Your little book has come & I have been sitting here by the open window, looking it over the last hour. It is a wonderful specimen, first of typographical beauty & solid excellence—then I find it interesting, absorbing in quite a devouring degree—
Walt WhitmanI am ab't as usual—the lecture netted me $674—Dr Bucke is half-way to England—I have rec'd John Burroughs' new book3—warm sunny day here—I am going out with my horse for two or three hours—
Correspondent:
William Douglas O'Connor
(1832–1889) was the author of the grand and grandiloquent Whitman pamphlet
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, published in 1866.
For more on Whitman's relationship with O'Connor, see Deshae E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas (1832–1889)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).