The Walt Whitman Archive
Life & Letters
Correspondence
About this Item
Title: Justin Huntly McCarthy to Walt Whitman, 3 December 1888
Date: December 3, 1888
Whitman Archive ID: loc.03246
Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.
Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Elizabeth Lorang, John Schwaninger, Eder Jaramillo, Caterina Bernardini, Ryan Furlong, Alex Ashland, Ian Faith, and Stephanie Blalock
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Grand Hotel de Mustapha Algiers
Monday 3 December 1888
Dear Mr. Walt Whitman
May I, here is this old Africa & very unhappy send a message to you in America who are helping me to bear my sorrow.
This [dry?] month I suffered the greatest loss that a young man can suffer by the death of the girl I loved, the girl who was to have been my wife. She loved your poems dearly: she taught me who loved them too to understand them as I had never understood them before. They were among the last things we ever read together but a few weeks ago in England when my life seemed so happy & there seemed to be no shadow of the implacable Death. I am reading your poems now again alone & in the bitterness of my heart in this place to which I have come to struggle with my sorrow. They are helping me, they are strengthening me & I wish to send you these few words of thanks & gratitude for the sake of my dead love & my living grief. Camerado, will you give me your hand across the sea.
Justin Huntly McCarthy
Correspondent:
Justin Huntly McCarthy (1859–1936) was an
Irish novelist and politician. He served as a member of Parliament from 1884 to
1892.