Your kind post card of the 8th1 inst. and papers just to hand. My cordial thanks to you.—
Dr Johnston2 has already told you of
the open air meeting held by our friends last Saturday–afternoon—the 13th inst—4 miles from Bolton3— loc_vm.02179.jpg to hear his account of
his visit to you and to West Hills.4—It was a perfect September
day,—warm, calm and bright, with a slight, pensive autumnal haze veiling the
distance. We gathered together under the shade of a tree in the fields and listened
for over an hour and a half to the Dr's story and examined
the photos he handed round as he proceeded.
loc_vm.02180.jpg It brought you very near to us all and
every heart was stirred as the Dr told us of your great
kindness to him, and of your kind messages to us all—since repeated, again &
again, in your post cards to me. In the talk which followed a general feeling was
expressed that our united gratitude, thanks & affection should be conveyed to you,
and I was commissioned to write to you.—
loc_vm.02181.jpg It gives me great pleasure to do so for
our little society owes its very existence, indirectly, to you, and we are all, in
greater or less degree, your admirers & lovers.
One of the friends (Thomas Shonock)5 has since asked me to procure a copy of the
pocket–book edition of L. of G.6 for him.7 So I will enclose a money order for
22s/—, I shall be glad if you will send one at your convenience. loc_vm.02182.jpg I am just beginning my
holidays (long needed) & your book accompanies me in all my rambles. I am spending
the first few days at home and taking solitary walks in the lonely country lanes and
on the moors near here. With you for company I have all I wish and spend blessed
hours of sacred, vital communion with the wordless divine Spirit that informs all
things
loc_vm.02183.jpg and with my
own soul. How near and dear you are to me I cannot tell
you. But I am sure that no author before ever appealed to such depths of a man's
nature, or aroused such tender, personal love. Very sure am I that your now despised
poems will yet rank with the Hebrew Scriptures (to which alone I can compare them)
as sacred and priceless—
loc_vm.02184.jpgspringing from divine depths—the latest modern revelation of
the same Spirit.
I will enclose a cutting from last weeks paper giving another instance (at a place a few miles from here) of the latent heroism of the roughest classes.
With love to you always Yours affectionately J. W. 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).