AND WALT WHITMAN 
 

ANNE GILCHRIST AND 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 BY 
 ELIZABETH PORTER GOULD 
 
 Author of 
 "GEMS FROM WALT WHITMAN" 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 DAVID McKAY, PUBLISHER 
 
 1022 MARKET STREET 
 
Copyright, 1900, by DAVID McKAY 
 
Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman 
 
 When, in England, in June, 1869, Madox Brown 
 put into the hands of Anne Gilchrist Mr. William 
 Michael Rossetti s Selections from Walt Whitman, 
 he little dreamed of the result. 
 
 Mrs. Gilchrist, having heard nothing but ill- 
 words of the poems, opened the book with feelings 
 " partly of indifference, partly of antagonism." But 
 as she read .... 
 
 "The Soul! 
 
 Forever and forever longer than soil is brown and solid 
 longer than water ebbs and flows." 
 
 " Each of us inevitable ; 
 
 Each of us limitless each of us with his or her right upon 
 
 the earth, 
 Each of us allowed the eternal purports of the earth," 
 
 and other selections in the book, she became con 
 scious of a new and most powerful influence affect 
 ing her. 
 
 " I can read no other book," she wrote Rossetti 
 a fortnight later. " It holds me entirely spell 
 bound, and I go through it again and again with 
 deepening delight and wonder." 
 
 3 
 
 680308 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 This new, and, he confessed, unexpected link in 
 their friendship so pleased Rossetti that he begged 
 to loan her his own complete copy of the poems ; 
 also a letter the poet had written him concerning 
 his Selections, in which he offered his friendship. 
 (" Permit me to offer you my friendship.") Any 
 one like her, he said, who so valued that " glorious 
 man Whitman, one day to be known as one of the 
 greatest sons of Earth," ought to read the whole 
 of him. Considered abstractly and as a whole, the 
 sound of the entire book was to him " like a por 
 tentous roll of chorus, such as the The Lord God 
 Omnipotent Reigneth, in Handel." In a manly way 
 he referred to the doubtful passages in the poems. 
 This she fully understood, for, en accepting the 
 gift, she wrote she was certain that that " great and 
 divinely beautiful nature could not infuse any poison 
 into the wine he had poured out for them." She 
 somewhat distrusted her powers, however, as a 
 critic, being averse to criticism ; but " what I like," 
 she wrote, " I grasp firmly and silently ; what I do 
 not like, I prefer to let go silently too." 
 
 After a still further reading, she wrote again, " I 
 had not dreamed that words could cease to be 
 words and become electric streams like these. I 
 do assure you that, strong as I am, I feel some 
 times as if I had not bodily strength to read many 
 of these poems. In some of them there is such a 
 weight of emotion, such a tension of the heart, 
 
 4 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 that mine refuses to beat under it stands quite 
 still and I am obliged to lay the book down for 
 a while ; . . . then there is such calm wisdom 
 and strength of thought, such a cheerful breadth 
 of sunshine, that the soul bathes in them, renewed 
 and strengthened. Living impulses flow out of 
 these that make me exult in life, and yet look 
 longingly towards the superb vistas of Death. 
 (Song at Sunset.") 
 
 If the poems did not seem to her equal in power 
 and beauty, she felt they were " vital ;" that " they 
 grew, they were not made." She compared it all 
 to the growth of a forest rather than the making 
 of a palace or cathedral. " Are not the hitherto 
 accepted masterpieces of literature akin rather to 
 noble architecture?" she asked. She so felt the 
 intense humanity of this " great-souled American," 
 that she cried out with the poet himself, at the 
 close of his book, 
 
 " Camerado, this is no book. 
 
 Who touches this, touches a man !" (So Long.) 
 
 The long, interesting letters, born of this new ex 
 perience, became a signal proof to Rossetti that 
 the friendship which united them was a " matter of 
 essence, and not merely of circumstances." Her 
 " resplendent enthusiasm " charmed him. " It is," 
 he wrote, " the earnest of the boundless enthusiasm 
 Walt Whitman will one day excite, and continue 
 
 5 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 exciting for ages." He confessed he knew not 
 where could be found a woman true-hearted and 
 brave enough to express herself with " such de 
 cision and perfectness of perception " as she had 
 done. 
 
 The acquaintance of Anne Gilchrist and William 
 Michael Rossetti, had begun some nine years be 
 fore, when her husband was writing his Life of 
 William \Blake. They, with four little children, 
 were then living at 6 Cheyne Row, next door to 
 Carlyle. He, as a well -equipped art-critic on the 
 periodical press, and she, capable of furthering his 
 development by sympathy and help, lifted their 
 daily life to that plane which could make such 
 gifted souls as William Michael and Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti feel at home. Living almost by them 
 selves, they had attained a "twinship of nature," 
 says one in a review of the Life of Blake (N. 
 A. Review of October, 1864). Encouraged by her 
 husband, Anne had already written some short 
 articles ; one on " Electricity " (for Once a Week), 
 "A Glance at the Vegetable Kingdom," and 
 "Whales and Whalemen" (for Chambers Maga 
 zine). Her first article, " Our Nearest Relation," 
 published in 1859, had attracted the notice of 
 Dickens, who showed it to the Carlyles. (The 
 Academy of December 5, 1885, in notice of her 
 death.) Though her school-life came to an end at 
 sixteen, she had continued a general study, music 
 
 6 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 being a specialty. The death, in her nineteenth 
 year, of her only brother, to whom she was devoted, 
 had aroused her whole being with questions she 
 could not answer. Her depth of nature was irri 
 tated with the commonplace platitudes of friends, 
 who, to her mind, attached too much importance 
 to creeds and doctrines. " They are mere defini 
 tions after all," she cried. It seemed to her a very 
 considerable thing just to believe in God, " the 
 greatest thing allowed to mankind." She strug 
 gled against limitations of all kinds, even daring to 
 say, on hearing "of the confirmation of a friend, 
 that if she were forced to be confirmed she would 
 have to submit, but she trusted she should escape. 
 All this intellectual struggle she finally silenced in 
 aiming, as she said, to " fulfill the ends for which 
 we were created ; that is to say, develop to the 
 utmost the nature which God has given us." In 
 this light she lived a growing life with her widowed 
 mother, studying books and people. She found 
 the writings of the Transcendentalists, such as 
 Emerson, a " sort of balance to her usual studies in 
 Comte." She felt the next generation would call 
 Emerson a great man, though his writings were 
 then treated with a " good deal of contempt and 
 ridicule." She gloried in Electicism. "Truth," 
 she said, "is to be found complete in no man s 
 system, but a portion of it in all systems." Lighter 
 works claimed her attention. She felt that Maria 
 
