Dave had not seen The Transcript piece. Elizabeth Porter Gould wrote him about it. I promised him a paper: sent

     He has been going over papers and manuscripts the past week. I asked if the Aaron Burr had yet turned up? "No," he said, "but I have my eye out sharply for it: it seems as if it must be there in the mix—yet so far I 've not come upon a trace of it. Some months ago, not long before I was taken sick, I sat down for an hour in the parlor there by the window—jotted down memoranda of Burr. Since that time I have missed the sheets: they got out of sight among other papers. It is nothing: it contributes nothing new: adds nothing to the stock of knowledge of Burr: yet it is a word, perhaps well said." He thought Burr "justly should be regarded as above the ordinary estimate of him"—"the school book stories," as he called them. I thought there had been a reaction from them: yet they crop up again

     W. was much stirred up. He said: "I had the most happy good luck in my early days to fall in with superior men—the higher man of that past era. I remember Colonel Fellows: you have heard me talk of him: one of the finest of them all. He had been a bosom friend of Paine in his last days—Paine's last days. How good the stories he told! how well reflecting things as they must have been!" W. said: "My father had been an acceptor of Paine: Paine had been much vilified." W. was quiet for awhile. "There has never been a life of Paine," he said: "anything tangible, real." I jokingly said: "That would be a job for me to take up." He seized the idea earnestly: surprised me with

56 Euston Sq., N. W., 31 March.

My dear Mr. Whitman:

     Your very interesting and valuable letter of 30 Jan. ought to have been answered before now. As you are willing to confess in it, however, to being an irregular correspondent, I gladly avail myself of so tempting an opening for saying that I am the same—and shall feel confident that my delay is pardoned.

     I read with much zest the poem you kindly sent me, with its deep sonata-like alternations of emotion.

     It was a peculiar pleasure to me to get acquainted with Mr. Burroughs, to whom would you please remember with great cordiality whenever the chance occurs? He may have told you—and indeed it cannot have needed telling—that you were a very principal subject of our discourse, and of my reiterated enquiries.

     It interests me to see in your letter that you have a habit of taking moonlight walks out of Washington. I used

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to find walks of this kind highly enjoyable, and have frequently indulged in them years ago. In my youth I was living in habits of daily and brotherly intimacy with various painters (Millais, Homan, Hunt &c) and from time to time we would all sally out, six or seven, say towards eleven at night, and pass the whole night, and sometimes the succeeding day as well, tramping about, and enjoying the varying effects of night, dawn, &—studied of course with peculiar interest, and directness of observation and purpose, by the painters: sometimes, instead of walking, we would row up the river from nightfall to day. There is a good deal of agreeable country round London: but unless one lives quite out in the suburbs, it takes miles of walking to get even to the beginning of anything green and rural. I can easily imagine that to walk out of Washington at night into Virginia or Maryland is an experience of a very different sort, in point of grandeur and impressiveness. Though, indeed, from some points of view which you of all men realize most intensely, nothing surely can be more impressive than the unmeasured size and colossal agglomeration of life in London—none the less felt through the interminable streets when all are asleep, and scarcely a passenger met althwart one's path. The interval when the streets are really deserted to this extent is but brief. I suppose from about two and three quarter to four a. m. is the most vacant time.

     What you say about the insulting and in fact ungrateful treatment which your poems continue to receive in America is deeply interesting though painful. I suppose it is a very general if not universal experience that anything that is at once great and extremely novel encounters for some considerable time much more hostility than acceptance, and so far your experience is not surprising—rather indeed a testimonial, when properly considered, to the great intrinsic value of your writings. But certainly it does seem that in degree and duration the obduracy of Americans against your work is something abnormal and unworthy—especially

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considering the spirit of your intense patriotic love and national insight which pervades your book through and through. That America should be so wanting (in this matter at least) in large receptiveness and quick intuition is distressing to those who love her—among whom I may humbly but truly profess myself. It seems as if she were even less capable than others of appreciating great work vital with the very marrow of her bones and corpuscles of her blood: perhaps this very affinity is partly the reason—but at any rate a bad and perverse reason. In this country there are of course very diverse knots of opinion, and schools of thinking and criticism, and to several of these your works are still an exasperation and an offence: but others accept and exalt you with all readiness of love and delight, and I think I may safely say that it is these who have in their holding the future of English opinion on such matters for some years to come. But I will say no more on this tack. For myself (with others) who believe in you with the certainty of full conviction, all these considerations are poor and slight: the one thing is the work itself, and the maker of the work, which has a destiny as assured and as limitless as that of any other great product of the soul or of nature.

