Your post card of 22d came to hand this morning [.] I am glad you are able to say that you are "fairly well". Shall try to see the 4th vol. of Am. Sup. to Ency. Brit. I have the Ency. itself but not the supplement.2 Have spent an hour today most pleasantly looking over the drafts of "The Song of the Redwood Tree." Studying it all from the newspaper piece (which seems to have suggested it) to the finished, printed, poem. It is all most interesting and suggestive.3 [—] Still the same wonderfull weather here, warm—bright—sunny—. Willy Gurd4 is here still will go East to work at meter probably early next week. The scheme at present is as follows: Gurd will go East and make a gas meter, then our New York partner will establish a company to manufacture—we hope to be making meters by the autumn but there may be other slips ahead of us yet and we count on nothing too certainly [/] We will just jog along and do our best and leave the rest to Providence. After all it is a matter of little consequence [/] we have done very well for a long time now without the meter and I guess we can get on all right without it still. One thing I would like to know (tho' I suppose I never shall) that is how Harned5 accounts (to himself) for his failure to carry out his agreement with us?6
I have sent copies of the Inspector's Annual Report (in which mine is printed) and shall send you one as soon as I get them
All well and quiet here
Love to you R M BuckeCorrespondent:
Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).