Many thanks for thy card of the 3rd which came on Saturday, just too late for me to
catch the return mail. I am afraid by a curious fatality all thy biographers want to
make thee out too good for thy liking! Has thee never
thought of expanding the Specimen Days into Autobiographical sketches? Then thee
could tell the world thy wickedness to the full, which loc.01360.002_large.jpg thy friends are so
uncomprehending as not to see! I wonder if thee knows Mr. Norman personally? He is
a charming fellow, very clever and full of American pluck. He is always so busy that
one seldom gets a chance of seeing him in the seething side of affairs in this great
city, but I am going to make my husband look him up again, now that I know he is a
friend of thine.
We have had nothing here but a succession of thick fogs, and today when I saw the
flush of the real sun in the sky, I thought it was a fire!
loc.01360.003_large.jpg
In pursuance of the course of reading I wrote to thee about, I have begun to take
Greek lessons and to read Plato's Republic. In our spare moments (which are alas!
none too many) we are working out our idea of the ideal State, as a sort of
supplement and corrective to Socialism. But life rushes along too fast here to give
one time for many wayside reflections, I am afraid, and too often I find whole days
filled up with things—thoughts being crowded out.
Perhaps it is good to live an intensely practical life for
loc.01360.004_large.jpg a while.
I am very grateful for thy little slip anent Tennyson's latest, although I don't
agree with it at all. Tennyson struck me as a man great in
spots, and the cracks filled in with inferior stuff. I think this latest
outburst of cynical pessimism comes from one of the gaps in the greatness of his
nature. Perhaps thee will think this the hasty & impulsive judgment of youth. I
will begin to reconsider it when I find thee issuing a latest edition of Leaves of
Grass with all the optimism loc.01360.005_large.jpg and faith and kindliness left out. I should have been glad to die
before I had left such a message as my last utterance, the
final outcome of a long life of experience and thought. I can't join with thee in
thanking him for his "Sixty Years After"!1 I judge people by different standards from
those which one uses towards Nature, for I think the gulf between natural evolution
& moral responsibility is infinite, and if the present
poems of Tennyson are the result of his point of view all along, then I think he is
responsible for taking such a point of view & for
loc.01360.006_large.jpg working it out to this
disheartening issue.
But I am disobeying my doctor, who has forbidden long letters for the present. It is always a temptation to chat with thee—I only wish I were near enough to do it really. Thee can't think what a refreshment to soul and body it is to read Leaves of Grass, or even to think of thee, in the midst of this artificial town life. I hope thee is well and cheerful; I am always silently sending thee good wishes across the ocean.
Thy friend, Mary Whitall CostelloeCorrespondent:
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).