MACKMURDO, Arthur Heygate.

£2,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Wren's City Churches. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "Mrs Gilchrist, from her friend the author, April 1884". The recipient was Anne Gilchrist, a writer and woman of letters with a keen interest in science and philosophy. Walt Whitman loved her and called her "a supreme character of whom the world knows too little for its own good" (Letters, p. xxxvi).Gilchrist's marriage to the writer Alexander Gilchrist threw her into association with artists and writers of the day, including Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Herbert Spencer, George Eliot, and Arthur Mackmurdo. When her husband died in 1861, she took it upon herself to finish the biography of William Blake that he had begun. It was published to much acclaim in 1863 with the help of William and Gabriel Rossetti. It was through William Rossetti that Gilchrist first encountered Walt Whitman, with whom she developed an intimate friendship. She briefly moved to America in 1876 to help him as he struggled with ill health. "I have that sort of feeling about her which cannot easily be spoken of - put into words", said Whitman "indeed the sort of feeling that words will not fit: love (strong personal love, too), reverence, respect - you see, it won't go into words: all the words are weak and formal". He recalled her as "one of my noblest, best friends - one of my wisest, cutest, profoundest, most candid critics", who understood that Leaves of Grass "was not the mouthpiece of parlors,

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