 7 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 Edgeworth gave " fine deeds and fine talk, but 
 never a human being ; she was evidently one who 
 observed acutely, but neither thought nor felt 
 deeply," while the "truthful simplicity and earn 
 estness of feeling made Miss Bremer a beautiful 
 painter of domestic life." All this Anne was feel 
 ing and saying at twenty years of age, when there 
 came into her life the absorbing love of Alexander 
 Gilchrist, one who could " fulfill her aspirations, 
 realize her ideal of a true marriage, be a friend and 
 helper as well as lover." She did not know how to 
 describe him to her intimate friends, on announcing 
 her engagement, except by telling them that he 
 was " altogether, both in intellect and heart, great, 
 noble and beautiful." Sweet pictures are given us 
 of the happy days after the marriage, three years 
 later, in 1851 (February 4th), when they went to 
 York to collect materials for the Life of Etty \hz 
 husband was writing ; also at Lyme Regis, within 
 sight and sound of the sea, when " daily writing 
 and reading, daily music and daily walks " were 
 theirs crowned by happy evenings, when he read 
 aloud earnest books, while she worked with the 
 needle, or " read " music, playing and singing all 
 that he selected for her. In this life the first child, 
 Percy, was born. The second, Beatrice, came to 
 them when they were living their few secluded 
 years at Guildford. That the Life of Blake, on 
 which Mr. Gilchrist was engaged, might be better 
 
 8 
 
THOMAS CARLYLE. 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 done, they decided to settle in London, where 
 Blake s "Illustrations of the Book of Job " had 
 inspired him. Writing to Carlyle, to whom he had 
 become of real assistance in obtaining prints of 
 portraits and costumes for the Frederick he was 
 then writing, the young husband asked his advice 
 as to a house there. The sage of Chelsea replied 
 that he did not " dare advise anybody into a house 
 (almost as dangerous as advising him to a wife, 
 except that divorce is easier), but, if heaven should 
 please to rain him accidentally into the house next 
 door he should esteem it a kindness. Thus it 
 happened that, in 1856, the Gilchrists settled at 
 6 Cheyne Row, where they lived for six years. 
 There were born their two other children, Herbert 
 and Grace ; and there, as has been said, began 
 the friendship of William Michael Rossetti. He 
 found in both of them a " large fund of intelligence 
 and sympathy, and, in neither, the least pretence or 
 affectation. A more evidently well-assorted couple 
 there could hardly be." He was observant of their 
 friendly relations with the Carlyles. Anne would 
 relieve her cares by having a chat with "lively" 
 Jane, who possessed a " charming audacity and 
 winning gaiety of manner." In many little ways 
 each helped the other. Jane looked up to Anne 
 as a fine housekeeper. As Carlyle thought Anne 
 made the best bread, Jane took lessons of her. 
 Not proving an apt pupil, she asked her one day 
 
 9 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 "to stand over her" while she made it herself. 
 " A precious bother I am, to be sure, to you," said 
 Jane, " but if I can never reward you on earth you 
 are pretty certain to have two little additional wings 
 for it in heaven ! " 
 
 In this daily life as neighbors, the Gilchrists saw 
 much of the strength as well as weakness of 
 Carlyle. Jane told them one day that he never 
 complained of serious things, but if his finger was 
 cut " the house turned upside down ; one must hold 
 it, and another get plaster," etc. At this time he 
 was engaged in writing his Frederick. In his 
 pauses from work he enjoyed hearing Anne s 
 music. He became interested in Mr. Gilchrist s 
 Life of Blake all the more because he possessed the 
 "Job Illustrations." It was through a letter he 
 had written Mr. Gilchrist on the appearance of his 
 Life of Etty that the acquaintance was begun. He 
 had then declared that the book was done in a 
 " vigorous, sympathetic, vivacious spirit, promising 
 the delineation actual and intelligible of a man 
 extremely worth knowing," while their reading of 
 his Life of Sterling had led them to feel that 
 " surely never before was there in any man the union 
 of such Titan strength and keenest insight, with 
 soft, tenderest, pitying gentleness. Never surely a 
 man who had so the power of winning deep, rever 
 ent heart s love from his readers." They felt that 
 his interpretation of Giotto s portrait of Dante in 
 
 10 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 Hero Worship might stand word for word as a 
 description of himself. 
 
 One day Anne asked Jane what she thought her 
 husband s best work. " The French Revolution she 
 replied, " was her favorite, though perhaps Crom 
 well was the best- written book." Carlyle himself 
 once said to Mr. Gilchrist that if he were on his 
 death-bed, the only thing he had done to give him 
 any pleasure was the Cromwell, for it " dispersed the 
 lies," and revealed him as " all men would some 
 day see him to have been." 
 
 The sympathy of the Carlyles was very helpful 
 to the Gilchrists in the bitter days when scarlet 
 fever held the lives of their children, and, letting go 
 of them, seized the husband to a fatal result. He 
 was only thirty -three years of age (born 1828) 
 just the age of Anne. He was full of plans for 
 work, a life of Wordsworth and others being in 
 mind. All efforts for her to remain as a neighbor, 
 after the last sad ministries were over, proved 
 unavailing. She]could not stay where life had been 
 so full of blessing. She finally found a little old- 
 fashioned, tile-roofed cottage in Shottermill, a 
 quaint Hampshire village a mile from Haslemere, 
 once a coaching town en route for Portsmouth and 
 London. Here on the summit of a steep little 
 Surrey hill, at the base of which flowed a brook, 
 Anne Gilchrist and her children were settled three 
 months after her husband s death. Her heart 
 
 ii 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 turned more and more to her children. This 
 mother-love Jane Carlyle expressed more forcibly 
 than elegantly the day the family left her neighbor 
 hood, when she said to a friend, who told it, " Mrs. 
 Gilchrist would skin and bury herself alive for the 
 benefit of her children." 
 
 Here among the Surrey hills Anne Gilchrist 
 took up life again, not, as she said, in the presence 
 of the one with whom she had lived eleven such 
 full years, but with the presence. " Alec s spirit is 
 with me ever/ she wrote ; " presides in my home, 
 speaks to me in every sweet scene ; broods over the 
 peaceful valley ; haunts the grand, wild hill-tops ; 
 shines gloriously forth in setting sun and moon 
 and stars." When sad memories almost crushed 
 her, she thanked God for hard work, that, like 
 harness to an overtired horse, kept her up. She 
 began at once to finish the Life of Blake, when her 
 friends, the Rossettis, proved friends indeed. They 
 had been deeply impressed with her " strong sense 
 common sense and mental acumen combined" 
 revealed under her deep sorrow, also with her aim 
 to make the home a " centre of mental as well as 
 family vital energy." 
 
 At last, in 1 863, with their help, the Life of Blake, 
 that " beloved task which had kept her head above 
 water in the deep sea of affliction," was finished. 
 Carlyle, Browning and others sent words of appre 
 ciation on its publication. 
 
 12 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 Later, she wrote an article for Macmillari s Maga 
 zine on " The Indestructibility of Force." But that, 
 she said, should be her last attempt for many a 
 day. She decided to devote herself wholly to her 
 children. "After all," she wrote, "they will not 
 always be children ; and if I have it in me to do 
 anything worth doing with my pen, why, I can do 
 it ten years hence, when I shall have completed 
 my task so far as direct instruction of the children 
 goes. I shall only be forty-six then, not in my 
 dotage." She was convinced that a divided aim 
 was not only " most harassing to a conscientious 
 disposition, but quite fatal to success to doing 
 one s very best in either." 
 
