Slabsides, Oct. 27. {1897.}
MY DEAR BOY,
I found your letter here yesterday on my return from N. J. whither I had gone on Saturday to visit Mr. Mabie. I was glad to hear from you. You must write at least once a week. Get the rowing pants you refer to and anything else you really need.... Do not try to live on less than $3.50 a week, Select the simplest and most nourishing food—meat only once a day—no pie but fruit and puddings. The weather still keeps fine here and dry; no rain yet and no heavy frosts.
Celery is most off; not more than $175 for this second crop. I am taking out the Niagaras below the hill—nothing pays, but Delawares in the grape line. I have had a good deal of company as usual. It cheers me up and keeps me from the blue devils. Your mother is cleaning house and groaning as usual. I can only keep my temper by flight to SS.
Hiram goes to Roxbury to-morrow for two months or more. I shall miss him very much. He stands to me for father and mother and the old home. He is part of all those things. When he is here my chronic homesickness is alleviated.
I hope you will do some reading outside of your courses. Read and study and soak yourself in some great author for his style. Try Hawthorne or Emerson or Ruskin or Arnold. The most pregnant style of all is in Shakespeare. Go into the laboratory some day and have your strength tested. Binder says they can tell you what part is weakest. Watch your health and keep regular hours. Write us as often as you can. How I wish I was a Harvard student too.
With deepest affection, JOHN BURROUGHS.
Doubtless it is a wise provision of Nature that we find our mates in our opposites. It is some natural law working for the good of the race, something to maintain the balance and uniformity of mankind. Certainly in many ways two people could not have been more unlike than Father and Mother. She said he was as weak as water, and he said he could get tipsy on a glass of water. He always said that Mother made the housekeeping an end in itself, and she said, "You know how he is, he never takes care of anything." How many evenings have I spent in the study when the lamp would begin to burn low for lack of oil and Father would have to run and fill lit and Mother would complain, "Just like you, come mussing around after dark. Why didn't you fill it by daylight?" Ah, me, when it was daylight Father did not need the lamp! It was Mother who filled the lamps, trimmed them and polished the chimneys regularly in the afternoon, while the sun was still up; but it was Father who trimmed and filled his lamp and let it so shine that all the world might see! After all, I am not sure but what Mother was just the wife for him; he had a streak stubborn determination along with his ambition to write that carried him through any trials of housecleaning or complaints about the housework. A wife in full sympathy with his work, who coddled him and made him think that everything he wrote was perfect, would never have done at all, nor would a selfish, extravagant, or society-mad woman. Father was temperamental, moody, irritable, easily influenced, easily led, suffering at times with attacks of melancholy, with but one fixed purpose, and that was to write. Mother was economical, thrifty, material, suspicious of people, determined to bring their ship to a snug harbour before old age, and she took the best of care of Father and held him steady and no doubt by her strength of character and firmness gave strength and firmness to his life. Their last years were most happy together and filled with a sympathy and understanding that were beautiful.
Sometimes Father would talk to himself, though but very seldom, and the following two letters are almost as though he were talking to himself. "I am far less forlorn when he is here," he says of himself and Uncle Hiram. With all his self-analysis he did not see that being forlorn was part of the price he must pay for the simple but intense joy he experienced from the beauty life and Nature.
W. P. Tuesday, Jan. 25 {1897}.