How is it with you, dear Walt? I fear from what little I hear from you and especially from your silence that you are having a bad time. and I hear too that Dr Longaker2 is sick which is very bad news because he is evidently a good fellow and because I know you need his care. But I trust he will soon be round again and that you too will before long be easier.
Here all goes quietly and well—I am mending3—hope to be quite myself again very shortly. We have a cold spell of weather it snowed yesterday morning and this morning
Love to you R M Bucke loc_zs.00389.jpg Given me by W. May 6 1891 loc_zs.00390.jpgCorrespondent:
Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) was a
Canadian physician and psychiatrist who grew close to Whitman after reading Leaves of Grass in 1867 (and later memorizing it) and
meeting the poet in Camden a decade later. Even before meeting Whitman, Bucke
claimed in 1872 that a reading of Leaves of Grass led him
to experience "cosmic consciousness" and an overwhelming sense of epiphany.
Bucke became the poet's first biographer with Walt
Whitman (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1883), and he later served as one
of his medical advisors and literary executors. For more on the relationship of
Bucke and Whitman, see Howard Nelson, "Bucke, Richard Maurice," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).