I send the MS2 to-day by Adams Express. Return at my expense by ditto.
Take yr time. I am dissatisfied with the thing.—as I always am with any work when done. But in this case I feel particularly blue—after all my rooster-crowing—for anything put beside yr writing dwindles immediately. The MS. is not done, & never would be: I have simply suspended work. I cd write forever on L. of G. because its scope is infinite. Have made the acquaintance of Sidney Morse.3 Good talks with him. He is going to bust you again in the Autumn! A good fellow!
bye bye W. S. Kennedy loc.02900.002_large.jpg loc.02900.003_large.jpg loc.02900.004_large.jpgCorrespondent:
William Sloane Kennedy
(1850–1929) was on the staff of the Philadelphia American and the Boston Transcript; he also
published biographies of Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier (Dictionary of American Biography [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933], 336–337). Apparently Kennedy called on
the poet for the first time on November 21, 1880 (William Sloane Kennedy, Reminiscences of Walt Whitman [London: Alexander
Gardener, 1896], 1). Though Kennedy was to become a fierce defender of Whitman,
in his first published article he admitted reservations about the "coarse
indecencies of language" and protested that Whitman's ideal of democracy was
"too coarse and crude"; see The Californian, 3 (February
1881), 149–158. For more about Kennedy, see Katherine Reagan, "Kennedy, William Sloane (1850–1929)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).