I am grieved to hear2 that you have been so unwell and can only trust that your physician is a true prophet, and that you will recover and be as well as ever.3 I have myself known a case of cerebral anæmia in a young lady living near me. She lost her mind and no one who saw her believed she could live; but under the superintendence of a good doctor she has perfectly recovered and looks plumper and fresher than ever she did before.
This is the first letter I have written for weeks, and I am afraid I write rather obscurely, for my hand and arm have been crippled with rheumatism (I hope it is not gout), and I am not yet perfectly recovered.
I was beholden to you for your Democratic Vistas,4 and if I did not answer and acknowledge them I regret to have done so; but if you knew how great the mass of my correspondence is, and how much I dislike letter-writing, I doubt not, you would forgive me easily.
When I next hear of or from you may the news be that you are fully re-established in your old vigor and body: Meanwhile believe me
Yours ever A TennysonCorrespondent:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) succeeded
William Wordsworth as poet laureate of Great Britain in 1850. The intense male
friendship described in In Memoriam, which Tennyson wrote
after the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, possibly influenced Whitman's
poetry. Whitman wrote to Tennyson in 1871 or late 1870, probably shortly after the
visit of Cyril Flower in December, 1870, but the letter is not extant (see Thomas Donaldson,
Walt Whitman the Man [New York: F. P.
Harper, 1896], 223). Tennyson's first letter to Whitman is dated July
12, 1871. Although Tennyson extended an invitation for Whitman
to visit England, Whitman never acted on the offer.