O'Conner introduces Frances Malone Raymond and asks Dwight to help her get her translation of Elise Pollio's book on musicians published by Ticknor and Fields. He mentions Dwight's Journal of music.

The Ghost is a perfect read for Christmas. Following the idea of Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, the Ghost by O'Connor is a spookier and more emotional version of the same narrative: reassessing the meaning of true friendship and love in our lives.

In 1865 Walt Whitman was dismissed from his clerkship in the Department of the Interior because Secretary James Harlan judged Leaves of Grass indecent, unfit to be read aloud "by the evening lamp." Most eloquent among Whitman's defenders was William Douglas O'Connor, whose pamphlet The Good Gray Poet, a panegyric to Whitman and an attack on literary censorship in general and Harlan in particular, was the first of his many heroic if sometimes excessive efforts on Whitman's behalf.