That code was picked up - though possibly not decoded - by Stoker. 'I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk,' Stoker wrote to Whitman on Feb. 'How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eye and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul,' Stoker wrote. What Stoker might have thought, if he had known about all the rumored men in Whitman's life - one of whom, Harry Stafford, got a ring which he said only death could part from him - is hard to say.
