I send you to-day by mail, to same address as this card, my Volume, Two Rivulets. Please send me word, (by postal card will do,) soon as it reaches you safely
W Whitman loc.02036.002_large.jpgCorrespondent:
Frederick Startridge Ellis
(1830–1901) was a London bookseller, publisher, and author who published
the works of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Whitman first wrote to
Ellis on August 12, 1871, to ask if he would
publish Leaves of Grass. Ellis declined, writing in an
August 23 letter that there were poems in Leaves of Grass that "would not go down in England," but
he praised Whitman's poetry and sent him a specially printed copy of Algernon
Charles Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise.