Thy postal card of ten days ago has just come.1 It is so good of thee to write. I am
ashamed when I think how long a silence I have kept—yet I have thought of thee
very often I have been so busy—"facilis decensus"2—into
politics!—and when once there, it is hard to get out. loc.01399.002_large.jpg Of course the one miserable thing
occupying the political field is Parnell's incredible meanness. He has dealt the
death blow to Home Rule in this generation, I am afraid.3 I feel so sorry for the
many Liberals whose one cry and interest has been Home Rule. It is not so unhappy
for me, because for several years all my work has been
given to what seems to me infinitely more interesting than the machinery of
politics—the reform of existing social abuses, such as the
loc.01399.003_large.jpg overwork &
underpay & the generally wretched conditions under which the poor live—The
collapse of Home Rule will bring these questions much more
to the front, but I think it means a Liberal defeat at the next election, as the
Party is not prepared.
I feel quite in the vein of writing a volume of newspaper "leaders" on the subject, but I will refrain!
We are all so well—children & all. Ray4 goes to a
little loc.01399.004_large.jpg
Kindergarten school every day. Frank5 & I are going to spend
our Xmas holiday at Rome, if all goes well.
Father6 is undergoing transformation into the "Country Squire" of fiction. He is wrapt up in "the place" at Haslemere, spends most of his time there.
Many thanks for all the papers, which greet me from time to time with a sight of thy hand writing.
Lovingly thine, 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).