Your letter did not reach me: till tonight, when I was getting ready to go to New York: loc.03744.002_large.jpg else I wd have hastened to your "Den" & drank to our noble selves in the promised sour mash.
I have been a little-worried lately over things in general & in some sense, at beginning life over again, else I wd not have jumped so quick at your ill-treatment of me.1
God knows & Walt knows that I am as loc.03744.003_large.jpg slow as the wrath of God—to take offense especially at what my friends do or say. Life in the main, has taught me as Bailey2 says
"That all religion can inspire is—Hope—: And all mortality can teach is—Bear"!(2) To start right again I think you had better send me my MSS—and let me do as I d—m please with it . . I will send it to the World
Will see you as soon as I get back from N.Y. . .
Remember that the friend most solicitous of your welfare at the "Scovel House" has always been the undersigned—
James Matlack Scovel— loc.03744.004_large.jpgI shall never allude to the "old son" again!
Correspondent:
James Matlack Scovel
(1833–1904) began to practice law in Camden in 1856. During the Civil War,
he was in the New Jersey legislature and became a colonel in 1863. He campaigned
actively for Horace Greeley in 1872, and was a special agent for the U.S.
Treasury during Chester Arthur's administration. In the 1870s, Whitman
frequently went to Scovel's home for Sunday breakfast (Whitman's Commonplace
Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman,
1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). For a description of
these breakfasts, see Walt Whitman's Diary in Canada, ed.
William Sloane Kennedy (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1904), 59–60. For Scovel,
see George R. Prowell's The History of Camden County, New
Jersey (Philadelphia: L. J. Richards, 1886).