 In this belief she filled her days with some 
 teaching, considerable reading, a little music she 
 " could not do without," attention to an aged, sick 
 mother, and devotion to her children. She lived a 
 tranquil, sequestered mode of life "with much 
 solitude and no luxury in it." In this she was a 
 "fanatical believer." Her great recreation was her 
 "glorious walks" across the breezy heaths, and 
 into the deep lanes of Guildford and Haslemere. 
 
 "If I go out feeling ever so jaded, irritable, dis 
 pirited," she said, "when I find myself up there 
 alone (for unless I have perfect stillness and quiet 
 ness, and my thoughts are as free as a bird, the 
 walk does not seem to do me good), care and fa 
 tigue are all shaken off, and life seems as grand and 
 
 13 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 sweet and noble a thing as the scene my bodily 
 eyes rest on and if sad thoughts come, they have 
 hope and sweetness so blended with them that I 
 hardly know them to be sad and I return to my 
 little chicks quite bright and rested, and fully alive 
 to the fact that they are the sweetest, loveliest 
 chicks in the whole world ; and Giddy (Grace) 
 says, mamma has shut up her box of sighs. 
 
 Mrs. Gilchrist felt there was no finer country for 
 her walks than this region of Shottermill with its 
 breezy uplands, its pine-clad hills, its undulating 
 lands over which grew the purple heather. She 
 walked with an even, light step, while every aspect 
 of Nature was assimilated. She was one of Na 
 ture s own daughters, to whom she opened her 
 soul. 
 
 Besides this companionship, Anne was rich in 
 her friends. Both Dante Gabriel and William 
 Michael Rossetti were frequent visitors. When 
 they brought to her home their sister Christina, 
 she thoroughly enjoyed the " unaffected simplicity 
 and gentleness, kindness to the children," which her 
 visits revealed. It was while she was sitting under 
 the yew-tree in this Brookbank home, one Septem 
 ber day in 1866, that the card of Mr. Alfred 
 Tennyson was put into her hands. He had come 
 with his wife to see a place, about to be sold, con 
 cerning which they had corresponded. While she 
 was preparing to accompany them to the estate, 
 
 14 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 Tennyson amused himself with her seven year old 
 Grace, as she sat on his knee. Afterwards, when 
 they were walking up a hill together, Tennyson 
 said to Mrs. Gilchrist, " I admire that little girl of 
 yours. How many children have you ?" 
 
 " Four," she replied, upon which he answered 
 hastily, " Quite enough, Quite enough " much to 
 the amusement of the mother. 
 
 In referring to this walk with Tennyson, Mrs. 
 Gilchrist said she felt singularly happy and free 
 from restraint in his presence a sense of a " benefi 
 cent, generous, nobly humane nature being com 
 bined with his intellectual greatness." The son 
 Herbert says that the children never forgot the 
 poet, as, in his long dark cloak and big hat, his 
 tall, gaunt figure "shuffled across the long, un 
 equally-shaped drawing-room " to stand before 
 Blake s water-color, " Elijah Mounted in the Fiery 
 Chariot." " Every inch a king," the mother said 
 in describing him, "features massive, eyes very 
 grave and penetrating, hair long, still very dark, 
 and though getting thin, falls in such a way as to 
 give a peculiar beauty to the mystic head ;" while 
 Mrs. Tennyson seemed to her to be a "sweet, grace 
 ful woman with singularly winning gentle manners," 
 but looking "painfully fragile and wan." 
 
 Both the poet and his wife appreciated the efforts 
 of Mrs. Gilchrist in assisting them to buy a place 
 in that vicinity. But ere settling permanently, they 
 
 IS 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 decided to try the climate by living awhile at 
 " Greyshot." While Anne extended her help in 
 furnishing the house, she entertained them two days 
 in Brookbank. Upon their being settled in " Grey- 
 shot," she occasionally dined with them. At one 
 time, among the subjects freely discussed was the 
 Queen s kindness to Tennyson. Her manner to 
 wards him, said Mrs. Tennyson, was " childlike 
 and charming. They both gave their opinions 
 freely." Anne never forgot a walk home one 
 night with Tennyson when they discussed Spencer s 
 Nebular Hypothesis and Illogical Geology, books 
 she had just been reading. She said he "talked 
 gloriously" of immortality as well as materialism. 
 Referring to one of their Haslemere rambles, she 
 said that though he was short-sighted, he was most 
 observant. In order to see the tiny movement of 
 a number of springs bubbling up through the sand 
 to which she was calling his attention, he put his 
 face almost to the water as he lay down near the 
 edge of the brook. 
 
 It was through the agent Mrs. Gilchrist finally 
 found for the Tennysons that " Green Hill," after 
 wards improved and called " Aldworth," was 
 bought at a moderate price. " I do think," said 
 Anne, after the purchase, " if ever there was a place 
 made for a poet to live in, this is the spot thirty- 
 six acres, half-coppice above, three large fields and 
 a little old farm-house below." She ever recalled 
 
 16 
 
ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 with delight Tennyson s feeling concerning it. 
 " He was so pleased/ she said, " a sort of childish 
 glee that was beautiful to see, contrasting curiously 
 enough with his saturnine moods." Again she 
 noticed his excellent spirits the following year 
 1868 when occurred the laying of the corner 
 stone for the new house, with its inscription, 
 " Prosper thou the work of our hands, O prosper 
 thou our handiwork." After the ceremony, which 
 included a few appropriate words of a friend, Mrs. 
 Gilchrist seized a few moments, before post, to 
 write Mrs. Tennyson. She knew she would have 
 a special interest, for the change of name to Aid- 
 worth arose from the fact that some of her family 
 came from a village of that name, where was a 
 curious old church containing tombs of her Sell- 
 wood ancestors. (From Tennyson s Memoirs?) 
 
 When by the summer of the following year 
 (1869) they were settled in the "very charming" 
 new house, neighborly calls were made. Often, at 
 the top of Blackdown, Tennyson would take his 
 friends, sit on the heather and enjoy the sunset. 
 Thus, on the site Mrs. Gilchrist, as Lady Tenny 
 son said in her Journal, took such " endless trouble " 
 to help obtain for them, the poet-laureate and his 
 wife lived restful years, and there they both died. 
 It was while living in this neighborhood, in " dear 
 little Brookbank," that the poems of Walt Whit 
 man came into Anne Gilchrist s life, the reading of 
 2 17 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 which was, as she said, " truly a new birth to her 
 soul." " What more can you ask of the words of a 
 man s mouth," she wrote Rossetti, " than that they 
 should absorb into you as food and air, to appear 
 again in your strength, gait, face that they should 
 be fibre and filter to your blood, joy and gladness to 
 your whole nature ?" She was persuaded that one 
 great source of this " kindling, vitalizing power 
 the great source was the grasp laid upon the 
 present, the fearless and comprehensive dealing 
 with reality." This " athlete full of rich words, full 
 of joy, takes you by the hand and turns your face 
 straight-forwards." She used to think it was great 
 "to disregard happiness, to press on to a high goal 
 careless, disdainful of it." Now she fully saw there 
 was nothing so great as "to be capable of happi 
 ness ;" to pluck it out " each moment and whatever 
 happens;" to find that one can ride "as gay 
 and buoyant on the angry, menacing, tumul 
 tuous waves of life, as on those that glide and 
 glitter under a clear sky ;" that it is not " defeat 
 and wretchedness which come out of the storm of 
 Adversity, but strength and calmness." As to the 
 words he uses, she felt it was not mere delight they 
 gave ; that the sweet singers could give too in their 
 degree ; but they gave such life and health as 
 enabled us " to pluck delights for ourselves out of 
 every hour of the day, and taste the sunshine that 
 ripened the corn in the crust we eat." She often 
 
 18 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 seemed to herself to do that. She found a wonder 
 ful, inspiring comfort in the magnificent faith in, 
 and love for, "sane and sacred death," who, in the 
 language of this poet, came not as a terror, but as 
 the " holiest minister of heaven." 
 
