Dear patient and [illegible] yet afflicted Friend—your Card of 13 instant1 in reply to my letter of the 5 is at hand—The main purpose of this is to express the greatest sympathy with you in your sickness—and, understand that it was not merely or mainly the "Radicalism" of your works which drew me toward you it was the warmth of a loving heart and universal charity so beautifully expressed—that which leans towards my own preference for "rudeness—savageness—spiritedness "was still regarded [illegible] in comparison. (Please let me replace some of the stamps you have wasted on me.)
The world should thank you for your Love—without regard to opinions.
The questions I have lately sent you about policy of attacking such Orthodoxy as prevails here and elsewhere, were forced from me by an increasing conviction that such Preaching as we have is greatly responsible [illegible] for the low moral condition of the country. I agree with Democratic Vistas,2 that we should get back to uncontaminated "intuitions" of true grrace as the loc_tb.00801.jpg sound basis for moral improvement.
Quite lately I came to perceive how you accepted the universe as a loving wife accepts gifts of a provident husband. I am satisfied—I see, laugh, dance, sing.
After I write again, say you got this, (I may sometime shortly send a little note to John Burroughs,3 to ask if he got the pretty little printed articles of a Georgia Poet4 about Fruit-Growing which I sent him in my one (only) short note a year ago [deletion] There was some very amusing and pretty a[deletion] lines of Dr Ticknor.) ☛ I shall be greatly offended unless you strictly limit yourself to love for B.
Dear Friend—think not that I know nothing about trouble or spells of unhappiness we are a discordant household, and I will (of course) say it is not my fault, but would boast of patience and ingenuity. Defeated till I sometimes wish I were dead.)
More and more I realize that the world is not rightly taught—I partly despair and partly resent. Yet I enjoy life most of the time, and owe more to you than anyone else. We have so much dry weather, the crop gives much leisure, but I fear we may have a serious drouth
John Newton JohnsonCorrespondent:
John Newton Johnson
(1832–1904) was a colorful and eccentric self-styled philosopher from
rural Alabama. There are about thirty letters from Johnson in the Charles E.
Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919 (Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C.), but unfortunately there are no replies extant,
although Whitman wrote frequently for a period of approximately fifteen years.
When Johnson wrote for the first time on August 13,
1874, he was forty-two, "gray as a rat," as he would say in another
letter from September 13, 1874: a former Rebel
soldier with an income between $300 and $400 annually, though before the
war he had been "a slaveholding youthful 'patriarch.'"
He informed Whitman in the August 13, 1874, letter
that during the past summer he had bought Leaves of Grass
and, after a momentary suspicion that the bookseller should be "hung for swindling," he discovered the mystery of
Whitman's verse, and "I assure you I was soon 'cavorting' round and asserting
that the $3 book was worth $50 if it could not be replaced, (Now
Laugh)." He offered either to sell Whitman's poetry and turn over to him all
profits or to lend him money. On October 7, 1874,
after describing Guntersville, Alabama, a town near his farm from which he often
mailed his letters to Whitman, he commented: "Orthodoxy flourishes with the usual lack of
flowers or fruit." See
also Charles N. Elliot, Walt Whitman as Man, Poet and
Friend (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1915), 125–130.