I was delighted this morning to see your handwriting on a package of papers. I infer
from that that you are able to be up and have your bed made:—There have been
alarming reports about your health in the papers, and I have hardly known what to
think. I hope you will be with us many years yet—but I suppose it is vain to
expect a complete restoration of bodily power.—I trust you may be fairly
comfortable, and that I may see you once more in the flesh. The newspapers on this
coast, especially the San Francisco Chronicle (the best of all) are very friendly to
you and copy every thing that appears about you in the Eastern Press—I am loc.02026.002_large.jpg still struggling
to establish myself at the bar here: with fair prospect of success. The probablity
is that I shall establish myself permanently here. This is bound to be a large city,
and the metropolis of Southern California as San Francisco of the Northern Part of
the State.—It is pretty warm here this month, but the nights are always cool
and we sleep under a blanket always.—It is a much pleasanter summer climate
than Philadelphia or Washington.
Correspondent:
Charles W. Eldridge (1837–1903) was one half
of the Boston-based abolitionist publishing firm Thayer and Eldridge, who issued
the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. In December 1862, on
his way to find his injured brother George in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Whitman
stopped in Washington and encountered Eldridge, who had become a clerk in the
office of the army paymaster, Major Lyman Hapgood. Eldridge helped Whitman gain employment in Hapgood's office.
For more on Whitman's relationship with
Thayer and Eldridge, see David Breckenridge Donlon, "Thayer, William Wilde (1829–1896) and Charles W. Eldridge
(1837–1903)," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).