Transcription:
3 prying critic to rest upon. Your little sketch concluding chap. IV of Our National Parks, wherein you relate Emerson's
visit to the Sequoias, may safely challenge anything ever written in English for beauty of imagery and profound pathos and
sweet simple telling's and the story of the birth of the talus, chap. VIII, same volume, is a noble achievement in the more
than difficult art of describing the indescribable. At least so I see it, and I make bold to tell you, since in a review I
wrote of this book some time ago, and in other occasional references to yourself and your work, as made by me in my paper,
I have taken the liberty of saying quite as much as I have said in these scrawled lines. Perhaps your publishers sent you
those notices, and, again, perhaps they did not, anyway I send you the gist of them all in this, and thereby do myself the
favor of freely speaking my mind, whether you are pleased by it or not. all this by way of justification of my assertion
that your letter gave me the keenest of pleasure. Now that you know how much I have liked you, and wanted to know you, you
may understand how much I was delighted at such a letter as you sent me. Like the first check a man gets for the stuff he
writes, it seems as though I ought to frame it; only, like marriage certificates and other holy things, such things are rather
to be kept hidden away in some secret reliquary, to be taken out and looked at now and then in moments of rare retrospection
and reflection; not to be 03431