As I write I am sitting in my big chair—cold to-day here—sunny however—Morse1 is here working on a life size Emerson2—(somewhat of a demand for them)—Your last letter good reading for him (& me too)—don't push the getting of the head3 into any Boston gallery ("wait for the wagon")—it must depend on its artistic merits—as a piece of modeling &c—Nothing new with me—No E Rhys4 yet——I have heard from O Connor5—tolerable—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).