I got yours of the 4th instant, written on the back of Kennedy's,1 and meant to have written you long before, as well as after, but have been in a wretched condition with the "misery in my back," as the colored brother calls it. I don't improve in my back and legs as rapidly as I ought, and am nearly as lame and heavy as you are, but keep hoping.
I have wanted to hear how you are, especially your eyes, which you don't mention. The
state of your eyes worries loc.03299.002_large.jpg me more than anything else about you.
Did you see the enclosed, cut from the Nation, from the great Italian fortnightly? The article must be a splendid one to bear such excerpting by the Nation!2 We tried to get the magazine through Brentano, but failed. It must make these fellows gnash their teeth to see this growing foreign appreciation.—Send the slip back some time when you are writing.
I got a copy of Kennedy's pamphlet3 from him, and but for
my bad condition would have written to him, which I will do yet. I cant help
feeling that he skates on pretty thin ice loc.03299.003_large.jpgsometimes, though he says many
things which are quite undeniable.
I had a letter from Grace Channing4 recently in which she says: "By the way, there is in the latest edition of Leaves of Grass a poem—'The City Dead-House'—which affects me I cannot tell you how powerfully. I never saw it before, and I think Walt has never written anything more divinely beautiful. Often as I have read it, I can't keep the tears out of my eyes."
The Channings are all very happy in their new home at Pasadena in California. It appears to be a perfect Paradise
Up to date, the New York publishers have uniformly refused loc.03299.004_large.jpg to publish my Baconian reply to R.
G. White, even at my expense!5 Reason, Shakespearean
hostility to the subject. This is a pretty note! I am now going to try Boston.
The death of Mrs. Gilchrist deeply stirred me.6 I was just about to try to write to her when I saw the news of her decease.
When you next write, tell me how your eyes are. I am really anxious to know.
Good bye. Faithfully yours W. D. O'Connor. Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
William Douglas O'Connor
(1832–1889) was the author of the grand and grandiloquent Whitman pamphlet
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, published in 1866.
For more on Whitman's relationship with O'Connor, see Deshae E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas (1832–1889)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).