I think I have all of your books (2 or 3 Editions of some) except the last,1—specified in my former note,2—which alone I intended to ask for. That might be sent by mail. I write this because in your card you speak loc_vm.00678_large.jpg of sending me books, & because I really desire only one.
I still go back occasionally to the old "Leaves of Grass" & find in them the same unfailing freshness & power, which repeated readings in no wise dull to the sense—a test which only master studies in literature loc_vm.00679_large.jpg can stand. They seem very great to me. I am thankful for them.
Faithfully yours J. T. Trowbridge Walt Whitman— loc_vm.00680_large.jpgCorrespondent:
John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916)
was a novelist, poet, author of juvenile stories, and antislavery reformer.
Though Trowbridge became familiar with Whitman's poetry in 1855, he did not meet
Whitman until 1860 when the poet was in Boston overseeing the Thayer and
Eldridge edition of Leaves of Grass. He again met Whitman
in Washington in 1863, when Trowbridge stayed with Treasury Secretary Salmon P.
Chase in order to gather material for his biography, The Ferry
Boy and the Financier (Boston: Walker and Wise, 1864); he described
their meetings in My Own Story (Boston: Houghton and
Mifflin, 1903), 360–401, with recollections of noted persons. On December
11, 1863, Trowbridge presented to Chase Emerson's letter recommending Whitman;
see Emerson's letter from January 10, 1863. Though
Trowbridge was not an idolator of Whitman, he wrote to William D. O'Connor in
1867: "Every year confirms my earliest impression, that no book has approached
the power and greatness of this book, since the Lear and Hamlet of Shakespeare"
(Rufus A. Coleman, "Trowbridge and O'Connor," American
Literature, 23 [1951–52], 327). For Whitman's high opinion of
Trowbridge, see Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906–1996), 3:506. See
also Coleman, "Trowbridge and Whitman," PMLA, 63 (1948),
262–273.