Walt Whitman to Robert Buchanan, 16 May 1876 a machine readable transcription Walt Whitman Kenneth M. Price Ed Folsom Transcription and encoding The Walt Whitman Archive Staff Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln University of Iowa National Historical Publications and Records Commission 2012 The Walt Whitman Archive
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 loc.02836 The following are responsible for particular readings or for changes to this file, as noted: Kenneth M. Price Elizabeth Lorang Kathryn Kruger Zachary King Eric Conrad Edwin Haviland Miller Walt Whitman The Correspondence New York New York University Press 1961–1977 47–48 3 Walt Whitman Walt Whitman to Robert Buchanan, 16 May 1876 May 16, 1876 MSS18630 The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Walt Whitman Robert Buchanan added schematron declaration blessedchecked encoded extracted transcription from Major Authors cd May 16 '76

Your two letters including the cheque for £25 reached me, for which accept deepest thanks. I have already written you my approval of your three communications in the L[ondon] D[aily] News & will [say] that in my opinion (& now with fullest deliberation reäffirming it) all the points assumed as facts on which your letter of March 13 is grounded, are substantially true, & most of them are true to the minutest particular—as far as could be stated in a one column letter.

Then let me quite definitely explain myself, about one or two things. I should not have instigated this English move, & if I had been consulted, should have peremptorily stoptstopped it—but now that it has started, & grown, and under the circumstances, & by the person, & in the spirit, (& especially as I can & will give, to each generous donor, my book, portrait, autograph, myself as it were)—I am determined to respond to it in the same spirit in which it has risen—to accept most thankfully, cordially & unhesitatingly all that my friends feel to convey to me, which determination I here deliberately express once for all. This you are at liberty to make known to all who feel any interest in the matter.

The situation at present may be briefly & candidly told. I am, & have for three years during my paralysis, been boarding here, with a relative, comfortable & nice enough, but steadily paying just the same as at an inn—and the whole affair in precisely the same business spirit. My means would by this time have entirely given out, but that have been temporarily replenished from sales of my new edition and as now by this most welcome present & purchase—the £25 herein acknowledged.

Though without employment, means or income, you augur truly that I am not in what may be called pinching want—nor do I anticipate it.

My object I may say farther has lately been & still is to build a cheap little three or four room house on a little lot I own in a rural skirt of this town—for a nook, where I can haul in & eke out in a sort of independent economy & comfort & as satisfactorily as may be the rest of my years—for I may live several of them yet. To attain this, would be quite a triumph, & I feel assured I could then live very nicely indeed on the income from my books.

I shall (as I see now) continue to be my own publisher & bookseller. Accept all subscriptions to the New Edition. All will be supplied upon remittance. There are Two Volumes. Leaves of Grass, 384 pages, poems, $5, has two portraits. Then Two Rivulets, poems & prose, (including "Memoranda of the War") with photos, altogether 359 pages—also $5. Each book has my autograph. The Two Volumes are my complete works, $10 the set.

I wish the particular address of each generous friend given, so as he or she can be reach'd by mail or express—either with the autographic volume Two Rivulets, or a complete set of my works in Two Volumes, with autograph & portraits, or some other of my books. It may be some while before the books arrive, but they will arrive in time.