I have received your letter, & am pleased at the prospect of meeting you at Mr. and Mrs. Lesley's2—say on the 28th, at bet. 12 and 1. (Should I not feel well enough to get over, I will send you a note, & you must then come & see me here. It is easily findable & reachable from Philadelphia.)
Walt Whitman loc.02311.002_large.jpg loc.02311.003_large.jpg loc.02311.004_large.jpgCorrespondent:
Katharine Hillard (1839–1915)
was the translator of Dante's Banquet (1889) and the
editor of An Abridgment by Katharine Hillard of the Secret
Doctrine: A Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy by Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky (1907). A Brooklyn resident, she was a friend of Whitman's
close friend, the women's rights activist Abby Price
(see Whitman's September 9, 1873, letter to
Price). According to a letter from Whitman's mother—Louisa Van Velsor Whitman—to Helen Price
on November 26, 1872, the Prices expected that Arthur Price and Katharine
Hillard would marry (Pierpont Morgan Library). Whitman had known Hillard's
writings since 1871 and mentioned her in his June 23,
1873, letter to his friend, the former publisher and fellow clerk Charles Eldridge. Hillard and Whitman first met in
person on February 28, 1876, and Whitman sent her a copy of Leaves of Grass on July 27, 1876 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of
Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Writing
to Whitman on September 13, 1871, Moncure D.
Conway, who acted as Whitman's agent in England, quoted from a letter he had received
from Katharine Hillard: "I have made a
discovery since I have been here [in the Adirondacks], and that is, that I never
half appreciated Walt Whitman's poetry till now, much as I fancied I enjoyed it.
To me he is the only poet fit to be read in the mountains, the only one who can
reach and level their lift, to use his own words, to pass and continue
beyond."