I found your letter of 12th ult when I came back here from the West. I shd have replied to it sooner but I knew that you had left Lake George and had no clue to your address. John and I have both been away since in different directions on business & we only came together this morning. If I am well eno’, I start again tomorrow morning for North Carolina and from there may have to go on to Chicago, so I may not be able to see you before you are matriculated. Hence I write though I cannot say nearly what I wd like to say. I enclose the paper containing Profr Shaler’s remarks to which I refd (accidentally omitted, I suppose, from my former note).

Your letter pleases me very much as showing that you have sought sound advice and have used personal judgment and been cautious & considerate. I am not disposed to differ with your conclusions. My only question is whether you are not undertaking too much in the regular college lines to allow you to give the time that you should to others. I want you to systematically give a good deal of time, thought and management to other sorts of education than the college provides. I cannot fully say what and why but can perhaps show some of the stems of my wishes in these respects. My life is pretty nearly run out. At the best I shall be disabled from all business long before you are to enter upon it. I wish that it were otherwise so far that your professional education could proceed in association with my actual work as John’s has, and Eliot’s, Codman’s and Coolidge’s. As that cannot be reckoned upon, it is a consolation that you must have acquired a good deal of knowledge of my principles and methods unconsciously, and it is to be hoped that you will henceforth be much more than you have been in an attitude of interest and intelligence to take in more. I want you to keep up a certain regular methodical reading and thinking on the subject, I will say at least five hours a week. I reckon that in four years you would thus have read everything not ephemeral in English, French & German & would be the best read man as to this Art in the world. I want you at the same time to keep such knowledge of what is going in our office that you will gradually be led to an understanding of practice in relation to theory and of theory in relation to practice. What I want now is that you adopt this wish of mine and let it enter into your plans and expectations and habits, [203]in the same way that the cut and dried requirements of the college course will enter into them.

One reason of this wish has this foundation. I have, with an amount of forethought, providence, sacrifice and hardship of which you can hardly have an idea, been making a public reputation and celebrity of a certain kind, which at last has a large money-value. We have, as a consequence more business than we can manage. The business increases faster than we can enlarge our organization and adjust our methods to meet it. But it is plain that this depends as yet almost entirely on me. Clients insist upon having my personal examination and personally conferring with me. I do not mean that the process of shifting the business more & more to Jno & Harry is not going on successfully. After a work has started I am surprised to find how they come gradually to be accepted, and indeed I am losing the run of a good deal of business and occasionally small commissions are from the start carried on independently of me. Yet all of our large and profitable commissions come to us from those who know no one but me and who are prepared at the outset to take advice from no one else. Hence whenever I drop out the business will fall off greatly—the more so that there are so many young men lately starting in it. Of the income from the present business more than half comes to me, and with my share of it, we are able to live as we do & are now putting a thousand dollars or more to windward every year. But a large share of my earnings laid up otherwise than in various indirect ways, making the business, have been lost in fitting out Owen and the beef business, and so, when my name no longer attracts clients, your mother, Marion and you will be in comparatively very straitened circumstances. You & Jno will have to support them and John is entitled to marry and have others to support. That’s a sufficient indication of the business side of the matter. You ought to have it in mind, however, that we are getting much higher prices and larger works and works that relatively to what they yield us cost less, than any others of our profession are getting. I do not suppose any one, or any three working together, earn a quarter as much as we do in L.A. I say this with reference to what you have to expect as to your own future earning capacity. The measure of this capacity will depend on the capital you can acquire in no inconsiderable degree in five hours reading a week during the next four years and the insight you obtain of the manner in which business is conducted in our office.

Another foundation of my wish is the modest pride and satisfaction I have in what, against great difficulties, I have accomplished in—if not elevating the art & profession of L.A. at least in contending for a much higher standard than could but for what I have done, have been maintained. I feel that I have been rather grandly successful in this respect, and yet only successful in holding the fort as it were. It is as if the war had just begun and my part had been to keep the enemy in check till reinforcements could arrive. These young men, John & Harry, Eliot & Coolidge, with Sargeant & Stiles and Mrs Van Rensselaer are the advance of the reinforcements. I want you [204]to be prepared to be a leader of the van. How much abler should I have been had I had your education, to this time of your education. How much more had I had that education that you may have ten years hence. I wd speak of myself & what I have done, as I have to no one but to you, & to you, only under these circumstances. I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success & applause to that of the future. In laying out the Central Park we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years. Now in nearly all our work I am thinking of the credit that will indirectly come to you. How will it as a mature work of the Olmsted school affect Rick? I ask. And then, with reference to your education, How is Rick to be best prepared to take advantage of what in reputation I have been earning?— Reputation coming as the result of what I shall have done, but not coming in my time. How best prepared to carry on the war against vulgarity and continued further & successfully against ignorance & prejudice & meanness. How best to make L.A. respected as an Art & a liberal profession.

Of course the main thing is solid strength in the art itself, to gain which the course of college studies with the atmosphere into which the pursuit of these studies will bring you, and the reading and rapport that you may secure with the office will be the best means. This with as much familiarity as you can gain in holidays & vacations with good natural scenery and the study of landscape paintings.

But with reference to success as a landscape architect—to obtaining business and gaining a name you must just as systematically study to acquire social power. You must be storing up through your college acquaintances, social opportunities. Be not lazy or shy to avail yourself of opportunities, first to earn friendly acquaintances; second to train yourself in social art. It is as necessary to success as anything else that you should be able to make yourself pleasing and entertaining in any society but more especially to be at home and ready to contribute the general entertainment of the most cultivated society. You need to be well-informed, thoughtful & familiar with the literature of all topics of conversation likely to come up in such society. For this reason you must set apart hours for keeping up with the world by reading certain books as they come out, certain periodicals and certain newspapers, and by looking at works of art as they become prominent, considering criticisms upon them, attending public entertainments—all this & more, I mean, besides cultivating social standing, assiduously in the ordinary way of parties, balls and “calls.” Do not think that you have only to follow your inclinations in this respect. Use discrimination. Seek the best society. Seek to enjoy it. Seek to make yourself desirable in it. Make yourself a well-informed man on matters of conversation of the best and most fortunate sort of people. This is an essential element of your education. Follow it systematically. Arrange other studies and occupations with reference to it. You have disappointed me in not training yourself more to acquire better manners in respect to the small change of social grace. It is entirely a matter of will. You have it in your power to greatly increase your value [205]in this respect—your power to be useful & through usefulness respectable to others & to yourself, which is the chief defense against misery in life. You have your defects & weaknesses but on the whole you are in capital condition at the starting point of the University period of your life-work.