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  Dear Walt Whitman,

I can't write much tonight, but I want to send you a few lines by this mail.

Fred Wild called to see me yesterday & had dinner with me (in Bolton). I spoke of my last letter to you, & said that if I had had a spare copy of his photo: I would have sent   it to you.—So, this morning, I was pleased to receive a letter from him enclosing one, which I forward herewith.

He is very much pleased with his copy of L. of G., (he is an old lover of yours,) & regards its presentation from Johnston & myself as "another token of our brotherhood," covenanted anew in your dear & honoured name. He hopes that the influence of the book "may   bind our hearts more firmly together in the coming years," & asks me, when I write to you again, "to at least send you his warmest love & good wishes."—I am glad to do so at once, for I know well how sincere & deep his love & admiration for you are.

He is not "literary" at all, though he is not without appreciation of the best literatures. He has an artist's eye for the beauties of   Nature (paints a little), but prefers Nature at first hand, with its vital freshness & movement. (Loves the sea especially—boating, sailing, fishing &c). He is not conventional, but rather too unconventional, & always prefers to be considered much worse than he is, rather than better. He has a wild, native wit of his own, & is frank, outspoken & free, in speech & manners—But he is liked at once by all wherever he goes. And, at   the heart of him is a deep, constant affectionateness, faithful & unswerving, & a native reverence of soul, all the deeper because so impatient of make-belief as to seem irreverent & irreligious. He has a wife & four children of whom he is fond. And I, his friend & intimate chum from boyhood, have found him stedfastly loyal & true & affectionate, through thick & thin.

I wish the portrait were a better one, but such   as it is, it may serve as a message of his personal love & adhesion.

I rejoice to think that natures like his respond to you so spontaneously & so warmly. You can afford to let the literary classes stand in antagonism to you (though it can be for a short time only), while the masses (the great majority,) who deal with life & nature & experience at first hand, & who despise   second hand presentations in books & art, see in you a master, as fresh & vital as Nature itself, offering them love & faith, & vistas before unknown.

I hope that you are better, & your "health points" more "favourable" than when you wrote last.

With love to you always

I remain Yours affectionately J.W. Wallace