My hand has been pretty bad, but looks more encouraging to-day. I don't think there is anything very serious, but it has caused me much suffering, since I have been here. If the "Radical" has come, send me a copy immediately.2 Address to No 101 Portland avenue, opposite Arsenal. Mother is well as usual. We both send love to you and Nellie. I expect to be back next Monday.
Walt Whitman By AHP.3Anne Gilchrist's "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" appeared in the May issue of the Boston Radical, 7 (1870), 345–359, reprinted in In Re Walt Whitman (1893), ed. Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas B. Harned, 41–55, and The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman, ed. Thomas B. Harned [New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918], 3–22. In an undated letter, probably written early in June 1870, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman commented: "that Lady seems to understand your writing better than ever any one did before as if she could see right through you. she must be a highly educated woman" (The Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library). On June 13, 1870, Charles Heyde wrote of the article: "Yet you percieve, even the praise she bestows [i?]s qualified with the general recoil, which all natures of true human sensibility experience, at your (mistaken) barbarism. The louse and the maggot know as much about procreation as you do, and when you unveil and denude yourself, you descend to the level of the dog, with the bitch, merely."
Since O'Connor promised William Michael Rossetti to have Mrs. Gilchrist's essay "fitly given to the world" (Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist, Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings [New York: Scribner & Welford, 1887], 187), he probably arranged for its publication in the Radical, which was printed in Boston by Samuel H. Morse, and which included among its contributors at least two of Walt Whitman's friends, Conway and Alcott; see Frank Luther Mott, History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 3:78. The former co-editor of the journal, Joseph B. Marvin, was now a clerk in the Treasury Department and was acquainted with Walt Whitman; Marvin is mentioned in Whitman's December 11, 1874 letter to John Burroughs.
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