Yours of 20th rec'd this morning & is quite a surprise to me, & a little not understandable1—But you will tell me plainer when you come up & see me Saturday—Don't do any thing too hastily, & from great excitement—I shall look for you Saturday—If any thing prevents your coming, write me & write fully.
I am much the same—rather easier if any thing the past two weeks—but the bad pall-weight & inertia, (like a sluggish, sleepy, tired, great weight, as of heavy irons on me, body & spirit) seem to be on me all the time—& appear destined for life. Still keep the sick chair & sick room—(now going into the sixth month)—The big book 2, (my whole works in one Vol.) will be bound now in a week or ten days—I suppose Eva3 bro't you the little Nov: Boughs4—Things go on comfortably with me—Eat & sleep fairly—spirits good yet—Sunny cold weather here—Herbert5 comes quite often—Two visitors ladies strangers just here to see me—love to you, dear boy, & to Eva and Dora6—
Walt Whitman loc_vm.00242.jpgCorrespondent:
Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford
(1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely
overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears
nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt
Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last
three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally
referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship
between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married
Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).