Johnston2 shewed me your card of the 5th,3 which I read with thoughts & emotions not to be expressed.—
"Stars silent rest o'er us Graves under us silent. But heard are the Voices, Heard are the Sages, The Worlds & the ages 'Choose well: your choice is Brief & yet endless. Here eyes do regard you In Eternity's stillness. Here is all fullness, Ye have, to reward you."4 loc_vm.01170.jpgHow I long to hear the better reports of your health & strength which are surely even now on the way. God grant it!
Last night a little group of friends met at Wentworth Dixon's5 & to present him with the copy of L. of G. you sent. I made the presentation, & W.D. was very much moved by it & by your kind inscription. Your portrait looked down on us from his wall & we felt you to be indeed one of us, kind, loving, & blessing. Dr. J sang a song: specially written for the occasion—in one line of which he spoke of the book as coming from our "'good loc_vm.01171.jpg grey Poet' to our good grey Stoic"! (W.D. just 36 is quite grey—& is an old lover of Epictetus & the Stoics6).
The weather here is very changeable—warm & fine as in midsummer in the beginning of the week, it is now very cold with occasional snow showers.
Loving thoughts & sympathies & prayerful good wishes to you.
Wallace loc_vm.01172.jpg loc_vm.01173.jpg loc_vm.01174.jpgCorrespondent:
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).