Harry boy we have missed you two or three days, & both I & Mrs D1 wondered & wanted you—but Ed2 has been here this forenoon & says you are not coming up any more to have the cut dress'd3—So I hope it is healing all right & will be no more trouble—Nothing new or special with me—Sold one of my books to-day,4 which helps along—Am not feeling quite as well as usual—(but nothing particularly bad)—Pretty dull here—If I did not have naturally good spirits I don't know what would become of me, run in here like a rat in a cage day in & day out—But I must not growl—it might be so much worse—If the weather is good I shall be down to Glendale Sunday next—Love to E5 and little D6
Walt Whitman loc_vm.00244_large.jpgCorrespondent:
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. In 1883, Harry married
Eva Westcott. 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).