I wrote you from Chicago postponing a real answer to your letter to me because my mind was too much engaged in trying to win a majority of the Commissioners of the World’s Fair to adopt our views on two points, both mainly supposed to be of “taste,” as to which men of the sort that we had to deal with are apt to assume that argument is useless and that there is no such thing as “authority.”3 As you refer to the circumstance in your good letter to Mrs Olmsted which I find here, I will just say that we at last obtained not only a majority but a unanimous vote on both points. The day after this was gained I reached home at the exact moment that the turkey was ready for the Thanksgiving Table. Since then I have been trying to overtake the obligations [245]of my long accumulating and specially pressing professional correspondence and overdue appointments.

You refer most generously in the beginning of your letter to something that I had written in a postscript to my queer note to you from North Carolina. I want to make a little confession as to that. My Confederate Surgeon thought at first that besides lumbago, sciatica, intercostal rheumatism, facial neuralgia shooting up into the eyes and down into the larynx, and some danger of pneumonia, he had caught a case of the true Grip. Hence his inquiry about my age and hence heroic treatment. I am now visiting an aurist because of the access of deafness due to the quinine with which he loaded me and I think that before I closed that letter I was beginning to question myself whether it would have been quite as picturesque in character but for his quinine and whiskey and the drugs with which he tried in vain for three days to make me sleepy? A few days later, I was really worried about it, and, as I went on at night thro’ the mountains of Tennessee I set myself to recalling just what I had written. I failed at some points and at others could remember terms but not what I could have been thinking of when I wrote them. On the whole I concluded that I had not much misrepresented myself and so far as I had I could be confident that you would take the corn and not the husks. Yet your letter was a relief. I can’t yet but think that you must have suspected that if I had told the doctor of my “reveries” he would have said, “a little wandering in your mind, Sir.” But you know that at such times “the truth comes out.”

I was glad to hear all that you told me of our old friends. Of some I had heard nothing for years. In truth I know more of my friends, not only of early but of later days, thro’ their children than directly. Some of Brace’s have been with us once or twice every year for a long time. The Kingsbury girls have more rarely visited us. I am slow-minded, reflective absent and taciturn in the house and not a good fellow with young people but it is one of my greatest enjoyments to have young people about me, see them and hear them. I wrote to Brace shortly before he last went abroad. He did not reply but his children have told me that he was pleasantly affected by what I wrote. I did not know that he was seriously disordered. I have just thought of another story to tell you about an old friend. You will have heard of a grievous accident that occurred to us in 1860. The newspapers made a sensation of it and it is mentioned in Miss Wormeley’s book to which you refer. After a moment (which, for all I knew, had been a century) I recovered consciousness and lifting my head saw my wife nearby, picking up the baby. How do you find him? I asked. “I don’t see that he is hurt.” (The baby, our first-born, died a few days afterwards) “And you”? “I am all right, and,” coming toward me, “how are you?” “Hurt badly, I am afraid, I cannot get up.” A crowd was gathering about us, (I was lying on the pavement in the middle of the street) and a lady looked out of the door of the adjoining house. Mary went to her and told her what had occurred. “Let me take your baby and have your husband brought right in here. I will call our man to help you.” When I had been carried in and lain upon a bed I was [246]near swooning from the pain of the movement. (There were three splintering fractures of the thigh extending through the knee and I was much lacerated and bruised). Things turned black and I thought I was dying. But the lady giving me wine and bathing my head I presently revived & looked about me. Then Mary taking my hand and smiling, asked “Well Fred, where do you suppose that you are?” “I have not the least idea.” “You are in Charles Trask’s house and this lady is—Mrs. Trask.” Neither of us had ever seen Mrs Trask before, nor had we known that she was in New York. Of course she had not known us when she took us in. But after this we were friends to the end—of which end I told you.

