I am in about my usual general health (which is nothing to brag of) but my locomotion is worse—had a fall a month ago & turned my ankle in, & at my age one dont recover from such things—Have no thought of coming to New York—If I did so, I should willingly give your friend the sittings for portrait.
Walt WhitmanWere the artist to visit Philadelphia I would sit to him here in my own room—good place north-light—as many times as he wishes.1
Correspondent:
Richard Watson Gilder
(1844–1909) was the assistant editor of Scribner's
Monthly from 1870 to 1881 and editor of its successor, The Century, from 1881 until his death. Whitman had met
Gilder for the first time in 1877 at John H. Johnston's (Gay Wilson Allen, The Solitary Singer [New York: New York University Press,
1955], 482). Whitman attended a reception and tea given by Gilder after William
Cullen Bryant's funeral on June 14; see "A Poet's Recreation" in the New York Tribune, July 4, 1878. Whitman considered Gilder
one of the "always sane men in the general madness" of "that New York art
delirium" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden,
Sunday, August 5, 1888). For more about Gilder, see Susan L.
Roberson, "Gilder, Richard Watson (1844–1909)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).