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Dear Walt:

I have hoped daily to write in reply to your letters of April 8th and 23d, and the postal card of May 7th, but between office business and illness I have been prevented. Last night I got another of May 14th, covering the one from Herbert Gilrchrist, which I send today to Doctor Bucke, as you desire. I am grieved to learn by these last advices that you are ill lately. Your trouble all through seems twin to mine—semi-paralysis, indigestion, constipation, etc. But who can be well, or who being sick can help being sicker, in such weather as we have had this spring? The last five days have been simply horrible—cold, wet, raw, diabolical, and we are all the worse for it. I think we will have to do like the Greenlanders—when the weather is bad, they boil the thermometer!

I saw your little piece in the Herald of the 14th. No fear of your distempers getting into your compositions! Your temperament is indomitable. One would think you had the sun for a solar plexus. I basked in the mellowness of your last letters as in the gold and azure October weather of which I am so fond. I often feel deep regret that you should have become ill. It simply proves the existence of the devil, whom Starr King called the fourth person of the Trinity! (Certainly he's powerful enough to be so styled.) But for him, or what he stands for, you might have reached a hundred, hale, sturdy, impregnable, and like the best druid of the grove. So may it be yet!

I read with a jovial heart of your trencher work at the planked shad and champagne up at the old tavern on the Delaware, and, later, with your friends, where champagne and oysters ruled the board. Didn't I wish to be along! Didn't my lower stomach shout to my upper stomach with loud halloos! O there's fun in this sad world yet! I hope you'll have lots of it.

Apropos of the Devil, I once had a conception of him, which I worked out in an unpublished romance thirty years ago, as a type of intellectual ignorance—that is, of word-knowledge as against the knowledge of things. Lately, I had another and more grotesque conception of such a being, supernatural and immortal, but, simply having all the diseases! Wouldn't be a bad idea, would it? How very diabolic such a devil would naturally be, wouldn't he?

Herbert Gilchrist's letter was very interesting. His reference to your bust would have been very enigmatical, but for a card I had from Kennedy which helped me to infer that it was Morse's bust that was alluded to.

In a couple of days the weather will change for the better, and you will feel revived. I hope you will ride out all you can in the Spring air.

You speak of Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton having been to see you. It is many years since I saw her. She used to be very pretty: I hope she is yet. Her fault was in being too Araminta-Seraphina-Matilda, and this, life has made her outgrow.

I had a letter from Ben Tucker about you and your Herald threnody on the Emperor (which I have never seen). He seemed much troubled and cast down. Undoubtedly, he has a great regard and veneration for you, and feels hurt.

I am delighted at your returns from the Herald, and hope they will continue. Bennett is certainly the most generous of all the blackguards.

You speak of having the bust of Elias Hicks, which must be a grateful possession. I hope your article on him is growing. You ought to make it good, and as elaborate as possible.

Miserable Cosmopolitan!—to refuse the Lilt of Songs, which has a real and deep thought! Such are these demons.

I had your Critic Thought on Shakespeare, and read it many times lately again. It is certainly very satisfactory, though I could wish it had certain explanations and expansions.

Donnelly's book is out, and I have gone through it, though hurriedly and in illness. He has done something I don't like—withheld a part of the explanation of the cipher, and moreover expounded it so bewilderingly as to leave the matter still in debate. Still, the effect is rather tremendous, and although the chief journals denounce and lampoon it with all their armory of lying, misrepresentation and persiflage, I don't think any fair mind can doubt the validity of the cryptograph. The general abuse and ridicule are consoled, so far, by Professor Colbert of Chicago vouching for the reality of the figures, and by Mr. Bidder, one of the best mathematicians in England, declaring that the cipher is surely in the test. But that my illness makes me unfit for composition, I would like to review Donnelly's reviewers so far, and would engage to make them skip. Such ignorance and such impudence I have rarely seen. The fragments of the cipher story in the book are quite amazing and have wonderful vraisemblance. He has a notice of me, with other Baconians, and briefly pays good tribute to you.

You speak truly of the beautiful hue of the young wheat. I have sometimes thought that "wheat-color" would be a justified and telling epithet. The tint is so peculiar, so living.

By the way, in looking over Stedman's book (the Poets of America) I saw how thoroughly and even radically he had modified the article on you. It is by no means what it was in the magazine. My talk with him must have sunk in.

Goodbye. Nelly sends you her love. So do I. Always affectionately

W.D. O'Connor