Your kind letter1 is received and the sad news of your ill
health2 makes this pleasant
weather even
seem tiresome and out of place. I had hoped to find you the same hale and whole man I had met in New
York a few years go and now I shall perhaps find you
bearing you a staff and full of pain
and torture. However my dear friend as you have lived from within and nor
from without I am sure you will be able to bear whatever comes with
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that beautiful faith and philosophy you have ever given us in your great and immortal chants.
I am coming to you really soon, as you request; but I cannot say to day or yet tomorrow for I am in the midst of work and am not altogether my own master. But I will come and we will talk it all over together. In the meantime remember that whateer befalls you you have the perfect love and sympathy of many if not all of the noblest and loftiest natures of the two hemispheres. Till I see you my dear friend and fellow toiler goodbye
Yours fitfully Joaquin MillerCorrespondent:
Joaquin Miller was the pen name of
Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837–1913), an American poet nicknamed "Byron of
the Rockies" and "Poet of the Sierras." In 1871, the Westminster Review described Miller as "leaving out the coarseness
which marked Walt Whitman's poetry" (297). In an entry in his journal dated August 1,
1871, the naturalist John Burroughs recorded Whitman's fondness for Miller's
poetry; see Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs—Comrades (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), 60.
Whitman met Miller for the first time in 1872; he wrote of a visit with Miller
in a July 19, 1872, letter to his former publisher and
fellow clerk Charles W. Eldridge.