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  Dear Walt Whitman,

Your kind post card of the 8th inst. and papers just to hand. My cordial thanks to you.—

Dr Johnston has already told you of the open air meeting held by our friends last Saturday–afternoon—the 13th inst—4 miles from Bolton—  to hear his account of his visit to you and to West Hills.—It was a perfect September day,—warm, calm and bright, with a slight, pensive autumnal haze veiling the distance. We gathered together under the shade of a tree in the fields and listened for over an hour and a half to the Dr's story and examined the photos he handed round as he proceeded.  It brought you very near to us all and every heart was stirred as the Dr told us of your great kindness to him, and of your kind messages to us all—since repeated, again & again, in your post cards to me. In the talk which followed a general feeling was expressed that our united gratitude, thanks & affection should be conveyed to you, and I was commissioned to write to you.—  It gives me great pleasure to do so for our little society owes its very existence, indirectly, to you, and we are all, in greater or less degree, your admirers & lovers.

One of the friends (Thomas Shonock) has since asked me to procure a copy of the pocket–book edition of L. of G. for him. So I will enclose a money order for 22s/—, I shall be glad if you will send one at your convenience.  I am just beginning my holidays (long needed) & your book accompanies me in all my rambles. I am spending the first few days at home and taking solitary walks in the lonely country lanes and on the moors near here. With you for company I have all I wish and spend blessed hours of sacred, vital communion with the wordless divine Spirit that informs all things  and with my own soul. How near and dear you are to me I cannot tell you. But I am sure that no author before ever appealed to such depths of a man's nature, or aroused such tender, personal love. Very sure am I that your now despised poems will yet rank with the Hebrew Scriptures (to which alone I can compare them) as sacred and priceless— springing from divine depths—the latest modern revelation of the same Spirit.

I will enclose a cutting from last weeks paper giving another instance (at a place a few miles from here) of the latent heroism of the roughest classes.

With love to you always Yours affectionately J. W. Wallace