Melbourne bot. Garden,
5/11/64.
My dear Miss.
Time runs on with a rapidity scarcely comprehensible, and thus this day reminds me
that a year passed since I offered you my best wishes to your birthday. Pray accept
these then again on this day, and let me hope, that the coming year and a long series
of others in their sequence will bring you all the happiness you so nobly deserve.
These lines are accompanied by two small books I very recently issued, and which I
hope you will kindly accept & retain in remembrance of this birthday. I do not think
that the works can interest you much; still in the one I have opposed the transmutation-theory
so dangerous to our christian faith.
We may all suddenly be called away from the world, and so I thought it well to deposite
however briefly my views on this serious doctrine, which is calculated to shake the
pillars on which the consolation of so many rests. The other small book may reveal
some of the beauty of minute plants within the reach of all.
That the dramatic works of Schillers are pleasing to your taste I am glad to hear
and I did anticipate. The sentiments are so noble and the thought so lofty and the
language so fluid, altho any translation can only do imperfect justice to the original.
I was reading Sir Edw. Bulwer Lytton's translation of some of the poems
recently at the house of a friend; they are prefaced by a magnificent biographic
sketch of Schiller; and I must confess that I regard
these
writings of Sir Edward's as real gems of English Literature, strange to say little
known anywhere. I always had a high opinion of the depth of learning & the elegance
of the writings of Bulwer, but
this
masterpiece of his has hightened my esteem of that poet to a perfect veneration &
in obedient to the impulse I dedicated to him a magnificent big nomiaceous tree recently
discovered at Rockingham-Bay as
. It will appear in the fragmenta,
of which, if I fall not seriously ill, I hope to finish the fourth volume before
the end of the year, when it will be offered to you. Since the last week I have suffered
from a cough far more severe than any I had for years past; if not the warm weather
soon dispels it, I fear, I shall be prostrated on the sickbed.
Trusting that you are in uninterrupted enjoyment of your usual firm health & trusting
that you will ever enjoy this almost the greatest of all blessings I remain your most
regardful
Ferd Mueller.
