ANNE GILCHRIST TO WALT WHITMAN
Earls Colne, Halstead
Feb. 21, 1875.
My Dearest Friend:
I have run down to Colne for a glimpse of my dear Bee, whom I had not seen for five months, and of my Mother; & now I am alone with the latter, Beatrice taking my place at home with her brother & sister for a week or two. A wonderful evergreen my Mother continues; still able to face the keen winds & the frost daily in her Bath chair—well swathed, of course in eiderdown & flannels. Beatrice takes beautiful care of her & is happy & content with her life here, loving the country as dearly as I do & having time enough for study & reading, as well as for domestic activities, to keep her mind as busy as her body. How I do long for you to see my children, dearest Friend. I wonder if you are surrounded with any in your brother’s home—young, growing, blossoming plants that gladden you. And I wonder if the winter, which I hear is so severe in America this year, tries you—whether you can yet move briskly enough to keep up the circulation—and whether you have as many dear friends round you as you had at Washington. In my walks I keep thinking of these things. Write me a little letter once more, it would do me such good. No one of all your friends so easy as I to write to because none to whom any & every little detail is so welcome, so precious—lifting a tiny corner of the great vast of space between us, giving me for a moment to feel the friendly grasp of your hand—I that long for it so. Two years are over since your illness began, or seemed to begin, dearest friend—so slow & stealthy in its approaches, so slow & stealthy in its retreat—may the spring that is coming (the birds have already caught sight of it, cold & brown & bare as the landscape still is)—may it but come laden with healing, strengthening, refreshing influences—so that you begin to feel again the joyous freedom of health, warbling once more a song of joy for lilac time. True, I know indeed, my dearest, that anyhow you are content, not grudging the price paid for your life work, but even some way or other the richer for paying it—garnering precious equivalents for pain & privation of health in your inmost soul. I cannot choose but believe this earnestly—the resplendent faith that there is not “one cause nor result lamentable, at last, in the Universe” which glows throughout the Poems is for me an exhaustless source of strength & comfort.—I see every now & then & like the more each time the Conways. I am half afraid Mr. Conway works too incessantly—that is, does not like well enough the indispensable supplement of close mental work—plenty of air & exercise, &c.,—hates walking, & indeed it is not to be wondered at in great, smoky London (I shall be fond enough & proud enough of it too when I am over the Atlantic). Unless one has a real passion for open air & the sense of sky overhead, like me. I hear Mr. Conway is coming to America for six months in October.
Feb. 25—I kept my letter till to-day that I might have the happiness of speaking to you on my birthday. See me this evening in the bright, cheerful parlour of our cottage, which stands just in the middle of the old village (it has been a village & jogged on through all change at its own sober, sleepy pace this 800 years)—my mother in her arm chair by the fire; I chatting with her & working or playing to her when she is awake; & with the Poems I love beside me, reading, musing, wondering while she dozes. Ah, shall I ever attain to the Ideal that burst upon me with such splendour of light & joy in those Poems in 1869—so filling, so possessing me, I seemed as if I had by one bound attained to that ideal—as if I were already a very twin of the soul from whom they emanated. But now I know that divine foretaste indicated what was possible for me, not what was accomplished—I know the slow growth—the standstill winters that follow the growing joyous springs & ripening summers. I believe it will take more lives than this one to reach that mountain on which I was transfigured again, never to descend more, but to start thence for new heights, fresh glories. Ah, dear friend, will you be able to have patience with me, for me?
Good-bye, my dearest.
Anne Gilchrist.