 "Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot called life, 
 Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death." (Death s Valley.) 
 
 " Come lovely and soothing death. 
 
 Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, 
 
 In the day, in the night, to all, to each. 
 
 Sooner or later, delicate death. 
 
 *** 
 
 Praised be the fathomless universe, 
 For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, 
 And for love, sweet love but praise ! praise ! praise ! 
 For the sure-en winding arms of cool-enfolding death." 
 
 (Memories of Lincoln . ) 
 
 " At the last, tenderly, 
 
 From the walls of the powerful fortressed house, 
 
 From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the keep of the 
 
 well-closed doors, 
 Let me be wafted. 
 
 " Let me glide noiselessly forth ; 
 
 With the key of softness unlock the locks with a whisper, 
 
 Set ope the doors O soul. 
 
 " Tenderly be not impatient, 
 (Strong is your hold, O mortal flesh, 
 Strong is your hold, O love.)" 
 
 ( The Last Invocation.} 
 
 Then she exulted in a poet who, while thus 
 welcoming death, could produce " evangel-poems 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 of comrades and of love," by which a " new and 
 superb friendship " was made possible here. She 
 felt with him the " Amplitude of Time," while " all, 
 all was for immortality." She rejoiced in the 
 modern man of which he sang 
 
 " Of life immense in passion, pulse and power, 
 Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine. 
 The Modern Man I sing." 
 
 For the first time she truly realized the meaning 
 of Democracy of individuality. As never before, 
 she realized the glory of being a woman, of being 
 a mother. 
 
 " I am the poet of the woman the same as of the man. 
 And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man. 
 And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men." 
 
 (Song of Myself. ) 
 
 Even for the prostitute she found him divinely 
 tender and sympathetic, as in The City Dead House. 
 I doubt if that poem will ever be more appreci 
 ated by any human being than by this woman 
 who could write that inspired letter to Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti, on " Jenny," when his first volume of 
 poems appeared in 1870 a poem which moved 
 her to anguish, coming upon her "after she had 
 been gazing into the very sanctuary of love where 
 woman sat divinely enthroned." 
 
 "You touch Jenny gently tenderly even," she 
 wrote, " and I feel grateful to you for that ; yet I 
 
 20 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 think even you are hard on her ; fond of guineas/ 
 yes, for want is bitter, and it always dogs her 
 steps, or, at any rate, lurks just round the corner. 
 But fond of kisses, no. I do not believe there is 
 ever more any sweetness in a kiss for her, only, 
 with whatever semblance it may be given or taken 
 an inward loathing." 
 
 Then with what impassioned eloquence (who can 
 forget it ?) she goes on to picture the heart, and 
 circumstances leading to evil, of such a woman; 
 from the first blind folly to the afterwards, with no 
 human hand to help her up, perhaps pushed down 
 from above by sisters, grasped from below by ever 
 more and more brutalized men, her poor body 
 dragged and dragged through the mire, even then, 
 she says, " I do not believe its vileness stains 
 through to her very inmost self. If I did, the pain 
 would be more than I could bear ; these tears 
 would burn my cheeks like flame ; I should hate 
 my womanhood crave annihilation for the race. 
 No ! God has not cursed men with the hideous 
 power to wreck her soul as they can wreck her 
 body. Poor soul ! it was but half awake and alert 
 to begin with all its finest instincts yet undeveloped, 
 else it would not have let her stand for a moment 
 within the atmosphere of danger, but would have 
 shed round her a subtle atmosphere banishing, dis 
 pelling danger ! Now, crouched away back, with 
 face averted from the mad riot of a body that 
 
 21 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 carries, but is scarce owned by it, numb with 
 misery, and the utter privation of all healthful ac 
 tivity and sympathy, conscious of itself only 
 through sullen despair, it waits and waits till there 
 comes at last the mighty rescuing friend Death 
 mysterious New Birth. Then it finds itself once 
 more animating a stainless body, standing not indeed 
 among the happy sisters, but free to climb towards 
 them, carrying no defilements with it." No " Echo 
 from the Past," she was grateful to say, told her 
 this was so, but something more " deeply convinc 
 ing, more illuminating than reason or the evidence 
 of the senses." 
 
 With this glimpse into the noble Christian soul 
 of Anne Gilchrist, it becomes interesting to see how 
 the certain poems to which Rossetti referred were 
 received by her. 
 
 " Who so well able to bear it," she asks, "as 
 she who, having been a happy wife and mother, has 
 learned to accept all things with tenderness, to feel 
 a sacredness in all?" Her only doubt was ex 
 pressed in the thought that perhaps Whitman had 
 forgotten, or through some theory in his head had 
 overridden, the truth that " our instincts are beau 
 tiful facts of nature as well as our bodies," and that 
 we have a " strong instinct of silence about some 
 things." When, however, she had read the " beau 
 tiful, despised" poems of Children of Adam by the 
 " light that glows out of the rest of the volume, by 
 
 22 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 the light of a clear, strong faith in God, of an un- 
 fathomably deep and tender love for humanity, light 
 shed out of a soul that is possessed of itself/ she 
 wrote Rossetti he argued rightly that her confidence 
 would not be betrayed by any of the poems in the 
 book. None of them, she said, troubled her even 
 for a moment ; because she saw at a glance that it 
 was not, as men had supposed, the " heights 
 brought down to the depths, but the depths lifted 
 up level with the sunlit heights, that they might 
 become clear and sunlit too." 
 
 In this poet, she saw always for woman, " a 
 veil woven out of her own soul never touched 
 upon even with a rough hand ;" and for man a 
 " daring, fearless pride in himself, not a mock- 
 modesty woven out of delusions." " Do they not 
 see," she continues, " that this fearless pride, this 
 complete acceptance of themselves, is needful for 
 her pride, her justification ? What ! is it all so 
 ignoble, so base, that it will not bear the honest 
 light of speech from lips so gifted with the divine 
 power to use words ? Then what hateful, bitter 
 humiliation for her to have to give herself up to 
 the reality. It must surely be man s fault, not 
 God s, that she has to say to herself, Motherhood 
 is beautiful, fatherhood is beautiful ; but the dawn 
 of fatherhood and motherhood is not beautiful. 
 ... It is true that instinct of silence I spoke 
 of is a beautiful, imperishable part of nature 
 
 23 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 too. But it is not beautiful when it means an 
 ignominious shame brooding darkly. It was needed 
 that this silence, this evil spell, should for once be 
 broken, and the daylight let in, that the dark cloud 
 lying under might be scattered to the winds. It 
 was needed that one who could here indicate for 
 us the path between reality and the soul should 
 speak. . . . Now silence may brood again ; but 
 lovingly, happily as protecting what is beautiful, 
 not as hiding what is unbeautiful ; consciously en 
 folding a sweet and sacred mystery august even 
 as the mystery of Death, the dawn as the setting ; 
 kindred grandeurs which to eye s that are opened 
 shed a hallowing beauty on all that surrounds and 
 preludes them. He who can look with fearless 
 ness at the beauty of Death 
 
 " O vast and well-veiled Death ! 
 
