Your card of yesterday rec'd. Best thanks—I am feeling unwell & stupid, dont want to think or talk these times—shall emerge soon, & then define what I spoke of in my last card—Do not come on personally as that would not facilitate—My Specimen Days in America (no "Collect") is out in London in a very pretty shilling Vol—with a short Pref: & add'l note for Engl: readers—I shall have some vols. & will send you one—Tell Rhys2 to try Sonnenschien & Co: Paternoster Sq: to publish your book—Herbert Gilchrist3 & Morse4 are here—hot to-day—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).