My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend (Now buried in an English grave--and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake), Ended our talk--"The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern learning, intuitions deep, Of all Geologies--Histories--of all Astronomy--of Evolution, Metaphysics all, Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering, Life, life an endless march, an endless army (no halt, but, it is duly over), The world, the race, the soul--in space and time the universes, All bound as is befitting each--all surely going somewhere." THE LETTERS OF ANNE GILCHRIST AND WALT WHITMAN A WOMAN'S ESTIMATE OF WALT WHITMAN[1] [FROM LETTERS BY ANNE GILCHRIST TO W. M. ROSSETTI.] _June 23, 1869._--I am very sure you are right in your estimate of Walt Whitman. There is nothing in him that I shall ever let go my hold of. For me the reading of his poems is truly a new birth of the soul. I shall quite fearlessly accept your kind offer of the loan of a complete edition, certain that great and divinely beautiful nature has not, could not infuse any poison into the wine he has poured out for us. And as for what you specially allude to, who so well able to bear it--I will say, to judge wisely of it--as one who, having been a happy wife and mother, has learned to accept all things with tenderness, to feel a sacredness in all? Perhaps Walt Whitman has forgotten--or, through some theory in his head, has overridden--the truth that our instincts are beautiful facts of nature, as well as our bodies; and that we have a strong instinct of silence about some things. _July 11._--I think it was very manly and kind of you to put the whole of Walt Whitman's poems into my hands; and that I have no other friend who would have judged them and me so wisely and generously.