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  My dear Sir,

I hardly know through what a malign series of crooked events—absence chiefly on my part in Italy & Switzerland, pressure of studious work, & miscarriage of letters—I should have failed to make earlier application to you for your new books. I do so now, however, begging you to send me copies of Leaves of Grass & Two Rivulets,  & enclosing a Cheque on my bankers for £5. I see by Mr. Rossetti's Circular that the price of each volume is £1. If you will send me 2 copies of each, the other £1 will serve for postage. I shall then have copies for myself & copies to give to a friend.

May I ask that in one of  the volumes at any rate your loved & revered autograph may be found?

Some time since, my friend Roden Noel gave me by token of comradeship one of two photographs signed with your own name, wch​ you gave him. This is now framed & hangs in my bedroom. I see it daily—opposite the similar signed photograph of Alfred Tennyson,  from whom as a boy I learned much. To me as a man your poems—yourself in your poems—has been a constant teacher & loved companion.

I do not know whether you are likely to have heard that I make literature my daily work. I wait the time when I shall be able here in England to raise my voice with more authority than I yet have in bidding men to know you: for I feel that you have for us  here in the old country a message no less valuable to us than to your own people.

I seem to know you as a friend & father; & those who love me best, make me gifts recalling you—like Roden Noel's I have mentioned, & like that of a lady who some time since sent me a copy of Leaves of Grass  Boston 1855.

More than this I need not now write: unless it be to ask you whether, by way of remembrance, you would care to receive any works printed by me—echoes of my studies in the history of Greece & Italy for the most part?

  I am with all love & reverence yours John Addington Symonds.To Walt Whitman