I cannot tell you how glad I am to write to you again with some confidence that you will be able to read it yourself. I only pray that you may recover sufficient strength to enjoy some measure of comfort & ease.2
The last 2 days
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have been a happy joyful release from the heavy cares & anxieties
of several weeks past. Do not think us thoughtless or
inconsiderate, or altogether selfish that we welcome your
partial recovery with so great a joy. The world has seemed to us,
during your illness, half emptied of its warmth & love.
We have learned, in bitterness & grief, how much the love
between us means & how deep it goes. And it is an immense
joy to us to find that it is to be ours still.
The last mail brought letters from Traubel3 which were the first to give us solid grounds of hope. And it astonishes me to find how gladdening & vitalizing is the joyous sense of release—as of a long & heavy load removed. May God bless you & give you comfort & strength.
Horace has been marvellously good to us,
as well as to you. Daily & faithfully he sends us bulletins
of your condition, and under trying circumstance & heavy
press of affairs steadfastly
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shows us loving kindess like a brother's. I cannot thank him or
respond to his kindness as he deserves. Perhaps you, whom
he loves & reveres as we do beyond all others, will thank him for us?
That will please him best of all.
I will not write much now, but I am very happy in the prospect of writing again. My dearest love to you. & my most fervent prayers & good wishes are yours always.
WallaceCorrespondent:
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).