Washington, May 18, 1868.
Messrs. Sheldon & Co.1
Dear Sirs:
Your note of 16th May, with draft for Seventy-Five Dollars, in pay for article Personalism, have safely come to hand.
Please accept thanks, &c. &c.
Walt Whitman.
Notes
- 1. The April issue of the
Galaxy announced that Sheldon and Co. had assumed
financial control of the journal. The reply to this letter is in the Charles E.
Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C. The Galaxy in 1868 was more
than kind to Whitman and his friends. In March appeared O'Connor's satirical
poem "The Ballad of Sir Ball," 328–333, about the authorship of Florence
Percy's (Elisabeth Chase Allen) "Rock Me to Sleep." Of the poem Louisa Van
Velsor Whitman wrote on March 24, 1868: "it is
signed W. i hope nobody will think you wrote it walt." In April the magazine
printed John Burroughs' "Before Genius," 421–426, in which he observed:
"If we except 'Leaves of Grass' and Emerson's works, there is little as yet in
American literature that shows much advance beyond the merely conventional and
scholastic." [back]