On June 22, 1869, Anne Gilchrist, writing to Rossetti, said: “I was calling on Madox Brown a fortnight ago, and he put into my hands your edition of Walt Whitman’s poems. I shall not cease to thank him for that. Since I have had it, I can read no other book: it holds me entirely spellbound, and I go through it again and again with deepening delight and wonder. How can one refrain from expressing gratitude to you for what you have so admirably done? …” To this Rossetti promptly responded: “Your letter has given me keen pleasure this morning. That glorious man Whitman will one day be known as one of the greatest sons of Earth, a few steps below Shakespeare on the throne of immortality. What a tearing-away of the obscuring veil of use and wont from the visage of man and of life! I am doing myself the pleasure of at once ordering a copy of the “Selections” for you, which you will be so kind as to accept. Genuine—i.e., enthusiastic—appreciators are not so common, and must be cultivated when they appear. … Anybody who values Whitman as you do ought to read the whole of him. …” At a later date Rossetti gave Mrs. Gilchrist a copy of the complete “Leaves of Grass,” in acknowledging which she said, “The gift of yours I have not any words to tell you how priceless it will be to me. …” This lengthy letter was later, at Rossetti’s solicitation, worked over for publication[Pg xxviii] as the “Estimate of Walt Whitman” to which reference has already been made.
Anne Gilchrist was primarily a woman of letters. Though her natural bent was toward science and philosophy, her marriage threw her into association with artists and writers of belles lettres. She was born in London on February 25, 1828. She came of excellent ancestry, and received a good education, particularly in music. She had a profoundly religious nature, although it appears that she was never a believer in many of the orthodox Christian doctrines. Very early in life she recognized the greatness of such men as Emerson and Comte. In 1851, at the age of twenty-three, she married Alexander Gilchrist, two months her junior. Though of limited means, he possessed literary ability and was then preparing for the bar. His early writings secured for him the friendship of Carlyle, who for years lived next door to the Gilchrists in Cheyne Row. This friendship led to others, and the Gilchrists were soon introduced into that supreme literary circle which included Ruskin, Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, the Rossettis, Tennyson, and many another great mind of that illustrious age.
Within ten years of their marriage the Gilchrists had four children, in whom they were very happy. But in the year 1861, when Anne was thirty-three years of age, her husband died. It was a terrible blow, but she faced the future unflinchingly, and reared her children, giving to each of them a profession. At the time of her husband’s death his life of William Blake was nearing completion. With the assistance of William and Gabriel Rossetti Mrs. Gilchrist finished the work on this excellent biography, and it was published by Macmillan. Whitman has paid a fitting tribute to the pluck exhibited in this achievement: “Do you know much of Blake?” said Whitman to Horace Traubel, who records the conversation in his remarkable book “With Walt Whitman in Camden.” “You know, this is Mrs. Gilchrist’s book—the book she completed. They had made up their minds to do the work—her husband had it well under way: he caught a fever and was carried off. Mrs. Gilchrist was left with four young children, alone: her perplexities were great. Have you noticed that the time to look for the best things in best people is the moment of their greatest need? Look at Lincoln: he is our proudest example: he proved to be big as, bigger than, any emergency—his grasp was a giant’s grasp—made dark things light, made hard things easy. … (Mrs. Gilchrist) belonged to the same noble breed: seized the reins, was competent; her head was clear, her hand was firm.”
The circumstances under which she first read Whitman’s poetry have been narrated. When in 1869 Whitman became aware of the Rossetti correspondence, he felt greatly honoured, and through Rossetti he sent his portrait to the as yet anonymous lady. In acknowledging this communication his English friend has a grateful word from “the lady” to return: “I gave your letter, and the second copy of your portrait, to the lady you refer to, and need scarcely say how truly delighted she was. She has asked me to say that you could not have devised for her a more welcome pleasure, and that she feels grateful to me for having sent to America the extracts from what she had written, since they have been a satisfaction to you. …” Early in 1870 the “Estimate” appeared in the Radical, still more than a year before Mrs. Gilchrist addressed her first letter to Whitman. He welcomed the essay, and its author as a new and peculiarly powerful champion of “Leaves of Grass.” To Rossetti he wrote: “I am deeply touched by these sympathies and convictions, coming from a woman and from England, and am sure that if the lady knew how much comfort it has been to me to get them, she would not only pardon you for transmitting them but approve that action. I realize indeed of this smiling and emphatic well done from the heart and conscience of a true wife and mother, and one, too, whose sense of the poetic, as I glean from your letter, after flowing through the heart and conscience, must also move through and satisfy science as much as the esthetic, that I had hitherto received no eulogium so magnificent.” Concerning this experience Whitman said to Horace Traubel, at a much later period: “You can imagine what such a thing as her ‘Estimate’ meant to me at that time. Almost everybody was against me—the papers, the preachers, the literary gentlemen—nearly everybody with only here and there a dissenting voice—when it looked on the surface as if my enterprise was bound to fail … then this wonderful woman. Such things stagger a man … I had got so used to being ignored or denounced that the appearance of a friend was always accompanied with a sort of shock. … There are shocks that knock you up, shocks that knock you down. Mrs. Gilchrist never wavered from her first decision. I have that sort of feeling about her which cannot easily be spoken of— … : love (strong personal love, too), reverence, respect—you see, it won’t go into words: all the words are weak and formal.” Speaking again of her first criticism of his work, he said: “I remember well how one of my noblest, best friends—one of my wisest, cutest, profoundest, most candid critics—how Mrs. Gilchrist, even to the last, insisted that “Leaves of Grass” was not the mouthpiece of parlours, refinements—no—but the language of strength, power, passion, intensity, absorption, sincerity. …” He claimed a closer relationship to her than he allowed to Rossetti: “Rossetti mentions Mrs. Gilchrist. Well, he had a right to—almost as much right as I had: a sort of brother’s right: she was his friend, she was more than my friend. I feel like Hamlet when he said forty thousand brothers could not feel what he felt for Ophelia. After all … we were a family—a happy family: the few of us who got together, going with love the same way—we were a happy family. The crowd was on the other side but we were on our side—we: a few of us, just a few: and despite our paucity of numbers we made ourselves tell for the good cause.”
From these expressions it is quite clear that Whitman’s attitude toward Mrs. Gilchrist was at first that of the unpopular prophet who finds a worthy and welcome disciple in an unexpected place. And that he should have so felt was but natural, for she had been drawn to him, as she confided to him in one of her letters, by what he had written rather than and not by her knowledge of the man. There can be no doubt, however, that on Mrs. Gilchrist’s part something more than the friendship of her new-found liberator was desired. When she read the “Leaves of Grass” she was forty-one years of age, in the full vigour of womanhood. To her the reading meant a new birth, causing her to pour out her soul to the prophet and poet across the seas with a freedom and abandon that were phenomenal. This was in the first letter printed in this volume,