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  My beloved Walt—

I have read thy sublime poem of the "Universal" once and again, and yet again—seeing it in the Graphic, Post, Mail, World, and among other papers.[no handwritten text supplied here]It is sublime.[no handwritten text supplied here]It raised my mind to its own sublimity.[no handwritten text supplied here]It seems to me the sublimest of all your poems.[no handwritten text supplied here]I cannot help reading it every once of a while.[no handwritten text supplied here]I return to it as a fountain of joy

My beloved Walt.—You know how I have worshipped you, without change or cessation, for twenty years.[no handwritten text supplied here]While my soul exists, the worship must be ever new.

It was perhaps the very day of the publication of the first edition of the "Leaves of Grass" that I saw a copy of it at a newspaper stand in Fulton street Brooklyn. I got it, looked into it with wonder, and felt that here was something that touched on depths of my humanity. Since then you have grown before me, grown around me, and grown into me

—I expected certainly to go down to Camden last fall to see you.[no handwritten text supplied here]But something prevented. And, in time, I saw in the papers that you had recovered—The New Year took me into a new field of action among the miserables.[no handwritten text supplied here]Oh, what scenes of human horror were to be found in this city last winter.—I cannot tell you how much I was engaged, or all I did for three months.[no handwritten text supplied here]I must wait till I see you to tell you about these things.[no handwritten text supplied here]I have   been going toward social radicalism of late years, and appeared here at the Academy of Music lately as Primort and orator of the Rochefort meeting.[no handwritten text supplied here]How I would like to see you, in order to temper my heat, and expand my narrowness

How absurd it is to suppose that there is any ailment in the brain of a man who can generate the poem of the "Universal"[no handwritten text supplied here]I would parody Lincoln and say that such kind of ailment ought to spread.

My beloved Walt—Tell me if you would like me to come to see you, and perhaps I can do so within a few weeks.

Yours always John Swinton See notes April 9 1888 John Swinton