Nothing very new or different, Alys2 comes often & is as welcomed as sunshine—I am sitting here in my den as ever—dark & rainy to-day & yesterday—My Canadian nurse & friend has left me—(he had a good chance to go into veterinary studies, finish & practice.)3 I am getting along better than you might imagine—a bad physical brain probably catarrhal—& hopeless locomotion—are my set fiends—fair spirits, appetite & nights however—
Walt WhitmanCorrespondent:
Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe
(1864–1945) was a political activist, art historian, and critic, whom
Whitman once called his "staunchest living woman friend." A scholar of Italian
Renaissance art and a daughter of Robert Pearsall Smith, she would in 1885 marry
B. F. C. "Frank" Costelloe. She had been in contact with many of Whitman's
English friends and would travel to Britain in 1885 to visit many of them,
including Anne Gilchrist shortly before her death. For more, see Christina
Davey, "Costelloe, Mary Whitall Smith (1864–1945)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D.
Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).