It is a matter of regret that so few of Whitman's letters to Mrs. Gilchrist are available. Those included in this volume, sometimes in fragmentary form, have been taken from loose copies found among his papers after his death, or, in a few instances, are reprinted from Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist's "Anne Gilchrist" or Horace Traubel's "With Walt Whitman in Camden." Acknowledgment of these latter is made in each instance. But though Whitman's letters printed in this correspondence will not compare with Mrs. Gilchrist's in point of number, enough are presented to suggest the tenor of them all. As a matter of fact, the first love-letter from Anne Gilchrist to Walt Whitman was in the form of an essay written in his defense called "An Englishwoman's Estimate of Walt Whitman." For that reason this well-known essay is reprinted in this volume; and "A Confession of Faith," in reality an amplification of the "Estimate" written several years after the publication of the latter, is included. The reader who desires to follow the story of this friendship in a chronological order will do well to read at least the former of these tributes before beginning the letters. Indebtedness is acknowledged to Prof. Emory Halloway of Brooklyn, New York, for valuable suggestions. T. B. H. INTRODUCTION Undoubtedly Mrs. Gilchrist's "Estimate of Walt Whitman," published in the (Boston) _Radical_ in May, 1870, was the finest, as it was the first, public tribute ever paid to the poet by a woman. Whitman himself so considered it--"the proudest word that ever came to me from a woman--if not the proudest word of all from any source." But a finer tribute was to follow, in the sacred privacy of the love-letters which are now made public forty years and more after they were written. The purpose of this Introduction is not to interpret those letters, but to sketch the story in the light of which they are to be read. And since both Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman have had sympathetic and painstaking biographers, it will not be necessary here to mention at length the already known facts of their respective lives.