I have received some remarkable honors at home and abroad on account of my public doings but none have been as grateful to me as that of your saying just what you do of them. It would be a long story to tell you all why. But for one thing my letter from Carolina will have shown you that as age grows upon me I am led to try back; compare what I have done with what I could have wished to have done; compare what I am with what I had wished to be. There was a Sermon of Martineau’s which I read in my New Haven days on Being and Doing. Perhaps you read it and from the same book. Your writing of yourself in a comparative way disparagingly—of your doings disparagingly, brought it to my mind. Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; and the truth is that, regarding the price that I have paid, I need all the esteem that I have earned from you to sustain my self-esteem. I have been selling being for doing.

I am thinking that of all the young men you knew I was the least likely to do what I have and that you cannot know or guess in what way I was led to it. Nor can you know what is most prominently in my mind when I refer to these doings. I need not conceal from you that I am sure that the result of what I have done is to be of much more consequence than anyone else but myself supposes. As I travel I see traces of influences spreading from it that no one else would detect—which, if given any attention by others would be attributed to “fashion.” There are, scattered through the country, seventeen large public parks, many more smaller ones, many more public or semi-public works, upon which, with sympathetic partners or pupils, I have been engaged. After we have left them they have in the majority of cases been more or less barbarously treated, yet as they stand, with perhaps a single exception, they are a hundred years ahead of any spontaneous public demand, or of the demand of any notable cultivated part of the people. And they are having an educative effect perfectly manifest to me—a manifestly civilizing effect. I see much indirect and unconscious following of them. It is strange how often I am asked: “Where did you get that idea?” As if an original idea on the subject had not been expected, but I see in new works of late much evidence of efforts of invention—comprehensive design—; not always happy but symptomatically pleasing. Thus I know that I shall have helped to educate in a good American School a capital body of young men for my profession. All men of liberal [247]education and cultivated minds. I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession—an Art, an Art of Design. I have been resolute in insisting that I am not to be dealt with as an agent of my clients but as a councilor—a trustee, on honor. I have always refused to take employment on other terms and when it has appeared that I must do so or yield the point I have seven times already resigned the charge of important and interesting works. It is what I have done in these respects and what I see of the indirect effect on the standing of my profession and the progress of my Art that leads me to write to you after so many years in the self-complacent way that I do. This, rather than anything you have seen or of which you have read.

I was saying that of all the young men, comradic young men, that you knew I was the last to have been expected to lead such a life as I have. I was strangely uneducated—miseducated. Because of an accident putting my eyes in some peril, I was at the most important age left to “run wild” and when at school, mostly as a private pupil in the families of country parsons of small poor parishes, it seems to me that I was chiefly taught how not to study—how not to think for myself. I tried to learn Euclid by rote without trying to understand what it meant. While my mates were fitting for college I was allowed to indulge my strong natural propensity for roaming afield and day-dreaming under a tree. The year before John entered college I went to sea before the mast. It was soon after my return from China that I first met you and you lifted me a good deal out of my constitutional shyness and helped more than you can think to rouse a sort of scatter-brained pride and to make me realize that my secluded life, country breeding and mis-education were not such bars to an “intellectual life” as I was in the habit of supposing. Or, if this is too personal, let me say that, through visiting at your house the first winter I was at New Haven with John, I was given a turn, not to study but, toward an “intellectual life” to which I feel that nearly all that I have been saying complacently of my doings is to be remotely attributed. You will smile at my thinking of you at all as a mentor, especially in a literary way, if you remember a certain Christmas present that you gave me. (It was burned thirty years afterwards together with some heir-looms, autograph letters of Washington and Webster and other treasures.) But in some way with which you had to do, I was led up at that time to Emerson, Lowell and Ruskin, and other real prophets, who have been familiar friends since. (Here they are on my bed-Table). And these gave me the needed respect for my own constitutional tastes and an inclination to poetical refinement in the cultivation of them that afterwards determined my profession. Yet that is not quite fair for I had had two lifts in the same direction before. One, when I had heard my father reading the books of travel in New England of President Dwight, Professor Silliman and Miss Martineau, in all of which the observations on scenery with which I was familiar had helped to make me think that love of nature, not simply as a naturalist but as a poet, loves it, was respectable. The other, when, yet a boy, I found in the Hartford [248]public Library certain books, which it is a strange thing that I should have looked into; stranger that I should have assimilated as much as, when rereading them perhaps twenty years afterwards, I found that I had. They were Price on the Picturesque and Gilpin’s Forest Scenery. Books of the last century but which I esteem so much more than any published since, as stimulating the exercise of judgment in matters of my art, that I put them into the hands of my pupils as soon as they come into our office, saying “You are to read these seriously, as a student of Law would read Blackstone.”