 O the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing, 
 
 may well dare to teach us to look with fearless, 
 untroubled eyes at the perfect beauty of Love in 
 all its appointed realities. Now none need turn 
 away their thoughts with pain or shame ; though 
 only lovers and poets may say what they will the 
 lover to his own, the poet to all, because all are in 
 a sense his own." 
 
 But where shall we stop in this splendid rush of 
 thought of this high-minded, pure-hearted woman ? 
 for only such could so express herself in this day r 
 
 24 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 when so much of thought and feeling is tinged 
 with the false and shallow teaching of the ages. 
 
 May I be allowed right here to tell of one of the 
 finest compliments ever paid a woman ? It was 
 during a conversation with Walt Whitman in his 
 Camden home on this very subject the advisability 
 of giving to the public eye things meant for the 
 silences. After a somewhat lengthy expression of 
 my opinion, when the matter was considered one 
 of taste rather than of morals, he looked at me 
 earnestly as he extended his hand, and said in that 
 wondrously sweet voice of his, " I want to thank 
 you, as a woman, for the capacity of understanding 
 me ;" then, after a moment s pause, he added some 
 what meditatively, " Perhaps only the combination 
 of the pure heart and the broad mind makes this 
 possible." 
 
 How many times this thought has come to me, 
 on seeing women s minds "so stuck" to a few 
 phrases in his work that they could not soar on the 
 wings of his poetry and say 
 
 " Over the mountain-growths, disease and sorrow, 
 An uncaught bird is ever hovering, hovering, 
 High in the purer, happier air. 
 
 " From imperfection s murkiest cloud 
 Darts always forth one ray of perfect light, 
 One flash of heaven s glory. 
 
 " To fashions, customs, discord, 
 To the mad Babel-din, the deafening orgies, 
 25 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 Soothing each lull a strain is heard, just heard, 
 From some far shore the final chorus sounding. 
 
 " O the blest eyes, the happy hearts 
 
 That see, that know the guiding thread so fine 
 
 Along the mighty labyrinth." 
 
 (Song of the Universal.} 
 
 Or 
 
 " In this broad earth of ours, 
 Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, 
 Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
 Nestles the seed perfection." 
 
 ( Song of the Universal. ) 
 
 This all-embracing truth of the poet, including 
 within its scope every created thing, and with 
 deepest significance every part, faculty, attitude, 
 healthful impulse, mind and body of a man (each 
 and all facing towards and related to the Infinite on 
 every side), was what so impressed Anne Gilchrist. 
 She was firmly convinced that a perfectly fearless, 
 candid, ennobling treatment of the life of the body, 
 so inextricably intertwined with, so potent in its 
 influence on the life of the soul, would " prove of 
 inestimable value to all earnest aspiring natures, 
 impatient of the folly of the long-prevalent belief 
 that it is because of the greatness of the spirit that 
 it has learned to despise the body, and to ignore its 
 influence." She felt that the spirit must " lovingly 
 embrace the body, as the roots of a tree embrace the 
 ground, drawing therein rich nourishment, warmth, 
 
 26 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 impulse." The great tide of healthful life that 
 carries all before it must surge through the whole 
 man, not beat to and fro in one corner of his brain. 
 " O the life of my senses and flesh, transcending 
 my senses and flesh !" She had no fear that the 
 poet s utterances, however harmless in themselves, 
 would prove harmful by falling into the hands of 
 those for whom they were manifestly unsuitable ; 
 for she believed that "innocence was folded round 
 with such thick folds of ignorance till the right 
 way and time for it to accept knowledge that what 
 was unsuitable was also unintelligible." She be 
 came more and more convinced that the harm 
 arose from the dark shadow cast on the white page 
 from without the misconstruction of foolish people, 
 traitors to themselves, poorly comprehending the 
 grandeur or beauty of their own natures. Remove 
 this shadow, she said, trust Nature to do her own 
 teaching to individual consciousness, and all would 
 learn, through the poet, the divinity of the temple 
 of the spirit, the glories possible to it, which, 
 through false teachings, had been denied. This 
 thought she knew was not now realized. But she 
 was sure that when the " most vital and practical 
 of facts that there was no particle of matter in the 
 universe but had reference to soul " was seen to be 
 true, we should understand all, love all, and fear 
 nothing. Then, she persuaded herself, Walt 
 Whitman s poems would be " dear to the hearts 
 
 27 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 of many women, and that the husbands of those 
 women would be the happiest of husbands." She 
 felt a persuasion, the "strength and persistency" 
 of which astonished her, that it was possible for 
 a woman so to treat the difficult subject as to com 
 mand respect, though it might not be possible at 
 present to win more than a dozen persons in the 
 world to the truest conception. A point was 
 gained, however, if hearts and minds would no 
 longer look at the poet through the distorting 
 medium bred by an utter misconception. She be 
 lieved that some of his poems would never be 
 rightly apprehended by men until some woman 
 had the courage to speak. " His utterances," she 
 wrote, " needed corroboration, acceptance from a 
 woman (as closely concerned as man in this ques 
 tion and approaching it from entirely distinct 
 standing-ground) before it could be accepted by 
 men." 
 
 Her conviction that these poems had in them 
 the " seeds of such immeasurably grand results for 
 the world" that any delay in the successful plant 
 ing of them was grievous ; the pain and indignation 
 she felt at the thought of how that " great name 
 had been saluted chiefly with injurious epithets 
 and hateful imputations ;" the belief that " none 
 but a woman could be the decisive judge of the 
 question involved in these attacks (she being sup 
 plied with finer, subtler tests) ;" the clear, sweet 
 
 28 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 consciousness that men and women might "trust 
 her to the uttermost in this, even if they could not 
 at present see the matter at all as she did ;" all these 
 things made her absolutely fearless in deciding to 
 accept Mr. Rossetti s proposal to have her letters 
 to him on the subject arranged for the public eye. 
 He had been deeply impressed with her thought, 
 considering it the "fullest, farthest-reaching and 
 most eloquent appreciation of Whitman" which 
 had then appeared. He deemed it all the more 
 valuable because the expression of what a woman 
 saw in the poet, especially such a woman, whom to 
 know was " to respect and esteem in every relation, 
 whether of character, intellect or culture." He 
 wrote a prelude in accordance with her request, for 
 she confessed she never could have written so 
 frankly but for the implicit faith that he would un 
 derstand her aright. She fully realized her posi 
 tion in advocating a poet which the world had not 
 yet understood. " I often feel," she wrote, " as if 
 my enterprise was very like Lady Godiva s as if 
 hers, indeed, were typical of mine. For she slipped 
 the veil from woman s body for a good cause, and 
 I from a woman s soul for a good cause. And no 
 man has ever dared to find any fault with her." 
 
