Early ALS, 4.75 x 8, eight pages on four sheets adjoined in pairs, March 31, 1889. Wilson writes from Middletown, Connecticut to editor Horace E. Scudder. In part: “Yes, the move from Bryn Mawr as distinctly to my advantage—palpably so pecuniarily, for the Bryn Mawr salaries are quite paltry—but even more so in other respects. There was a plentiful lack of inspiration in teaching young women politics; and the ‘administration’ of the college inclines more, I discovered, to new educational ‘fads’ than to tested educational wisdom. In college phrase, it was ‘very fresh.’ Here I had, not inspiring classes, but goodly numbers of very sturdy, earnest men, who are capable of worthy work and elevating enthusiasm, who mean business and respect business. The atmosphere is altogether wholesome, the spirit at once sober and progressive…. The book on the State announced in the Nation is not yet quite ready for the publisher. It is one of those inconvenient things, a fact book, and its facts concern systems of government and administration, foreign and domestic: with these systems legislatures are forever tinkering, and whenever they tinker I have to re-write….” After discussing related matters in foreign politics and a book by another author, he continues: “I have had a score of occasions to thank you in my heart—and in my conversations with confidants—for the letter that you write me in ’86 in answer to my outpour of confidence touching the work upon which my mind is set, towards which I am steadily bending every energy of thought I possess. I am realizing more and more fully year by year the value of patience in thinking, the gain of ‘waiting on the slowness of my thought’—at the same time that I am eager to be at the work I have planned My enthusiasm grows rather than abates: but it is becoming chastened, not heady and impatient….” Stray ink mark and a few minor wrinkles, otherwise fine condition. JSA/John Reznikoff Auction LOA and RRAuction COA.
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