PREFACE
Reading edition
MY first acquaintance with Whitman’s writings (William Rossetti’s edition of the Poems) was made at Cambridge during the Long Vacation in the summer of 1868—or it may have been ’69. But it was not till 1877 that I crossed the Atlantic and paid my first visit to him. In 1884 I was again in the States, and saw Whitman several times. The notes made on the occasions of these visits were written out at a later period, and finally published in the Progressive Review (February and April 1897) in the same form as they now stand. The other papers in the present book belong to a still later date, and, with one exception, have not been published before.
E. C.
April 1906.