Seems to me the trees & grass & skies never look'd so fine as they do these early summer days.—I suppose this letter to your folks at Glendale1 will give the points of news abt me &c. I keep up Hank (but it is a tough job sometimes)—If I am well enough I go over to a birth day supper2 some friends insist of giving me Saturday evn'g next. From that I enter on my 72d year—
Walt Whitmanhere is $2 for the young ones, Eva3
Correspondent:
Walt Whitman met the
18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a
relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship,
in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of
Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though
it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only
in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son"
(as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H.
Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic
charge to it. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998). Eva M. Westcott (1857–1939) was a teacher in
New Jersey. She married Harry Lamb Stafford on June 25, 1883, and together they
had three children.