![]() ![]() What great births you have witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steel ship, the railroad, the perfected cotton-gin, the telegraph, the phonograph, the photograph, photo-gravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine, & the amazing, infinitely varied & innumerable products of coal tar, those latest & strangest marvels of a marvelous age. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them. You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world’s history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. ![]() ( Source: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Images: Walt Whitman & Mark Twain, via James Preller & Shorpy respectively.) The cause for celebration was Whitman’s upcoming 70th birthday, the imminence of which saw Twain pen not just a birthday wish, but a stunning 4-page love letter to human endeavour, as seen during Whitman’s lifetime. In May of 1889, author Mark Twain wrote the following beautiful letter of congratulations to Walt Whitman, the indisputably influential poet behind, most notably, Leaves of Grass. ![]()
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