 On the work being received in America, the 
 friends of Walt Whitman were " infinitely indebted, 
 beyond words, for so broad and luminous an inter 
 pretation of his pages." Mr. Wm. D. O Connor, 
 
 29 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 upon receiving it, wrote, " The lady s contribution 
 is simply superb. Unquestionably the finest and 
 fullest appreciation yet uttered." Later he wrote, 
 "Our Bird of Paradise has found a perch in the 
 May number of the Radical" (1870.) And to 
 day, " An Englishwoman s estimate of Walt Whit 
 man" is one of the finest contributions to Whitman 
 literature. 
 
 Walt Whitman himself was deeply touched with 
 this " burst of sunlight over the sea." " Nothing," 
 he wrote Wm. M. Rossetti, after having received 
 word direct from Mrs. Gilchrist, "nothing in my 
 life, or my literary fortunes, has brought me more 
 comfort and support every way nothing has more 
 spiritually soothed me than the warm appreci 
 ation of friendship of that true, full-grown woman 
 (I still use the broad, grand old Saxon word, our 
 highest need)." To his dying day the poet never 
 forgot this ray of hope in his lonely, self-made 
 way. 
 
 The effect of Anne Gilchrist s study of Walt 
 Whitman was already being seen in her judgment 
 of other poets. Mr. Rossetti s Memoir of Shelley 
 led her to restudy Shelley. His criticism of Mr. 
 Swinburne caused an animated discussion between 
 the two friends of that poet s work. While his 
 Ballads of Burdens interested Rossetti, as Ecclesi- 
 astes would, she felt it to be the "trite, dreary, 
 sickly conceptions of life that have already been 
 
 30 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 uttered ad nauseam; though, she had to confess, 
 " never so musically uttered before." Her nature 
 was panting for healthier life, the free, fresh, grow 
 ing life of humanity. The emotion of Swinburne 
 seemed to her the " effluence of a heated brain, not 
 of a strong, beating heart." 
 
 " Was there ever before a gifted man so barren 
 of great thoughts or deep feelings?" she asked 
 Rossetti. But she said she could go any length 
 with him in admiration of Victor Hugo, " cet heros 
 au doux sourire," as she always thought of him. 
 
 In these days in her Brookbank home, passed in 
 a life of " earnest, warm and unfrittered simplicity," 
 Anne Gilchrist held an " even and sensitive balance 
 between the claims of family affection and those 
 of intellectual activity." She was genial, coura 
 geous, and steady in all her likings and habits," with 
 a manner, says her son, " remarkably cordial with 
 out gushingness." She had an eminently speaking 
 face, the full, dark, liquid eyes, extremely vivacious, 
 being the marked feature. Her " ready quick- 
 thoughted kindness " was what George Eliot espe 
 cially noted in the correspondence which led to the 
 renting of* Brookbank to her and Mr. Lewis for 
 the summer of 1871. This little " queer cottage " 
 where, as George Eliot wrote Anne, " the exquisite 
 stillness in the sunshine, and a sense of distance 
 from London hurry which encourages the growth 
 of patience," were such a joy to her, became so 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 dear to them both that they " were loth to leave " 
 when the lease of a few months was up. The 
 shelves were so ladened with books that they re 
 gretted having brought any of their own. They 
 found the reading of the Life of Blake especially 
 interesting midst the cloud of Blake drawings and 
 engravings which adorned the walls. They were 
 as pleased with these as Tennyson had been. In 
 the long drawing-room with its antique furniture, the 
 red rose and honeysuckle peeping in through the 
 bow- window, George Eliot wrote day after day the 
 second part of Middlemarch. The old prints on 
 the walls, "charming children of Sir Joshua, and 
 large-hatted ladies of his and Romney," were her 
 "dumb companions." She declared if ever she 
 stole anything, it would be the two little Sir Joshuas 
 over the drawing-room mantel-piece, Master Lord 
 Burghersh, and little Miss Theopila Gwatkin. All 
 this surrounding may have suggested the house of 
 Mrs. Meyrick in Daniel Deronda, where the " nar 
 row spaces of wall held a world-history in scenes 
 and heads." 
 
 Work went on smoothly to both George Eliot 
 and Mr. Lewes, away from all friendly interrup 
 tions. Their habits here, as in London, were of 
 clock-work regularity. " We are like two secluded 
 owls," she wrote a friend, "wise with unfashionable 
 wisdom, and knowing nothing of pictures and 
 French plays. I read aloud almost all the even- 
 
 32 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 ing books of German science and other gravities." 
 To another friend she wrote of the beauty of the 
 region, " perpetual undulation of heath and copse, 
 clear views of hurrying water with here and there 
 a grand pine wood, steep, wood-clothed promon 
 tories and gleaming pools." In this atmosphere 
 she read our Lowell s My Study Windows. " If 
 you want delightful reading," she declared, " read 
 in that the essays called My Garden Acquaint 
 ances/ and Winter. Occasionally they went 
 the uphill road to see Tennyson, who, from his 
 house about three miles from Shottermill, had 
 found them out. Miss Blind, in her biography of 
 George Eliot, tells how, on one of these visits, after 
 a warm argument on Evolution and kindred 
 thought the poet called to her, as she wended her 
 way down the hill after the farewell, " Well, good 
 bye, you and your molecules !" Looking back, 
 she replied in her low, deep voice, " I am quite con 
 tent with my molecules !" When they left the little 
 cottage, a most cordial invitation was extended to 
 Mrs.Gilchrist to come to their Sunday "At Homes." 
 But the way never opened for a personal meeting. 
 George Eliot, however, never forgot Shottermill, 
 where, as she wrote Anne, who had used the 
 phrase, she had a " sense of standing on a round 
 world," which was "precisely what she most cared 
 for amongst out-of-door delights." 
 
 Five years later, in 1876, when she and Mr. 
 3 33 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 Lewes bought a place not far off, The Heights, at 
 Witley, Surrey (which became a favorite country 
 home), they had the same kind of beautiful open 
 scenery. There Mr. Lewes sper!: his last summer 
 on earth, and there George Eliot came with her 
 husband, Mr. Cross, after their tour in Italy. 
 
 It is possible that Anne Gilchrist s love for the 
 work of Walt Whitman influenced George Eliot to 
 a further study of him. She may have found 
 among Anne s books at Brookbank the Radical 
 containing her estimate of him, as it was published 
 only the year before. However that may be, we 
 do know that George Eliot came to change her 
 opinion that Whitman had nothing " spiritually 
 needful for her," to a confession that he did con 
 tain what was good for her soul." 
 