Where am I going? You said, to my great gratification, that you had almost taken personal pride in what you had known of my public doings and I answer with perfect honesty—I have often thought of it—that you have not been without a hand in them, yet that when you knew me, no one was less to be expected to give you occasion to speak so well of him. While I had read a good deal for entertainment and to gratify curiosity and was fairly well informed, and had travelled much, mostly in a vagabond way, I was then and for ten years or more afterwards, living, under various guises, essentially the life of an uneducated “man of leisure,” industriously pursuing my tastes and fancies, which fortunately were not of a very vicious or expensive character; following them often with enthusiasm and even through some hardship but always so as to leave my mind undisciplined and unfitted for close, continuous, laborious application, as it remains today, so that at any moment, no matter how strong the counter-motive, I am liable to lose the thread I wish to follow and go off wool-gathering.

I had no thought when I began this volume of taking your few lines of approbation as the text of an auto-biography as I see that I have made a good beginning to do. The fact is I have never before had the question quite so clearly before me how such a loitering, self-indulgent, dilettante sort of a man as I was when you knew me and for ten years afterwards, could, at middle age, have turned into such a hard worker and doer as I then suddenly became and have been ever since? At this moment I have a strong impulse to go on and try to answer it. Perhaps I shall indulge it later.

What you say of your father’s observation on Livy Day’s turning to teaching for an occupation is a striking reminder of what we have seen gained for—civilization (not simply, as I was going to write, for women) I rejoice in it with you. I think that hardly another man has as high an estimate of the possible capacities of women as compared with men in respect to organization, method and discipline in the management of affairs as I have as the result of my Sanitary Commission experience. I think, for example, your neighbor, (and friend, I hope), Mrs. Doctor Bacon, (“Georgie”) would, upon orders, take command of the channel fleet; arm, equip, man, provision, sail and engage the enemy, better than any other landsman I know. Yet I think it likely that I am more conservatively disposed than you are. I certainly am than my friend George Curtis, perhaps because I have been too much engrossed with matters of my special responsibilities to give the Woman question the attention it [249]should have from me. But, bearing on the subject, I will tell you something that has just occurred and which I rejoice in.

We made a plan for a park, perhaps twenty years ago, in Bridgeport, and perhaps ten years ago were asked to make a plan for another. Finding then that their Superintendent was perfectly incompetent I induced them to employ a Mr Bullard, brother in law of H. W. Beecher. He died while I was last in the South. To a letter found here on my return, asking if I could help them to find a successor, I replied asking what they could pay? To this inquiry comes now the answer from which I quote:—

“But conversing with Mrs Foote, Mr Bullard’s married daughter, I find that a single daughter of his, has, from natural taste, observation and education under his eye, gained an intimate knowledge of the Art; that Mr Bullard was in the habit of consulting with her; that he trusted greatly to her judgment. She is an artist [painter], by profession; familiar with her father’s ideas especially as to our parks. xxx How would it do to have her take up her father’s duty? xxx Have you known a lady to assume such employment?” xxx

(Wm H. Noble, President.)

Fortunately I have some acquaintance with the lady—enough to justify me in warmly advising her appointment. There is some risk in it mainly because of difficulties of discipline but my opinion is that it would have a wholesome effect on politics and patronage and stimulate the Commission to higher manliness. And, most fortunately, I can cite a precedent. The plans under which the old burial grounds of London are being transformed into public pleasure grounds (under the influence of a Society there of which I am a honorary member), are made by a woman and the keeping of these grounds is superintended by her. (Miss Wilkinson).

I want to write a note to Mrs Doctor Bacon (I shall not be garrulous) and by a trick of my capricious memory can’t write her husband’s full name. Will you please send it to me on the enclosed card?

I am faithfully Yours