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  Dear Mr. Walt Whitman

May I, here is this old Africa & very unhappy send a message to you in America who are helping me to bear my sorrow.

This dry month   I suffered the greatest loss that a young man can suffer by the death of the girl I loved, the girl who was to have been my wife. She loved your poems dearly: she taught me who loved them too to understand them as I had never understood them before. They were among the last things we ever read together but a few weeks ago in England when my life seemed so happy & there seemed to be no shadow of the implacable   Death. I am reading your poems now again alone & in the bitterness of my heart in this place to which I have come to struggle with my sorrow. They are helping me, they are strengthening me & I wish to send you these few words of thanks & gratitude for the sake of my dead love & my living grief. Camerado, will you give me your hand across the sea.

Justin Huntly McCarthy