Very truly yours,
D. A. Wasson
It maybe fancy on my part, but I have a feeling that, all unconsciously to Mr. Burroughs, a sentence or two in Mr. Wasson's letter of September 29, 1862, had something to do with inspiring the mood of trustfulness and the attitude of waiting in serenity, which gave birth to this poem:—
... The book, too, all in good season. Life for you is very long, and you can take your time. Take it by all means. Give yourself large leisure to do your best.
Whether or not this is so, I am sure the sympathy and understanding of such a man as Mr. Wasson was a godsend to our struggling writer, and was one of the most beautiful instances in his life of "his own" coming to him.
"Waiting" seems to have gone all over the world. It has been several times set to music, and its authorship has even been claimed by others. It has been parodied, more's the pity; and spurious stanzas have occasionally been appended to it; while an inferior stanza, which the author dropped years ago, is from time to time resurrected by certain insistent ones. Originally, it had seven stanzas; the sixth, discarded by its author, ran as follows:—
You flowret, nodding in the wind,
Is ready plighted to the bee;
And, maiden, why that look unkind?
For, lo! thy lover seeketh thee.
This stanza is a detraction from the poem as we know it, and assuredly its author has a right to drop it. Concerning the fifth stanza, Mr. Burroughs says he has never liked it, and has often substituted one which he wrote a few years ago. The stanza he would reject is—
The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.
The one he would offer instead—