
I hardly know through what a malign series of crooked events—absence chiefly on my part in Italy & Switzerland, pressure of studious work, & miscarriage of letters—I should have failed to make earlier application to you for your new books. I do so now, however, begging you to send me copies of Leaves of Grass & Two Rivulets,
& enclosing a Cheque on my bankers for £5. I see by Mr. Rossetti's Circular that the price of each volume is £1. If you will send me 2 copies of each, the other £1 will serve for postage. I shall then have copies for myself & copies to give to a friend.
May I ask that in one of
the volumes at any rate your loved & revered autograph may be found?
Some time since, my friend Roden Noel gave me by token of comradeship one of two photographs signed with your own name, wch you gave him. This is now framed & hangs in my bedroom. I see it daily—opposite the similar signed photograph of Alfred Tennyson,
from whom as a boy I learned much. To me as a man your poems—yourself in your poems—has been a constant teacher & loved companion.
I do not know whether you are likely to have heard that I make literature my daily work. I wait the time when I shall be able here in England to raise my voice with more authority than I yet have in bidding men to know you: for I feel that you have for us
here in the old country a message no less valuable to us than to your own people.
I seem to know you as a friend & father; & those who love me best, make me gifts recalling you—like Roden Noel's I have mentioned, & like that of a lady who some time since sent me a copy of Leaves of Grass
Boston 1855.
More than this I need not now write: unless it be to ask you whether, by way of remembrance, you would care to receive any works printed by me—echoes of my studies in the history of Greece & Italy for the most part?

