Your c'd just recd2—by this time you must have got papers I sent with report of dinner &c: All was a great success, intense meaning & expression yet very quiet—I was there an hour & a half at the last (drank a bottle of champagne) I felt unusually well, wh has continued ever since, till to day (not so well at present).3 The idea now is to print all in a little book4—Do you want further papers? If so I can send you. What do you mean by "the $4.99" on y'r card? I have rec'd none—
W W loc.03027.001.jpgCorrespondent:
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).