 The summer that Brookbank was occupied by 
 the Lewes , Anne was with her aged mother at the 
 ancestral home at Earls Colne, where annual visits 
 were always paid. There, in the old-fashioned 
 flower-bordered garden, or in some pet field, she 
 roamed, listened to the singing of the birds, and 
 ever had " happy thoughts of her children and 
 their future together." She read the Idylls of the 
 King and The Holy Grail which the Tennysons 
 sent her. But, above all, she dwelt upon " Walt 
 Whitman and his divine poems." They not only 
 made Nature dearer to her, but deepened her feel 
 ing for human nature. She came to realize more 
 
 34 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 what comradeship meant. These poems, associated 
 as they were with William Michael Rossetti, made 
 his friendship a constant delight a friendship 
 " never clouded by p. breath of coldness or dissat 
 isfaction." When settled the following winter in 
 her native London* for the better education of her 
 children, it was a pleasure to congratulate him 
 upon his approaching marriage with Miss Lucy 
 Madox Brown ; for she was still an earnest be 
 liever in the " enlarged, deepened, completed life 
 only to be attained through a happy marriage." 
 On the death of the wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 she "sighed with happiness," as she wrote him, 
 " to realize that the earth did bear on its bosom 
 such sweet life for two human creatures." After 
 trying to console him with the thought that it was 
 only a pause in that blended life, only one of the 
 two hidden for a few yards by a bend of the road," 
 she cried out, " But how could God spare the sight 
 of such happiness out of His universe ?" 
 
 A visit to America had been in Anne Gilchrist s 
 mind for some time. At last, in the Centennial 
 year (1876), she decided to go there with her son, 
 Herbert, then about twenty years of age, and her 
 daughters "Bee" and "Giddy," as Walt Whit 
 man calls them in a letter. Before sailing in August, 
 she was rejoiced to see a goodly list of names of 
 
 * Anne Gilchrist was born at 7 Gower street, London, February 
 25, 1828, the same year as Dante G. Rossetti. 
 
 35 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 persons who, through her and Mr. Rossetti s in 
 strumentality, had agreed to buy a copy of Walt 
 Whitman s Centennial edition of Leaves of Grass. 
 Inspired by the eloquent letter of Robert Buchanan 
 following a review in the Daily News, Tennyson 
 had sent the poet five pounds. Although Buchanan 
 intimated to Whitman that no books were expected 
 in return, he preferred to send him his new edition 
 of two volumes, which he did. " I am not at all 
 sure/ he had already written Rossetti, " that Alfred 
 Tennyson sees my poems, but I do his ; and strongly, 
 (and there, perhaps, I have the advantage of him) ; 
 but I think he sees me ; and nothing could have 
 evidenced more courtesy and manliness and hos 
 pitality than his letters to me have shown for five 
 years." This kind, helpful interest of English 
 friends was never forgotten by Walt Whitman. 
 "Forevermore I shall love old England," he said 
 to Sidney Morse when he was at his home sculp 
 turing a bust of him. "It all comes over me 
 now, and always does when I think of it, like a 
 great succouring love. You should have seen the 
 tears, Sidney, or you shouldn t. With no discount 
 ing of friends at home, I must say that English 
 business stands apart in my thought from all else 
 the money and the friendliness of it all." 
 
 Upon arriving in Philadelphia, Anne was favor 
 ably impressed with the city, with its " long straight 
 streets at right angles to each other, long and 
 
 36 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 broad enough to look as if they must lead some 
 where very pleasant." It was "more picturesque 
 and foreign-looking" than she expected. Its free 
 dom from smoke and soot pleased her. Friends 
 were soon made. John Burroughs called a few 
 days after her arrival, and " much she liked him." 
 But the chief joy was meeting Walt Whitman, who, 
 she wrote Rossetti, " fully realized the ideal she had 
 formed from his poems," and brought such an 
 " atmosphere of cordiality with him as is indescrib 
 able." This atmosphere of cordiality was what par 
 ticularly impressed me in visiting the poet in his 
 Camden home. Although confined to his room, 
 ill-health did not quench the spirit of love which 
 animated his face and guided his action the love 
 of comradeship which engendered a personal inter 
 est and a loyal affection. It was at the time when 
 my little gratuitous work in his behalf, Gems 
 from Walt Whitman, was being published by 
 David McKay (1889). He showed interest in 
 every detail, even providing the biographical facts 
 for it. He had already sent me two most apprecia 
 tive letters for the article on his life among the 
 soldiers included in the book, when it appeared in 
 the New York Critic. 
 
 Those who have had the friendship of Walt 
 Whitman know how much he meant when he said, 
 " Thank you deeply." This capacity for grateful 
 affection Anne Gilchrist fully appreciated ; and the 
 
 37 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 poet was only too happy for the opportunity now 
 given for personal expression. Day after day 
 he came to her boarding-place in Philadelphia, 
 (1929 North 2 2d street.) Every evening but Sun 
 day he was likely to be at her right hand in the 
 circle gathered around her tea-table. His white 
 hair and beard gave him a look of age " curiously 
 contradicted by his face," she wrote Rossetti, 
 " which has not only the ruddy freshness, but the 
 full-rounded contour of youth, nowhere drawn or 
 wrinkled or sunk a face indicative of serenity and 
 goodness." As a result of a paralytic stroke, he 
 inclined "to drag rather than lift" the left leg. 
 She was always impressed with his striking per 
 sonality. One evening, when Joaquin Miller was 
 a guest at the tea-table, he came in a little late. 
 "Ah !" exclaimed Miller, as he arose to greet him, 
 " He looks like a god to-night !" 
 
 In referring to those days, Joaquin Miller wrote 
 me from his California home in December, 1896, 
 that Mrs. Gilchrist " would not be forgotten Walt 
 was ever safe in her hands." In those evenings, 
 rich in conversation and friendly greetings, the 
 good gray poet rarely read his own poems. He 
 inclined more to discuss the work and personality 
 of others. Years afterward Grace, or "Giddy" as 
 they then called her, added her public impressions, 
 to those of her brother Herbert, of the two years 
 her family spent in the Quaker City of Philadelphia. 
 
 38 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 She recalled the rich personality of Whitman, when, 
 after supper, they would all take their chairs out 
 " American fashion, beside the stoop that is on the 
 pavement below the front steps of the house " 
 and have the friendly evening together. The poet, 
 sitting in a large bamboo rocking-chair, would 
 declaim scenes from Tennyson, Shakespeare and 
 others, but would rarely recite anything of his own. 
 She recalled "The Mystic Trumpeter" as one he 
 oftenest recited, that having been a favorite one for 
 his recital to the soldiers in the hospitals. She 
 referred to his confession that he could not find 
 the satisfaction in Shakespeare s heroines that some 
 did. " I think," he said, "it is partly owing to the 
 fact that women never actually acted in Shakes 
 peare s time ; boys were dressed up, and Shakes 
 peare must have had those in mind." He declared 
 he felt like comparing his plays to " large, rich, 
 splendid tapestry, like Raphael s historical cartoons, 
 where everything is broad and colossal. Royal 
 kings and queens did not really talk like that, but 
 ought to if they did not ; it is redeemed in that way. 
 Now you can t say that of Nature a tree is what 
 it is, and you can t make it out better than it is." 
 At another time he said he didn t care for " Straw 
 berry teas" and the like. He enjoyed "being 
 with those he loved, and was never tired of that." 
 The son Herbert, in his biography, recalls interest 
 ing incidents of these friendly gatherings at the 
 
