
At the moment of my departure for Vienna, where I am to assist at the Postal Union Congress, your birthday comes to my mind. I may easily be prevented from sending a letter so as to arrive on the right day, and must therefore do my reverence to you a trifle in advance.
This, then, let me do—not in the mere conventional sense in which that
collocation of words is used in daily trivial life, but in the literal sense of
greeting you
with a "bowed mind."
Since your protracted illness began it has been with no ordinary "happy returns of the day" interest that those who love and revere you as I do have looked forward year by year to the recurrence of your Day. This year still more than last, last year more than the year before, we have possessed our souls in hope to send you again our messages of affection and grateful solicitude.
On this seventh of May which is the Birthday of Robert Browning,
and a high day
also to me as the anniversary of the first and only performance of "The
Cenci," I send you my heartfelt good wishes for the
new year of your life that will be commencing on the 31st of this month.
I look towards the sea and see you sitting calmly over there with your face turned to
the light. Be not in haste to climb, dear Walt Whitman. Sit there, still, "calm and
supercilious" (your own word words
), and
receive for many years yet the expressions of our love for yourself,
our respect for
your life, and our deep thankfulness for the solid spiritual aid we have received
and expect still to receive from the inexhaustible treasury of your Book.

