First—how are you getting on? Second (like a woman's postscript) have I told you at any time that I have been & am preparing a vol: of Amer: poetry, up to your Centennial,1 for English publication? I would like, if I may, to use as frontispiece your head, which will not hurt your fame on the other side; & 3000 miles off will not, I think, interfere with the appearance of the same head here with those new things which I want to use. May I use it? Say honestly yes or no, as you feel. I do loc.01803.002_large.jpg not want to do what you might not like, whether in matter of interest or feeling. But I can have nothing I should like so well.
I wish you were here now that the storms seem over. We have had such a spell of bad weather as I have never before been treated to by U.S.
Yours always WJ LintonCorrespondent:
William J. Linton
(1812–1897), a British-born wood engraver, came to the United States in
1866 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), in which appeared eight of Whitman's
poems as well as a frontispiece engraving of the poet. According to his Threescore and Ten Years, 1820 to
1890—Recollections (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): "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."