Twain's letter praising Whitman was first published in CAMDEN'S COMPLIMENT TO WALT WHITMAN (1889) at pp. 64-5. Twain was unable to attend the dinner, but his letter was read aloud along with other "letters of regret." This book is not recorded by BAL in the Twain section, but Merle Johnson noted it. I have a small archive relating to this dinner, but it does not include Twain's letter. Twain had access to at least two copies of LEAVES OF GRASS-- a copy of the 1900 edition which ended up with his maid Kate Leary (noted by Gribben, MARK TWAIN'S LIBRARY, p 764), and a heavily annotated copy of the 1908 edition inscribed by his daughter Clara with her maiden name (before she married Ossip). The annotations seem to be Clara's, with the possible exception of a few parallel double-lines in a few margins that could be Twain's. But I think it more likely they are Clara's, even though she used a single curved or straight marginal line most of the time. I own this copy. While Twain could have encountered Whitman's writings in the 1850s or 60s, it seems most likely that he would have seen them by the time he visited England in 1872 and 1873. Hotten had published Whitman's poems in 1868, and Twain owned quite a few of Hotten's publications from this period (despite the fact that he hated Hottentot for pirating his own writings). So, while the surviving evidence does not put a copy of LEAVES OF GRASS in Twain's hands until his last ten years, he was clearly familiar with Whitman's writings, and admired them, and was not afraid to say so. Kevin Mac Donnell Austin TX