The papers say you are engaged upon a complete Edition of your Poems.1 I have been an admirer thereof for some six years, and believe myself to have learned from them.
loc.01330.002_large.jpgI have the Rossetti Edition,2 but should like to have the complete one. I enclose a money order for £4.18.0 (somewhere about $20), for an early copy.
I would send you a volume of poems of my own, but they are very juvenile; and I loc.01330.003_large.jpg would rather not be known of by them.
Would your health permit you to come to England? My wife & I would both be delighted if you could come and stay with us so long as might suit you. I expect in the spring we shall be resident a few miles out of loc.01330.004_large.jpg London.
With our best regards, Yours faithfully Kenningale Cook. Walt Whitman.Correspondent:
Kenningale Robert Cook
(1845–1886) was editor of the Dublin University
Magazine, and he was married to popular Victorian novelist Mabel
Collins (Marion Meade, Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the
Myth [New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1980], 390). Cook was also the
author of The Fathers of Jesus: A Study of the Lineage of the
Christian Doctrine and Traditions, 2 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench & Co.,
1886).