Your third letter ab't the Tennyson visit arrived today—& has already been
re-read with eager interest2—as was the Toynbee
Hall one also. I now anticipate the one ab't your meeting Mrs.
Gilchrist.—Thanks, dear girl, for the past & thanks for those to
come—Since you left we've had over three weeks of extremely hot
weather—it affected me badly, caused some fits, unconsciousness, falling
&c—I can't go out, which is quite a cross—but no doubt in due time
things will return to their usual routine. I am sitting here down stairs by the
window in the little front room, writing this—Mrs. Davis has just brought me a
beautiful perfect middling sized sun flower—it looks like a curious golden
face turning toward me from its jar on the window sill—Fine day this for the
Grant funeral show in New York which is going on as I write3—O I nearly forgot to mention the cyclone &
destruction, brief but terrible, of last Monday4—they did not touch these premises—but came very near. loc.01347.002_large.jpg Well, Mary, dear
girl, I am making out a stupid letter—but I was determined to write
something—Affectionate remembrances to Alys, the Father and Mother, Logan, and
to Mr C5—
Correspondent:
Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe
(1864–1945) was a political activist, art historian, and critic, whom
Whitman once called his "staunchest living woman friend." A scholar of Italian
Renaissance art and a daughter of Robert Pearsall Smith, she would in 1885 marry
B. F. C. "Frank" Costelloe. She had been in contact with many of Whitman's
English friends and would travel to Britain in 1885 to visit many of them,
including Anne Gilchrist shortly before her death. For more, see Christina
Davey, "Costelloe, Mary Whitall Smith (1864–1945)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).