C'est A great moment at last this April 22, (88) Sund. Eve (I free from the gnarring of the finite at my heels). Your very interesting letters rec'd & forwarded.
Last night I saw Bronson Howard's2 play—Henrietta—Robson & Crane3 chief actors. A very useful play—satire on Wall Street.
Matthew Arnold's4 article on America in the April Nineteenth Century5 you ought to read. He's as insolent & haughty toward us (amusingly so) as all other Englishmen. They are getting afraid of us—to tell the truth?
W.S.K loc.02942.001_large.jpgCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).