Your letter of 13th has reached me.1 Thanks to you—& thanks & best remembrances to your wife2—for the kind invitation in it. I shall probably accept it for a few days, as I want to visit Washington soon as I am well enough. I should have made my visit the current week, but one of my bad spells has intervened3—will write loc.03135.002_large.jpg to you before I come—I still linger along here in the same tedious baffling way—still hope to get well—but still don't get well.
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
Joseph B. Marvin, a friend and an
admirer of Whitman's poetry, was from 1866 to 1867 the co-editor of the Radical. He was then appointed as a clerk in the Treasury
Department in Washington, on behalf of which he took a trip to London in the
late fall of 1875. On October 19, 1875, Whitman
wrote a letter to William Michael Rossetti to announce a visit from Marvin.
Rossetti gave a dinner for Marvin, which was attended by the following "good
Whitmanites": Anne Gilchrist; Joseph Knight, editor of the London Sunday Times; Justin McCarthy, a novelist and writer for
the London Daily News; Edmund Gosse; and Rossetti's
father-in-law, Ford Madox
Brown.