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.1 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.2 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 poems3 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 Bulweria nobilissima. It will appear in the fragmenta,4 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.
Bulweria nobilissima
Please cite as “FVM-64-11-05,” in Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller, edited by R.W. Home, Thomas A. Darragh, A.M. Lucas, Sara Maroske, D.M. Sinkora†, J.H. Voigt† and Monika Wells accessed on 26 April 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/vonmueller/letters/64-11-05