I send you a cheering review of Hosnett's book from the Nation. So far I have not been able to find the book here, but will continue the search. It appears to give you great rank, and prefigures big future verdicts.
I got your letter of last May, but have not been well able to write with my half-paralyzed hands and moribund head. My little book overwhelmed
me with letters, and yal_af.00022_large.jpg I have felt stung not to be able to answer many of them, but so it is.
I hope the liquorice powder helped you. If not satisfactory, please let me know sometime when you are writing.
I had a letter from Dr Bucke1 recently, which I will try to answer soon. I was glad he had such a good time.
Donnelly2 promised to have his book out this June, but I guess the decipheration process was more laborious than he had reckoned. My faith is not shaken.
Life seems to have almost stopped still with me. I earnestly wish I could get well, or else peg out suddenly.
I hope you have stood the summer fairly well. It has been, lasting three or four days, pretty comfortable, and the worst is now, which is pretty dog dayish.
Au revoir. Always faithfully WDO'C Walt Whitman, Camden, N.J.
—Will you be going yal_af.00024_large.jpg
up to Canada this summer? Charley Eldridge3 intends leaving here for the North on a trip Saturday, and wanted to stop to see you at Camden, but
doubts whether he should find you there.
—I had a note from Herbert Gilchrist4 the other day, asking leave to print some letters of mine to Rossetti about his mother. He is writing a memoir of her, which is nearly completed.
Correspondent:
William Douglas O'Connor
(1832–1889) was the author of the grand and grandiloquent Whitman pamphlet
The Good Gray Poet: A Vindication, published in 1866.
For more on Whitman's relationship with O'Connor, see Deshae E. Lott, "O'Connor, William Douglas (1832–1889)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).