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"Stranger! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?"

Leet​ Let​ this be my apology for speaking to you with my heart laid bare—I tried very hard to secure a copy of your "Leaves", and at last in New York did so, I took the book up and ran my eyes over detached lines uninterestedly because carelessly: at last I came to a poem ("24"—page 242 Thayer & Eldridge edition) that brought me to a stand-still and as I read and reread the lines I felt—I, the conventional young man, or    boy, if you will—but it was a "man flushed and full blooded who stood naked, body and soul, before me. I went back to the beginning, I have read and reread carefully, I do not understand you all in all fully, but I recognize the manliness of you, the power you possess, the strength of mind and limb—and, meter of conventional ideas in the lines and feet of conventional poetry as I am. I feel how weak and pitiful physically and mentally I must look to the better, the    stronger part of me—my dear sir, I cannot analyze my feelings, had any one told me that my blood would leap, my soul cry out at the poems of a man, as blood and soul and heart spring at some glorious aspect of nature, I should have laughed at him—But I feel while reading you (not your book, but you) as though I were let loose in some grand rugged place where I had never thought to be, and all around teeming with pre Adamite strangeness    and majesty—This is just you and myself. I cannot help writing you. I do not know if you will read anything I say, whether my name is a familiar or unfamiliar one to you,—but at least I am and must be hereafter one who "loves you secretly" in his heart, and openly to the world—

At least it must be something to you to have a man say that you have done him good, physically and spiritually    good. It cannot be so much a matter of indifference to you that in all gratitude I offer my tender thanks and changed belief and admiration. I have taken "from your lips" the kiss, and with all my heart and soul return it to you. Believe that I shall study you more and more, and if ever the day comes that I may give you the hearty and true hand grasp, and look in your eyes and in your face, even though my own tongue is silent    I think you will understand my soul and that I am faithfully your friend

James Berry Bensel 
  To 
  Walt Whitman 
 Camden N.J.