I have mailed you and registered there. the following Books and printed matter. a Copy of "the Bhagavad Gita"2
Thompson's3 translations. (a recent Edition.) Selections from the
Sanscrit by John Muir4 D.D. a lecture on
English Literature by a Unitarian Minister of Birkenhead (to whom I gave a copy
of the Complete Edition of your Poems) lastly the Supplement to our town's paper. I would like you to look over
a Sketch by H.C. Andersen5 on two Candles, its
translated by one of your readers here. the other is a Story from Iceland being the first story in said
paper, it is also written by a warm friend of yours, he was once Editor of the paper but is now engaged in a
larger paper in a neighbouring town. a paper that is quite in advance of all our papers here about entitled
the Newcastle Chronicle it has got a Daily as well as weekly issue. I will send you a copy someday of the weekly
one so that you may gauge its power and its principles. and also
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contrast it with your own papers for I think there is large room for improvement in—many of them I see.
they seem to contain matters of such trivial interest outside of the district they are issued in, now I think
your papers ought as a rule to be universal in a lare
portion of there topics. if your
National poetry to a large extent is intensely European I think the papers to large extent are essentially
local in there articles. at least
with very few exceptions, such I find is the case in those
I recieve . the best piece of
hopeful
outspoken utterance in print I see is the reports of the Free Religious Association6 of Boston.
It seems quite in Keeping with what supposes and expects from the cultureed
people of your land—but perhaps you dont see it? so that
my reference to it will not be of use to you.
I help all I can here its circulation. Well I hope you will enjoy our little gift I hope in the perusal of
each work you will something akin to the width and depth of your own heart. these are old utterances. yet new to us in
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this lands. "the Gita" is one of my favourite Books, it is the gem of all Indian lore.
it is as wide in its teachings and runs deep too as anything I have ever yet seen
in printed Book. I have tried hard to induce a few souls
to aid in the issue of a cheap universal Edition of it. but have utterly failed. its present publisher been
lead to do it, in the hopes it may lead to some such recognition by some of our Literary
associtions —I
read with deepfelt sympathy the slight utterances as E.A. Poe7 He and his Works have
long been in part dear to me.—but what is it that is not so. and to
Carlyle8 and my own nature too and lastly to you and your teachings. how can one but feel
interested and moved by such a Nature and then I ask? How comes the distance in such life as
own such Souls? We We poor mortals sit in
judgement on such—who know nothing of the nature or the environments of such.
I pause in my thoughts on all such, and gaze on them in wonderment—even with awe and silence too.—
How much of the Speculations of our time did he not solve. and lies therein embeded
in these wild wild awful stories of his. Ah! that nature is one that used one's love and deepest sympathy,
not our Hate and Scorn. as alas too often is given it.
your sketch of him in the Storm tossed vessel is very very awful real and true. it made me tremble while I read
it.—and I have read it up to friends 3 times who call in to hear the news.
bye the way is the photograph you sent me with your Beaver on
procurable yet? If so where and what price? The friend whose letter I sent you on your Critique on
Burns9 who lives in London wants a copy. he has seen the one you
sent me in 1869. Now lastly I feel glad to see in our papers you have seen Conway10 again,
I once spent a little time pleasantly with him in London in 1873. He's a right noble free spoken man, full of
wise helpful energy of all sorts in his neighborhood in London. I regretted his notes on you was so very brief.
Will my subscription to your New Edition of your works, if sent you direct to America, be of any real aid in your
new efforts? let me know I will
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see what I can do in the matter of subscribing for a few Copies—I would gladly like to aid you if I can
do so. I think all who read your Books ought to help you in some way that would really be helpful—
I feel in your case that it is only by some such method we cannot really help forward the work you aim to do. Excuse that simple free scrawl.—
Yours Thankfully Thomas DixonCorrespondent:
Thomas Dixon (1831–1880), a corkcutter of
Sunderland, England, was one of Walt Whitman's early English admirers. In 1856,
he had bought copies of Leaves of Grass from a book
peddler; one of these copies was later sent by William B. Scott to William
Michael Rossetti. Dixon vigorously supported cultural projects and represented
the ideal laborer of John Ruskin, who printed many of his own letters to the
corkcutter in Time and Tide (1867). See Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto
(1892), 2, 32–33, 267–269; Harold Blodgett, Walt
Whitman in England (1934), 15–17; The Works of
John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1905), 17:
lxxviii–lxxix.