I have just heard from Kennedy2 that your illness continues. We
had been hoping that the recovery would be more lasting and that the summer days
would see you driving out and enjoying the precious sunshine. We had also been
looking forward to the pleasure of feeling that you were comfortably domiciled in
the desired cottage of your own, away from the stifling and noisy city, but your
friends who worked to that and will all feel—as one loc_es.00112.jpg of them has expressed it — that the
thought that the project has given you even the briefest joy, and that it has given
you the gratification of building and dwelling therein in the world of your mind—more real than the world of sense—fully
compensates them.
I am so glad that you have to help you so devoted a friend as young Traubel,3 and through you I give him my hand and my thanks.
I have lately been reading a beautiful and noble story by Edward Bellamy,4 "Looking Backward." It goes far in the direction pointed out by your prophetic "Democratic Vistas," and I hope Traubel will read it and tell you about it.
In these days the glorious words you have spoken about Death comes up in my mind, and I feel much as must have been felt by the disciples in those calm last hours of Socrates. Whether his coming be near at hand, or later, he can only take your physical presence from us and that which you have given will ever abide with us. To many whose souls you know will be realized by your words:
"I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth."5
Faithfully yours Sylvester BaxterCorrespondent:
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).