That emotional, audacious,
open-handed, friendly-mouth'd just-opportune English action, I say,
pluck'd me like a brand from the burning, and gave me life again, to
finish my book, since ab't completed. I do not forget it, and shall
not; and if I ever have a biographer I charge him to put it in the
narrative. I have had the noblest friends and backers in America; Wm.
O'Connor, Dr. R.M. Bucke, John Burroughs, Geo.W. Childs, good ones
in Boston, and Carnegie and R.G. Ingersoll in New York; and yet
perhaps the tenderest and gratefulest breath of my heart has gone, and
ever goes, over the sea-gales across the big pond.
About myself at present. I will soon enter upon my 73d year, if I
live--have pass'd an active life, as country school-teacher, gardener,
printer, carpenter, author and journalist, domicil'd in nearly all the
United States and principal cities, North and South--went to the front
(moving about and occupied as army nurse and missionary) during the
secession war, 1861 to '65, and in the Virginia hospitals and after
the battles of that time, tending the Northern and Southern wounded
alike--work'd down South and in Washington city arduously three
years--contracted the paralysis which I have suffer'd ever since--and
now live in a little cottage of my own, near the Delaware in New
Jersey. My chief book, unrhym'd and unmetrical (it has taken thirty
years, peace and war, "a borning") has its aim, as once said, "to
utter the same old human _critter_--but now in Democratic American
modern and scientific conditions.
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