I enclose for the cottage2 $285 in two checks of $50 and $235 respectively. On the former you will see the signature of one of the best of your Boston friends, Dr. Wesselhoeft.3 This will make $788 so far, I believe, and I think the remaining $12 will be forthcoming soon.
I wish it might have been done so as to enable you to escape this hot weather
altogether, but I loc_es.00094.jpg hope
you can contrive to get away before the summer ends. Shall you get some house that
is already built, or do you propose building?
Would you not like in the house a nice fireplace where you can sit and toast your
toes before a nice open fire and dream with open eyes as you look at the blaze? I
think you would enjoy that better than an ugly black stove that scorches all the
vitality out of the air. If the idea pleases you, my friend, Jack Law, loc_es.00095.jpg the Chelsea tile-maker,
would like to send you a handsome set of tiles for it. Law knew you in the old Pfaff
days,4 when he was a landscape painter, but says you
probably would not recollect him by name. Very likely you might remember his
vigorous expletives, and great enthusiasm!
I think I may go on to New York next week and run over to Philadelphia when I
shall loc_es.00096.jpg drop in on
you.
P.S.—Oh! About Hartmann.5 He was altogether "too previous" and hardly appreciated what he had undertaken. He did not know how to go to work and appointed officers of a society which had not been organized! We all had to sit down on him and the matter is in abeyance. I hope it may come to something later. You may remember I wrote you last winter about the idea of a W. W. Society.
S.B.
Correspondent:
Sylvester Baxter (1850–1927)
was on the staff of the Boston Herald. Apparently he met
Whitman for the first time when the poet delivered his Lincoln address in Boston
in April, 1881; see Rufus A. Coleman, "Whitman and Trowbridge," PMLA 63 (1948), 268. Baxter wrote many newspaper columns
in praise of Whitman's writings, and in 1886 attempted to obtain a pension for
the poet. For more, see Christopher O. Griffin, "Baxter, Sylvester [1850–1927]," Walt Whitman:
An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).