     I have not met Professor Dowden since last summer (or spring perhaps): he is seldom, I think, out of Ireland. What I saw of him I like particularly. He seems an uncommonly young man to be a Professor—less than thirty to look at; and is in no common degree good-looking, pleasant, open, and sound-minded. There are few men, I should say, more likely to have their sympathies in literary matters sane and right—guided also by the fullest measure of lettered cultivation. Mrs. Gilchrist I dined with noy many weeks ago. She seems to have fairly recovered from a very exhaustive and indeed dangerous illness that oppressed her of late (say from the early autumn of 1870 to the late summer of 1871)—only that she is not so capable as she used to be of continuous mental or bodily

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strain. It was a pleasure to see her surrounded by her family, the type of a true mother, guiding and nurturing all aright in her children, mind and body. The eldest son bids fair to have a distinguished and prosperous career as a mining engineer: a younger son is greatly set on being a painter. One of the daughters is just about grown up; the other, I suppose, ten or eleven years of age.

     Mr. J. A. Symonds I don't know personally; but, about the time when my selections from your Poems came out, he wrote to me (two or three letters) showing himself to have been for some while past one of your very ardent admirers. Tennyson I have known for years, and like much: I think him deep-hearted and high-minded, though it may be true (as has often been said, and sometimes not in a kindly spirit) that he is somewhat too self-centered, and morbidly sensitive. He hates the vulgarizing aspects of fame, and some people find him present a very obtuse exterior to their advances and approaches; for myself, I can truly say my experience is the direct contrary. I think you and he would understand each other, and feel on a very friendly footing. Tennyson (as I dare say you know) is a remarkably fine manly person to look at, with a noble mould of face, and very powerful frame. He must be six foot one in height, I should suppose—but not now so erect as in his prime. If you do at any time come to England to see Tennyson or others, I need not say what a delight it would be to me to know you personally—and several of my friends would amply share my feelings.

     My volume of selections from American Poets does n't seem likely to be published yet awhile. It has been completed for months past: but, as it is one volume of a series, and others of the volumes are in course of printing, the printer may probably leave it over for a few months to come. I have in the briefest terms dedicated it to you (and hope you won't object). Any other dedication—at least, if to any one on your side the Atlantic—would be a fatuity.

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     I have no doubt you will have felt sorrow as I did—though indeed sorrow is not fully the right word, nor the right emotion—at reading lately of the death of Mazzini. I, who am three-fourths Italian in blood, have naturally a strong feeling on these subjects: and I regard Mazzini as the noblest of patriots, and the man to whom more than any other single person, not even excepting Garibaldi, the lovers of Italian unity are beholden. It is often a pleasure to me to reflect that, with all the miserable oppression and depression under which she has so long been laboring, Italy has after all produced the three greatest public men (to my thinking such) of the last hundred years in Europe—

     1. Napoleon I, the greatest genius as a conqueror and rules (I suppose anyone is to be allowed to admire him enormously whether one approves him or not—and to call him a Frenchman, or anything save an Italian, is meaningless).

     2. Mazzini, the greatest of ideal statesmen, patriot.

     3. Garibaldi, the greatest and most flawless personal hero.

Believe me honored to be called your friend,

W. M. Rossetti

     W. said: "Rossetti fires up magnificently when he talks of the American attitudes towards me. Whether America is right or Rosetti is right—who knows? I don't. Rossetti sounds right: yet America has her own voice in the matter—has thundered against me or been contemptuously silent about me in a way not to be misunderstood. America makes me proud: Rossetti makes me humble: I stand for myself, for the Leaves—must let results take care of themselves. I would be a fool, an ingrate, if I did not however respond with love to a confession as unhesitating and unqualified as Rossetti's." He paused. I went on. The Tennyson matter moved him? "Yes, I am sure we would understand each other: we would find that we had most things in common—that the differentiations were too trifling to make much of." "Even Tennyson's later desertion of democracy?" I