After a time of much anxiety about you the papers gave better accounts & we may hope
that your last word of promise & encouragment has not yet been spoken to men. I got
from Traubel1 the L. of G. of 18922—a noble
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volume & just such a one as I have wished to possess. My friend Standish O'Grady3
asks me to address a letter to you. Take, with his, my words of sympathy in your late heavy
trial, & of unalterable homage & love. You have given such faith & courage to
so many souls that I doubt not your own ride
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high over all surges of pain & physical dissolution. And I pray that strength &
cheer may reach you from those deepest sources which you have opened up for others &
set flowing eternally. Goodbye dear Walt, may God bless and keep you in any and every
lot that may be yours.
Correspondent:
Thomas William Hazen Rolleston
(1857–1920) was an Irish poet and journalist. After attending college in
Dublin, he moved to Germany for a period of time. He wrote to Whitman
frequently, beginning in 1880, and later produced with Karl Knortz the first
book-length translation of Whitman's poetry into German. In 1889, the collection
Grashalme: Gedichte [Leaves of
Grass: Poems] was published by Verlags-Magazin in Zurich, Switzerland.
See Walter Grünzweig, Constructing the German Walt Whitman (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1995). For more information on Rolleston, see
Walter Grünzweig, "Rolleston, Thomas William Hazen (1857–1920)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).