431 Stevens st.
Cor West.
Camden,
N.
Jersey. Sunday, March 28.
Dear Linton,1
My note of yesterday, (or day before,) asking for the bill was
written in the midst of a splitting headache—& without fully reading yours.
To-day, better, I have just taken up yours to read a second time, (as I generally do with
my friends' letters,) & see your kind & friendly gift to me of the prints2—which I accept with thanks & pleasure.
Two days now of fine weather—which I fancy is telling on me, as well as on the frozen
ground & sap in the trees—
Love to you—
Walt Whitman
Notes
- 1. William James Linton
(1812–1897), a British-born wood engraver, came to the U. S. in 1867 and
settled near New Haven, Connecticut. He illustrated
the works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and others, wrote the "indispensable" History of Wood-Engraving in America (1882), and edited
Poetry of America, 1776–1876 (London, 1878),
which included eight of Whitman's poems and the poet's picture. Linton's
engraving of Whitman appeared in the 1876 version of Leaves of
Grass, in Complete Poems & Prose
(1888–1889), and in The Complete Writings of Walt
Whitman (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1902), 10 vols., 2:156; it also inspired the poem "Out from
Behind This Mask." See Harold Blodgett, "Whitman and the Linton Portrait," Walt Whitman Newsletter, 4 (1958), 90–92.
According to his Threescore and Ten Years, 1820 to
1890—Recollections (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894),
216–217, Linton met with Whitman in Washington and later visited him in
Camden, which Whitman reported in his November 9,
1873, letter to Peter Doyle. Linton wrote of Whitman: "I liked the man
much, a fine-natured, good-hearted, big fellow, . . . a true poet who could not
write poetry, much of wilfulness accounting for his neglect of form." Linton's
obituary in the New York Times of January 8, 1898, called
Linton "the greatest wood engraver of his time, an artist in other senses, and a
poet of no mean ability." [back]
- 2. Walt Whitman ordered 1,000 impressions of
the engraving in his February 24, 1875 letter to
Linton. [back]