Your book has come so nice and fresh like a new pot-cheese in a clean napkin—I have read the first piece—"Look Out"1—all through and thought it fully equal to anything in the past, and looked over the rest of the pages—doesn't seem to me to deserve the depreciatory tone in which you speak of it.
Dr. Bucke went to England April 14—I rec'd a letter from Wm. O'C[onnor], and his little book.2
I am much the same as of late—made out very handsomely with my lecture April 15th—$674—have seen Gilder3—Early summer here—I have a new horse—very good—
Correspondent:
The naturalist John Burroughs
(1837–1921) met Whitman on the streets of Washington, D.C., in 1864. After
returning to Brooklyn in 1864, Whitman commenced what was to become a decades-long
correspondence with Burroughs. Burroughs was magnetically drawn to Whitman.
However, the correspondence between the two men is, as Burroughs acknowledged,
curiously "matter-of-fact." Burroughs would write several books involving or
devoted to Whitman's work: Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and
Person (1867), Birds and Poets (1877), Whitman, A Study (1896), and Accepting
the Universe (1924). For more on Whitman's relationship with Burroughs,
see Carmine Sarracino, "Burroughs, John [1837–1921] and Ursula [1836–1917]," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and
Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).