I want to thank you for the beautiful photograph of yourself sent me through Miss
Smith.1 It is too true a likeness of you as you are
now to represent the author of the Leaves of Grass. The picture which hung on yr wall showed that person better—his paganism, his full senses, his
readiness to identify himself with all things, his insubordination, & his
recklessness of the fine relations loc.03484.002_large.jpg
loc.03484.003_large.jpg which change a
world of things into a world of persons. If I could prefer a poet to a man, I should
like that picture better. But this will be the best reminder of the beautiful
ripened spirit who met me in Camden & said, "I did the work sincerely. So it is
honorable. God shall use it to help men, or else let him throw it away."
Correspondent:
George Herbert Palmer
(1842–1933) was a Bostonian scholar and writer who would become the
professor of natural religion and moral philosophy at Harvard in 1889. Mary
Whitall Smith took classes with him (as his only female student) and considered
Palmer "a very fine teacher" (Tiffany L. Johnston, "Mary Whitall Smith at the
Harvard Annex," Berenson & Harvard: Bernard and Mary as
Students exhibition, The Harvard University Center for Italian
Renaissance Studies).