I enclose you one of the very many letters I write to you1—I think I have written to you at least once a week for the past four years—sometimes I write long letters, sometimes short one's . But so you know my dear friend they are all real to me—and I often keep them months before I destroy them.—
Many and many a mile have I rode on a Locomotive while in charge of a Freight-train and had you by my side in conversation—which to me was as really a presence as in years gone by on the box of a Broadway Stage—or a loc_vm.00801_large.jpg Sleep and lounge on the deck of a Fulton Ferry Boat—
Walt in all your Sorrow that has been made public, I have sorrowed with you—Most especially in the death of Dear Mother,2 and your own illness3
If you can Dear Walt write to me and acknowledge the receipt of this—If you cannot, I shall still keep writing, in my own way
As Ever & always:— Yours, Fred B. Vaughan Care Leviness & Weeber 164 Fulton St. Brooklyn.Correspondent:
Fred Vaughan was a young
Irish stage driver with whom Whitman had an intense relationship during the late
1850's. For discussion of Vaughan's relationship with Whitman, see Jonathan Ned
Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 123–132; Charley Shively,
Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working-Class
Camerados (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987), 36–50; Ed
Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An
Introduction to His Life and Work, "Chapter 4: Intimate Script and the New American Bible: "Calamus" and the
Making of the 1860 Leaves of Grass."