Engelmann has come home, looking far better than we expected, or than he thought to be; is visiting Sargent, and will soon come to us....
TO SIR EDWARD FRY.
November 10, 1883.
In a line which I remember adding to Mrs. Gray’s last letter to Lady Fry I expressed a hope and confident expectation that we should have done with General Butler as governor of Massachusetts. The election occurred last Tuesday; an extraordinarily large vote was cast: Butler was defeated by 10,000, and an excellent man, a member of Congress from the central part of the State, a lawyer, who makes considerable sacrifice in taking the governorship, is chosen in his place, and there is a majority of two thirds in both branches of the legislature to support him. We hope that this makes an end of Butler’s power for harm, or at least cripples it. He is a desperate demagogue....
I doubt if either of the friends you mentioned came to Cambridge at all. My friend Agassiz had the pleasure of meeting them at Newport, and was greatly taken with them....
I am beginning to print the Compositæ for my “Flora of North America;” and am revising for the last time some of the more difficult and more unsatisfactory portions. My wife now excuses me to her friends for outbreaks of ill-humor, the excuse being that I am at present “in the valley of the shadow of the Asters.” This is “sic itur ad astra,” with a vengeance. If only I can have done with the printer by the close of the winter months, with any life left in me, then we will go in for a holiday.
I am very well, and Mrs. Gray passably so. We have seen just a little of Matthew Arnold, with wife and daughter; shall probably see more of them.
TO R. W. CHURCH.
November 12, 1883.
... I have just seen the first proof of the portion of “Flora of North America” that I have been moiling over for so long; and over them and the ever-renewed touches to the ever-growing Compositæ, I may expect a toilsome winter. That done, I hope about the time that the clear and biting, but rather enjoyable, winter subsides into the inclemencies of our early spring, we hope, if we live and thrive, to take a holiday. Just how and where is not yet clear, but I hope to have something to say of it before I am done with this letter. Meanwhile I am curious to know if you have disposed of Bacon. If your essay pleases me as much as your remarks in your letter to me, I shall enjoy it. I recant all I wrote you long ago, begging you would drop him and take up a more congenial subject....