeeping an
end in itself, and she said, "You know how he is, he never takes care
of anything." How many evenings have I spent in the study when the lamp
would begin to burn low for lack of oil and Father would have to run and
fill lit and Mother would complain, "Just like you, come mussing around
after dark. Why didn't you fill it by daylight?" Ah, me, when it was
daylight Father did not need the lamp! It was Mother who filled
the lamps, trimmed them and polished the chimneys regularly in the
afternoon, while the sun was still up; but it was Father who trimmed and
filled his lamp and let it so shine that all the world might see! After
all, I am not sure but what Mother was just the wife for him; he had
a streak stubborn determination along with his ambition to write that
carried him through any trials of housecleaning or complaints about the
housework. A wife in full sympathy with his work, who coddled him and
made him think that everything he wrote was perfect, would never have
done at all, nor would a selfish, extravagant, or society-mad woman.
Father was temperamental, moody, irritable, easily influenced, easily
led, suffering at times with attacks of melancholy, with but one
fixed purpose, and that was to write. Mother was economical, thrifty,
material, suspicious of people, determined to bring their ship to a snug
harbour before old age, and she took the best of care of Father and held
him steady and no doubt by her strength of character and firmness gave
strength and firmness to his life. Their last years were most happy
together and filled with a sympathy and understanding that were
beautiful.
Sometimes Father would talk to himself, though but very seldom, and the
following two letters are almost as though he were talking to himself.
"I am far less forlorn when he is here," he says of himself and Uncle
Hiram. With all his self-analysis he did not see that being forlorn
was part of the price he must pay for the simple but intense joy he
experienced from the beauty life and Nature.
W. P. Tuesday, Jan. 25 {1897}.