I tho't I w'd send you word that Mr Eakins the portrait painter of Phila:3 is coming over here to paint me next week & I suppose will continue off & on all the current month (or more)—so you might tell Miss Wheeler4—Also give my best respects & remembrance to Miss W. & say I continue in the mind & promise of last summer (when it suits)—
Walt Whitman loc.02423.002_large.jpg R. U. Johnson loc.02423.003_large.jpg loc.02423.004_large.jpgCorrespondent:
Robert Underwood Johnson
(1853–1937) was on the staff of The Century
Magazine from 1873 to 1913, and was U. S. ambassador to Italy in 1920
and 1921. Whitman included in this letter a news release based on an interview
printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on October 17, in
which he criticized William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow (reprinted in American Literature,
14 [1942–1943], 144–147). See also Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), 336,
and Specimen Days, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York
University Press, 1963), 167.