Thomas W. H. Rolleston to Walt Whitman, 4 June [1881]

 loc_af.00999_large.jpg Sunday evg.​ June 4. Wettiner Hof. Bad-Elster Saxony

At last I find myself able to write to you, having got myself moored in a quiet nook after much hurried journeying. When I received your letter with the poems, I was staying with a married sister1 in the county Wicklow. Then my father got very ill & I had to go down & see him (he is all right now.) Then business in London, tedious travelling half across Europe, & now my wife and I are fixed in a little German valley for the summer. There are mineral springs and baths here; she was ordered  loc_af.01000_large.jpg to come for her health, which has not been very good lately—but there is every likelihood of its mending now. This is a very pleasant place—a long, rather narrow valley with low hills, covered with pinewood, at each side—at one end of it stands the village of Elster, bowered in dense foliage, oak and chestnut; with highroofed houses, a few large hotels, a rather grand looking building,—the Bath House—surrounding the mineral springs. When you climb to the top of a hill you see leagues on leagues of grass country, no mountains, but low undulations with quaintly built villages set in their folds, and covered often with dark tracts of pine forest.  loc_af.01001_large.jpg There are few visitors here, for this is not one of the fashionable watering places; our countrymen & women have not found it out and vulgarized it yet. These Germans I admire more and more—if they keep their present characteristics, what a nation they will be sometime! Their life is simple, friendly, humane, unembarrassed; the poor have leisure and use it well, the rich do not strive, (as periodically in England) to "do their duty to the lower classes" by subscribing to benevolent schemes & inventing elaborate machinery for the reclamation of criminals,—they meet their labourers, servants, &c in a perfectly natural manner, as man with man and other bonds are established than those which unite the payer and the payee. As a nation, high and low, they have intelligence, and what is more, spirituality—life is not measured by its value in £.s.d.

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There is much democracy among them, socially speaking—politically, none whatever. They endure a really oppressive despotism—how oppressive foreigners, even aristocratic Germans, can little know—without complaint, or resent it only in a petty, spiteful way. And they have an innate dread and respect for an official—anyone in a uniform—they surround him with something of the divinity that used to hedge kings when Shakespeare wrote. They are a people whom I love to mix with. I mean the common folk, the others I rarely meet with, for I scarcely see anyone, being buried a good deal in Greek and metaphysics, except when I take long walks in the country, which I do pretty often; sometimes with a  loc_af.01003_large.jpg knapsack for a fortnight, wandering without definite aim, finding friends, 'eating and sleeping with the earth.'

In Dublin I came across a man I had heard much of but never seen before, one Standish O'Grady, a barrister who drifted into authorship, has written part of a History of Ireland, collecting, translating, piecing together, Homeric fashion, old bardic lays preserved from pagan times, of Irish heroes and gods. He is going to bring the history down to the present day.2 I met him at Dowden's first, often afterwards, & we arranged for a walk on the Wicklow mountains, Dowden, O'Grady, two others & myself. When the day came only O'Grady and I appeared at the rendezvous, & we had a splendid day of it. I never met anyone, I think, whose mind answered so well to mine. We had been travelling on parallel roads of thought for some time—now  loc_af.01004_large.jpg we travelled together. Each had help to give and each needed help; above all we helped each other to realize. I love many persons, but him with that nearest, most contented love—him and one other. That other is now a schoolmaster in South Africa.3 O'Grady in Ireland, I in Saxonland—if we three were together we would tread the clouds! I send you some stanzas about my day's walk with O'Grady (I found out shortly that he was a lover and disciple of yours, and we talked much of you).

Thank you very much for the two poems.4 I have put them in the Passage to India. It was very kind of you to try to get 'Calvin Harlowe' published, but I fear it is too rough. I could mend it a good deal. It was written quickly, the subject filled me and I hammered out the verses & left them without a touch of the file. So too with those I send you—but I don't think I ever shall arrive at successful filing.

Yours sincerely W. Rolleston.

This address will find me till October—that of 'Glasshouse, Shinrone, Ireland,' always. I hope you are well.

I think much might be well done in altering the arrangement of your poems & prose, but I like the two vols. & mainly, as they are.