Finest sort of weather, sun, skies &c here days & nights—I was out last evn'g to supper and stopt my chair2 to have a good long look at the skies & full moon—Alys3 has been here to-day with a young woman chum—on their way to Milville—Nothing to write about but feel pretty well & tho't I w'd write. The news (the papers full) is of death of Jeff Davis4—that ends it—or seems to—
Love & respects to father & all, not forgetting the girls. Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
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).