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Walt Whitman to Peter Doyle, 24 July [1880]

Am all right again for me—was sick ab't​ three weeks—at times pretty bad—was well taken care of here—the best of friends both Dr and Mrs B[ucke] (as human as I ever met, both)—Monday morning next I start on a long Lake & St Lawrence river trip, 900 miles (mostly by steamer, comfortable, I reckon)—gone nearly three weeks, then back here2—May write you from Quebec. Your papers come—

W W

Notes

  • 1. This letter is addressed: Peter Doyle | M Street South bet: 4½ & 6th | Washington | D C | U S A. [back]
  • 2. Whitman left London on July 26 for his trip on the St. Lawrence River and returned to London on August 14. Whitman's account of this journey was published in the London (Canada) Advertiser, the Philadelphia Press, and the Camden Daily Post on August 26. He sent the article on August 23 to the Washington Sunday Herald (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Most of the material was later incorporated into Specimen Days & Collect (1882; see Whitman's Complete Prose Works, 1–202). See also the account of this trip in Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada, ed. William Sloane Kennedy (Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1904), 16–40. [back]
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