The 3d July was my rejoicing day, dearest Friend,—the day the packet from America reached me
scattering for a while the clouds of pain and humiliation & filling me through & through
with light & warmth: indeed I believe I am often as happy reading as you were writing your Poems.
The long new one "As a Strong Bird"1 of itself answers the question hinted
in your preface &
loc_cb.00112.jpg
nobly fulfils the promise of its opening lines.
We want again & again in fresh words & from
the new impetus & standpoint of new days the vision that sweeps ahead, the tones that fill us with
faith & joy in our present share of life & work—prophetic of the splendid issues. It does
not need to be American born to believe & passionately rejoice in the belief of what is preparing
in America. It is for humanity. And it
loc_cb.00113.jpg
comes through England. The noblest souls the most heroic hearts of England were called to be the nucleus
of the race that, (enriched with the blood & qualities of other races & planted down in the new
half of the world reserved in all its fresh beauty & exhaustless riches to be the arena) is to
fulfil
justify outstrip the vision of the Poets, the quenchless aspirations of all the ardent souls that never
ever struggled forward upon this earth.
loc_cb.00107.jpg
For me, the most precious page in the book is that which contains the Democratic Souvenirs.2
I respond to that as one to whom it means the life of her Soul. It comforts me very much. You speak in the Preface
of the imperious & resistless command from within out of which Leaves of Grass issued. This carried
with it no doubt the secret of a corresponding resistless power over the reader wholly unprecedented
unapproached in literature as I believe, & to be compared
loc_cb.00115.jpg
only with that of Christ. I speak out of my own experience when I say that no Myth, no "miracle" embodying
the notion of a direct communication between God & a human creature, goes beyond the effect soul
& body, of those Poems on me: & that were I to put into oriental forms of speech what I experienced
it would read like one of those old "miracles" or "myths. Thus of many things that used to appear to me
incomprehensible lies, I now
loc_cb.00116.jpg
perceive the germ of truth & understand that what was called the supernatural was merely an inadequate
& too timid way of conceiving the natural.—Had I died the following year, it would have been the
simple truth to say I died of joy. The doctor called it nervous exhaustion falling with tremendous violence
on the heart which "seemed to have been strained": & was much puzzled how that could have come to pass.
I left him in his puzzle, but it was none to me—How could such
loc_cb.00117.jpg
a dazzling radiance of light flooding the soul, suddenly kindling it to such an intense life, but put a
tremendous strain on the vital organs? how could the muscles of the heart suddenly grow adequate to such
new work—O the passionate tender gratitude that flooded my breast, the yearning that seemed to strain
the heart beyond endurance that I might repay with all my life & soul & body This debt—that
I might give joy to him who filled me with such joy, that I might make his outward life sweeter & more
beautiful
loc_cb.00114.jpg
who made my inner life so divinely sweet & beautiful. But, dear Friend, I have learnt to see that this
is not to be so, now: that for me too love & death are folded inseparably together: Death that will renew
my youth.
I have had the paper from Burlington3—with the details a woman likes so to
have. I wish I had known for certain whether you went on to Boston & were enjoying the music there. My
youngest boy4 has gone to spend his holiday with his brother5 in South Wales &
he writes me such good news of Per. that he is "looking as brown as a nut &
loc_cb.00108.jpg
very jolly" & his home in a "clean airy old farm house half way up a mountain in the midst of wild rough
grand scenery, & the sea in sight near enough to hear the sound of it about as loud as the rustling of
"leaves"—so the boys will have a good time together, and the girls6 are going with me for the holiday to
their grandmother at Colne. W. Rossetti7 does not take his till October this year.
I suppose it will be long & long before this letter reaches
loc_cb.00109.jpg
you as you will be gone to California—may it be a time full of enjoyment—full to the Brim.
What a noble achievement is Mr. Stanley's:8 it fills me with pleasure that Americans should thus have been the rescuer of our large hearted heroic traveller. We have just got his letters with account of the five races in Central Africa copied from N. Y. Herald, July9 29.
Correspondent:
Anne Burrows Gilchrist
(1828–1885) was the author of one of the first significant pieces of
criticism on Leaves of Grass, titled "A Woman's Estimate
of Walt Whitman (From Late Letters by an English Lady to W. M. Rossetti)," The Radical 7 (May 1870), 345–59. Gilchrist's long
correspondence with Whitman indicates that she had fallen in love with the poet
after reading his work; when the pair met in 1876 when she moved to
Philadelphia, Whitman never fully returned her affection, although their
friendship deepened after that meeting. For more information on their
relationship, see Marion Walker Alcaro, "Gilchrist, Anne Burrows (1828–1885)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).