Joaquin Miller to Walt Whitman, [6 November 1874]
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HOTEL CHATHAM
67 & 69, RUE NEUVE ST AUGUSTIN
PARIS
My dear Walt Whitman.
In London last week I met many mutual friends who were asking after you and wondering when you would
come over to the Great Smoky Capital—friends who know you only by your books. Last
winters stay of Rome, the author of
"Cleopatra" you remember, asked me for your photo, and I gave it him to contemplate and he has it
yet: Are you coming, and when? Most like I shall
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return to the States this winter and then visit Washington for I have never yet seen our national
Capitol.
The news of the great democratic virtues has first reached us and all Paris—that is all American Paris—is teribly excited: Of course this suits me, born democrat as I am, but I trust it will not at all disturb the future of the my dear friend the "good gray poet." My address is the Langhorne Hotel, London. Drop me a line.
Yours fittfuly , Joaquin Miller
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Correspondent:
Joaquin Miller was the pen name of
Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837–1913), an American poet nicknamed "Byron of
the Rockies" and "Poet of the Sierras." In 1871, the Westminster Review described Miller as "leaving out the coarseness
which marked Walt Whitman's poetry" (297). In an entry in his journal dated August 1,
1871, the naturalist John Burroughs recorded Whitman's fondness for Miller's
poetry; see Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs—Comrades (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), 60.
Whitman met Miller for the first time in 1872; he wrote of a visit with Miller
in a July 19, 1872, letter to his former publisher and
fellow clerk Charles W. Eldridge.