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1238 CLXXXV

Home / Complete-Works / Volume 9 / Letters – Fifth Series /

CLXXXV

To Mrs. Ole Bull

66, RUE AMPERE

22nd October 1900

DEAR MOTHER,

I am sorry to learn you are not well. Hope you will soon be better. Things seem to turn out better for me.

Mr. Maxim of the gun fame is very much interested in me, and he wants to put in his book on China and the Chinese something about my work in America.1 I have not any documents with me; if you have, kindly give them to him. He will come to see you and talk it over with you. Canon Hawes [Reverend Hugh Reginald Haweis] also keeps track of my work in England. So much about that. It may be that Mother will now work up my original plan of international work. In that case, you will find your work of the Conference2 has not been in vain.

It seems that after this fall in my health, physical and mental, it is going to open out that way — larger and more international work. Mother knows best.

My whole life has been divided into successive depressions and rises — and so, I believe, is the life of everyone. I am glad, rather than not, these falls come. I understand it all; still, I suffer and grumble and rage!! Perhaps that is a part of the cause of the next upheaval.

I think you will be in America by the time we return; if not, I will see you in London again. Anyhow, adieu for the present. We start day after tomorrow for Egypt etc. And all blessings ever be on you and yours is, as always, my prayer.

Your son,
VIVEKANANDA

PS: To Margot [Sister Nivedita] my love, and I am sure she will succeed.

V.

→
Addressee→
Chronology→

^Sir Hiram Maxim. In the foreword to his book L. Hung Chang’s Scrapbook (1913), Maxim wrote at some length of Swami Vivekananda’s appearance at the Parliament of Religions. Vide Marie Louise Burke’s Swami Vivekananda in the West, Vol. 6, pp. 319-21.
^The Cambridge Conferences, an annual series of lectures by eminent people, which Mrs. Bull had organized at her home in Cambridge.