I was very, very glad to get thy postal card1 & thy congratulations on the birth
of our second little daughter,2 who is two months old today. We
have just brought her back from the country, where we all had a most delightful
Easter holiday. How thee would have enjoyed our drives! The fields & lanes were
starred with primroses & daffodils, & loc.01384.002_large.jpgthe hedges were just breaking into
bloom. The air was fragrant & warm & the birds seemed intoxicated with joy
at the return of Spring. The English country is so beautiful—it is different,
too, from anything we can see at home. There is a mellow historical air brooding
over everything—the old common lands, dating from Saxon times—which are
beautiful even if they are not useful in an agricultural sense—the quaint old
rambling villages with mossy thatched roofs, clustering
loc.01384.003_large.jpgabout the gates of some lordly
park, of whose castle or gabled Manor House one can catch glimpses through the
magnificent trees—I do not say I approve of grand
castles & dependent villages—or even of so much waste land. But I enjoy it
even more than an Englishman could, I think, since I don't feel responsible for its
existence.
We have come back again to work, political, legal, & social—& of these
three the hardest is the social. I grow loc.01384.004_large.jpgmore disinclined every year for the
kind of amusement which society here offers—which is not amusement at all, but
a struggle for notoriety.
Little Ray3 has entered the enchanted land of imagination. She
lives in "'tories" & "p'etends" & we are in terror of our lives from her
deadly assaults as a "bear-lion." She usually eats her supper in the character of an
"efelant" with a "long nose" & a "big mouff," & when she wakes up in the
night I sometimes find her transformed loc.01384.005_large.jpginto a loudly purring "pussy-cat"
or a wriggling "'nake." Her little sister is still in the mental attitude of an
oyster—except that on occasion she can do what I believe no animal ever
did—laugh. But that is not quite true—I can remember one animal who used
to laugh—Antecellere—the horse I had so many years. He used to laugh
when I fell off—sometimes he laughed so hard that he would forget to run
away.
There is an English friend of mothers' who has long been a disciple of thine. She is going to America soon & is so very anxious to see thee that I ventured to give her a letter to thee. But I told her of thy ill-health & warned her that thee might not be well enough to see her—so thee will not feel in necessary at all, if thee doesn't feel like seeing her when she comes.
I am just preparing a loc.01384.007_large.jpgspeech on "Sugar Bounties"—which I am to give soon at The
Annual Meeting of the Women's Liberal Federation.4 It is one of
the burning questions of the day, & is really the old contest between Free Trade
& Protection, under a new form. I am on the Free Trade side, in spite of my
American upbringing.
I must close to get this in today's post. With love & always with sincerest wishes for thy health, I am,
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).