with best respects & love1
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
Horace Howard Furness
(1833–1912) was the distinguished editor of the Variorum Shakespeare, and
was one of the honorary pallbearers at Whitman's funeral. See also Horace
Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, January 12, 1889. On April 27,
1890, Whitman sent Furness a copy of "O Captain! My Captain!"
(Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of
Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). See also
Whitman's April 30, 1890, letter to Dr. Silas Weir
Mitchell, a physician specializing in nervous disorders. Furness was somewhat
snide in a letter he wrote to English poet Edmund Gosse on March 29, 1892, three
days after the poet's death: "Let us hope that he is now more favourably
situated than erstwhile for giving a 'yawp over the roofs of the world.' I
should be sorry to think that the yawp would reverberate through our cellars.
I'm not sure that the very best of Walt was not his Jovian looks. Latterly when
I used to see him in his room, with that majestic avalanche of a beard flowing
in snowy luxuriousness over his broad chest, it was not hard to convert his blue
wrapper into blue sky and the vast & innumerable newspapers piled knee deep
around him in[to] the clouds of Olympus. And, oh, the lot of funny stories about
him, gossip pure & simple but nourishing, which 'twould take too long to
write & must be reserved for the pleasant time when you & I can ha'e a
crack thegither."