I have read your poems with my
door locked late at night and I have read them on the seashore where I could
look all round me and see no more sign of human life than the ships out at sea:
and here I often found myself waking up from a reverie with the book open
before me. I love all poetry, and high generous thoughts make the tears rush to
my eyes, but sometimes a word or a phrase of yours takes me away from the world
around me and places me in an ideal land surrounded by realities more than any
poem I ever read.
Bram Stoker, excerpt from a letter to Walt Whitman
written c. February 1872.