When I wrote to you yesterday I quite forgot to mention that Mr. Swinburne1 had for a long time been very much concerned that not knowing
your address he had been unable to send you a copy of his "Songs before Sunrise". As
I think it possible that loc_nhg.00798_large.jpg
loc_nhg.00799_large.jpg
loc_nhg.00796_large.jpg by this time you
may have got the book I send you one of the special copies printed on fine paper, of
which only 25 were struck off and shall feel much gratified by your acceptance of
it.
Correspondent:
Frederick Startridge Ellis
(1830–1901) was a London bookseller, publisher, and author who published
the works of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Whitman first wrote to
Ellis on August 12, 1871, to ask if he would
publish Leaves of Grass. Ellis declined, writing in an
August 23 letter that there were poems in Leaves of Grass that "would not go down in England," but
he praised Whitman's poetry and sent him a specially printed copy of Algernon
Charles Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise.