Though I know that you will respect the strong feeling which has impelled me to print this booklet, I send it to you with some reluctance and shamefacedness, because I know that it deals with a subject on which I am not qualified to write. I am constantly impelled to write upon it because of the deploreable neglect of it by so many who could so easily be better qualified and the horrible barbarous waste which goes on because of this neglect. I see now a new folly arising here about Boston which cannot fail to be demoralizing and I can hardly refrain from lifting up my voice about it, but I none the less feel how great a risk I should run in doing so of blundering in argument, however right I know that I am in practice. I am always working away at it just [562] to the last point of my strength—many printed reports, two encyclopedia articles and no end of private urgings & remonstrances. I have written twenty letters about it in the last week besides a long horticultural magazine article and what I have been doing about Niagara & my regular business in Boston & Washington—An unusual batch rather because I am stirred up by what I have heard of the destruction going on in Central Park, complacently called improvement. I have no reason to suppose that half a dozen men have yet read anything I have written, and as far as argument goes it all tells for nothing. A doubt of my own sanity in keeping on at it often comes upon me but I can’t help it. Now & then I do meet a man who says: “I know what you think and I think —” with me or otherwise as may happen but always with the assumption that I have original and peculiar ideas and am not what I only want to be, the expounder, vindicator and applyer of views which are—not views at all but well established science.

But how can I feel any confidence in myself in this duty, when I find myself so much alone and all I say and think on my topic treated by the best of men—as this book illustrates? I can’t & while I work like a horse at it, I take every step shrinkingly & look back upon it when taken half repentantly, as an act of effrontry.

This is all preface to saying that I do wish you would look over page 22 to page 32 so much of this little thing—not little to me—and tell me surgically if I have been going out of my depth—off solid bottom or if I have been preaching essentially false doctrine? But if I have been, also I want to ask you, if you can advise me nothing to read, going beyond what you know I must have read, whereby I can better ground myself?

Where shall I find the definition of Art which I want to correct me—a definition which will include landscape modification and accentuation? Is it absurdly incomplete to say as I do that the prime object of a work of art is to affect the emotions? Of course I don’t ask you to answer this but can you tell where I will find the instruction I want, without learning a new language or building another story to my education? Of course I can’t begin at 60 a University Course but it does seem that I should find solider ground than I feel that I do in the books. You see I want to distinguish the motive & purpose of what I have to call gardening from that of the florist & confectioner, on the one side, & from that of the engineer & brick layer on the other. I think it ought to be done better than it has been and that the public indifference to it - no, not the public indifference but the indifference of the proper leaders of the public in matters of Art—ought to be exploded.

We are again under the tension of a great domestic anxiety. A telegram saying that our boy Owen is “very low.” He is two days journey from a telegraph office. We have telegraphed for a doctor to be sent & our John [563] started by the first train to go to him—will have reached Chicago tomorrow, but without an hour’s rest it will take him a week to get to him & we cannot look for another message under ten days.