Eakins'1 "pict." is ab't finished—It is a portrait of power and realism, ("a poor, old, blind, despised and dying king").2 Things with me ab't the same. Mrs. D[avis]3 is well—is in the back room working. My canary is singin' away as I write.
Correspondent:
Sidney H. Morse (1832–1903)
was a self-taught sculptor as well as a Unitarian minister and, from 1866 to
1872, editor of The Radical. He visited Whitman in Camden
many times and made various busts of him. Whitman had commented on an earlier
bust by Morse that it was "wretchedly bad." For more on this, see Ruth L. Bohan,
Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art,
1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2006), 105–109.