If convenience helps I want to present two American girls, sisters, Mary Whitall and Alys Smith, of Quaker stock[,] special personal friends of mine—to you—They are traveling in Europe with their parents—Mary can tell you all about my perplexing self to latest dates2—
Walt WhitmanTo Lord Houghton
Correspondent:
Richard Monckton Milnes
(1809–1885), Lord Houghton, was an intimate of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(1809–1892) and William Makepeace Thackeray
(1811–1863), as well as a poet. He was a
collector of famous people; in Dictionary of National
Biography he is characterized as "eminently a dilettante." Houghton
wrote to Joaquin Miller on September 1, 1875, from Chicago: "Please give my best
regards to Mr Whitman." On September 5, 1875,
Miller informed Whitman that he was trying to arrange a meeting with Lord
Houghton. Houghton himself wrote to Whitman on September
27, 1875, and proposed a visit at the end of October or early in
November, and on November 3, 1875, he asked whether November 6 would be
convenient. See Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in
Camden (1906–1996), Thursday,
June 21, 1888, 364, and Wednesday,
September 12th, 1888, 310; In Re
Walt Whitman (1893), ed. Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and
Thomas B. Harned, 36; and Harold Blodgett, Walt Whitman in
England (1934), 141–143.