Don’t you think Adams pays him back nicely for proposing that they should sit down and rejoice together over the abolition of slavery? Just see how the world has moved. Turn back to Russell’s lecture to be read to Mr. Lincoln on occasion of his proclamation of emancipation!
Good-by, my dear, good fellow, and recover health as fast as ever you can.
Yours affectionately,
A. Gray.
TO CHARLES WRIGHT.
Cambridge, June 28, 1865.
I am not going on so any more. A letter from me you shall have. To be sure I have had none from you since you sailed, but that is no matter. College and garden and herbarium work together are enough to drive one mad; but now the college work begins to hold up, and will soon be over. And as to herbarium, Fendler has at length promised to come at the end of the summer and help me—all winter at least, perhaps longer....
Oh, yes! I have yours of “Habana,” May 9th, with your shipboard studies on the variations of Chapman and Grisebach. Well, sometimes one wrong, sometimes the other; sometimes a difference as to who the author of a book is,—Michaux, whose name is on the work, Richard, who wrote it incog.
I inclose my last from Grisebach. I am hoping to arrange to have the catalogue of Cuba plants printed or stereotyped at Göttingen, for the Smithsonian contributions, and have written Grisebach to cultivate his Spanish influence in the view of having that government at length patronize effectively the bringing out of a Flora Cubensis, by Wright and Grisebach.
You owe this letter partly to the general disturbance of an uneasy conscience, and partly to a sudden cold caught by carelessness in hot weather, which unfits me for more driving work. It is getting better. I hope to write you again before I catch a new one.
July 4, Eighty-ninth Anniversary
of the United States.