Your two Bolton friends and admirers, J. Johnston1 & J. W. Wallace,2 again write in sending you their love and best wishes on your Birthday.
We are very thankful to have within our power the means of again communicating with you and of sending you a small token of our deep and continued reverence & affection.
Since our last letter your November Boughs3 has loc_vm.01024.jpgappeared—of which
we each immediately procured a copy. And not the least of the pleasures it gave us
was the admirable portrait of yourself on the frontispiece. Every line of the book
has been carefully read—most of it again & again—& has increased the
heavy debt we owe you. We feel, too, in reading its closing lines that besides your
other great services to humanity, you, too, like Elias
Hicks,4 like George Fox,5 have "laboured", and "made
contributions" to, and, "best of all set an incarnated example" of, life spent in
the constant "thought of God, merged in the thoughts of
loc_vm.01025.jpg moral right and the immortality of
identity."—But your contributions have been far
greater, and of immeasurably wider scope than theirs, inasmuch as they go along with
a vastly increased intellectual power and range, and are "consistent with the
Hegelian formulas, and consistent with modern science." By these immense services in
these our times, and especially in your contributions to the "thought of the
immortality of identity," you have enrolled yourself for ever amongst those who, you
justly say, are "dearest to humanity,"—and are
inexpressibly dear to us.
We hope that the remainder of your life may loc_vm.01026.jpg be serene and calm, and cheered by the
ardent love and gratitude of those who, like us, are so
deeply indebted to you.
We each send you £5 which we should like you to expend in some visible token of our good will.
We also enclose 2 photos. 1st—one of J. Johnston—taken for presentation to the members of an ambulance class, of which he was the teacher, and who gave him the writing cabinet shown on the table. 2nd J. W. Wallace in his own little room, photographed by J. Johnston some months ago. It isn't a good portrait, but it may6
Correspondent:
James William Wallace
(1853–1926), of Bolton, England, was an architect and great admirer of
Whitman. Wallace, along with Dr. John Johnston (1852–1927), a physician in
Bolton, founded the "Bolton College" of English admirers of the poet. Johnston
and Wallace corresponded with Whitman and with Horace Traubel and other members
of the Whitman circle in the United States, and they separately visited the poet
and published memoirs of their trips in John Johnston and James William Wallace,
Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 by Two
Lancashire Friends (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917). For more
information on Wallace, see Larry D. Griffin, "Wallace, James William (1853–1926)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).