Correspondent:
Horace Howard Furness (1833–1912) was the distinguished editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, and was one of the honorary pallbearers at Whitman's funeral. See also Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, January 12, 1889. On April 27, 1890, Whitman sent Furness a copy of "O Captain! My Captain!" (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). See also Whitman's April 30, 1890, letter to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician specializing in nervous disorders. Furness was somewhat snide in a letter he wrote to English poet Edmund Gosse on March 29, 1892, three days after the poet's death: "Let us hope that he is now more favourably situated than erstwhile for giving a 'yawp over the roofs of the world.' I should be sorry to think that the yawp would reverberate through our cellars. I'm not sure that the very best of Walt was not his Jovian looks. Latterly when I used to see him in his room, with that majestic avalanche of a beard flowing in snowy luxuriousness over his broad chest, it was not hard to convert his blue wrapper into blue sky and the vast & innumerable newspapers piled knee deep around him in[to] the clouds of Olympus. And, oh, the lot of funny stories about him, gossip pure & simple but nourishing, which 'twould take too long to write & must be reserved for the pleasant time when you & I can ha'e a crack thegither."

Notes:

1. This correspondence card apparently accompanied a transcription of "O Captain! My Captain!," which Whitman sent to Furness on April 27, 1890 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). Furness and his father, Reverend Doctor William Henry Furness (1802–1896), a Unitarian minister in Philadelphia, visited the poet on April 10, 1890. See Whitman's letter to the Canadian physcian Richard Maurice Bucke of April 10, 1890. [back]