 39 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 boarding-place of his mother in Philadelphia. At 
 one time she persuaded him to read Romola, know 
 ing that George Eliot was not a favorite of his. 
 The result, however, was not satisfactory. The 
 book seemed to him more " like a mosaic, each bit 
 good," but he wanted a " thread, something to 
 carry him on in a novel." He thought Romola 
 was " statuesque ; her author always poses her 
 before the reader is allowed to see her, as a photog 
 rapher does your chin a little higher, please ! 
 The story was melancholy to him. " Ah !" he 
 exclaimed, " when the Greeks treated of tragedy, 
 how differently it was done. They did it in a lofty 
 way, so that there seemed to be fulfillment in defeat ; 
 a tragedy as treated by the ancients inspires fills 
 one with hope." He once said that Walter Scott 
 was ever a great favorite with him, especially his 
 Heart of Mid-Lothian. His work breathed more of 
 the open air than of the workshop. His humanity 
 refreshed him. At another time, referring to Burns, 
 he spoke of his large humanity. " Convivial Burns!" 
 he exclaimed, " fond of comrades, of talking and 
 joking ; I think that I, nay, that we, should all 
 have liked him. What a tragedy his life was, poor 
 fellow !" Walt always spoke of George Sand s 
 work with interest, especially Consuelo. His knowl 
 edge of music and the drama made his discussion 
 on those subjects interesting, for Mrs. Gilchrist was 
 musical by nature and education. When they were 
 
 40 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 in a box seeing Joaquin Miller s new play, The 
 Danites, she noticed that though now and then he 
 nodded approval, he did it with the reserve of an 
 old playgoer who had seen the great artists. 
 
 But it was as a democrat she saw the richest 
 life in him his love for the individual everywhere 
 for the person itself, aside from the profession. 
 
 " I am the bard of personality," he said, much 
 to her joy, for in that she saw soul-recognition for 
 the humblest. Speaking of Tennyson one evening, 
 he said it was a pity for such a personality as his 
 not to invest more of his capital in comradeship. 
 " Literary men and artists seem to shrink from 
 companionship ; to me it is exhilarating ; affects me 
 in the same way that the light or storm does." He 
 said that though he liked Thoreau, what he once 
 said to him, when walking in his favorite Brooklyn, 
 jarred on him. " What is there in people ? Pshaw ! 
 what do you (a man who sees as well as anybody) 
 see in all this cheating, political corruption?" He 
 felt that it was not so much a love of woods, 
 streams and hills that made Thoreau live in the 
 country, as a morbid dislike of humanity. He 
 even felt a little vexed, at times, that the good 
 William (Shakespeare) should have failed to see 
 anything in the common people ; for, unless it be 
 the faithful servant in As You Like It, there was not 
 a single character of the people in his plays who 
 was not a booby (Jack Cade, Bottom) and no 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 doubt they were only it showed him how entirely 
 Shakespeare was absorbed in the feudalism of his 
 time. Walt often spoke of his own experiences 
 with those who were ignorant of him as a writer 
 or poet. Poets and artists were such " far-off 
 things" to many of them, that he declared he 
 found real entertainment in their opinions, and even 
 in their astonishment that one such could come 
 among them talking freely. He enjoyed giving his 
 reminiscences of the war to pilot-men, engineers, 
 car-drivers, etc. He noted all the criticisms, refer 
 ring one time to a piece of advice he received from 
 an old fellow who, after having read Leaves of 
 Grass, asked, very earnestly, why he didn t study 
 Addison. " You ought to read Addison s works," 
 he concluded gravely. 
 
 When Edward Carpenter came to America, 
 mainly to see the "good, gray poet," Walt took 
 him to call on Anne. Her predilection to science, 
 leading her mind to the roots of things, made her 
 an interesting companion. One can easily imagine 
 these three large natures talking together of the 
 new forms of poetry, of democracy, and other sub 
 jects. Anne, according to her son, was a " good 
 and rather copious talker, serious and amusing as 
 well," and had a most musical voice. Her large, 
 loving nature and fine sympathy made her liberal 
 and charitable. Walt called her his " noblest 
 woman friend" as well as "science-friend." (Going 
 
 42 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 Somewhere?) Her nobility of soul was the secret 
 of this great capacity for friendship with great 
 minds. She could not stoop to the vulgar or to 
 the superficial. " I never knew a woman," said 
 Rossetti, " who, while maintaining a decorous social 
 position, from which she never deviated or dero 
 gated by a hair s breath, showed less propensity 
 towards any of those social distinctions which are 
 essentially factitious and arbitrary." And years 
 afterward, in 1897, referring to her in a letter to me, 
 he said he always thought of her with " affection 
 and respect." 
 
 Her friend, Mrs. Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, re 
 ferred to this splendid capacity for friendship in 
 writing of her in the New York Critic. She says 
 her letters to her friends were "more full of thought 
 and more finished in style than many of the articles 
 published in papers and reviews." Some of her 
 most " beautiful, characteristic, and copious " letters 
 were, according to the Athenaum, written to her 
 great American friend, Walt Whitman. These the 
 poet kept as sacred to his dying day. On being 
 appealed to by Herbert Gilchrist to give them, or 
 parts of them, for publication in the biography of 
 his mother, he said he could not furnish any good 
 reason, but he felt to keep these utterances exclu 
 sively to himself. 
 
 While in America, Mrs. Gilchrist s pen was not 
 idle. Besides prose translations from Victor Hugo s 
 
 43 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 La Legende des Siecles, letters, etc., she wrote an 
 occasional article or essay. One written at North 
 ampton, Massachusetts (where she went after her 
 two years stay in Philadelphia), under the title 
 "Three Glimpses of a New England Village," 
 eventually appeared in Blackwood s Magazine. 
 (November, 1884.) In this she pleasantly compared 
 the New England valley to the English weald of 
 Sussex, acknowledging its advantage of a broad and 
 beautiful river winding through it (the Connecticut), 
 while its hills were about two hundred feet higher. 
 By signs in the Amherst Museum, she judged that 
 New England was old compared to Old England, 
 since for ages one had dry land, while the other 
 had a waste of waters. She not only pictured the 
 natural beauties of the region, but its history, in 
 cluding the long-supposed " miraculous deliver 
 ance " in old Hatfield, of which Sir Walter Scott, 
 Cooper, Miss Sedgwick and Hawthorne had treated. 
 She .was in love, like all of us, with Hatfield s wide 
 street with its double avenue of superb elms, look 
 ing to her more like the entrance to a fine park than 
 a village street. Socially, the town reminded her 
 of Cranford, but " Cranford with a difference." 
 There was the same preponderance of maiden ladies 
 and widows; the same tea-parties with a "solitary 
 beau in the centre like the one white flower in the 
 middle of a nosegay ;" the same " modest good 
 ness, kindliness, refinement, making the best of 
 
 44 
 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 limited means and of restricted interests." But she 
 made haste to say the heroines did not wait for the 
 " inevitable, faithful, long-absent, mysteriously-re- 
 turriing-at-the-right-moment-love to redeem their 
 lives from triviality, and renew their faded bloom ;" 
 they lived the modern life Miss Smith founded a 
 college, and Miss Harriet Rogers opened the way 
 for the dumb to speak. She came to see that the 
 great forces which were building up a people s life 
 worked silently beneath the surface ; that in spite 
 of " newspapers, telegrams, travellers, a common 
 language and ancestry," misconceptions between 
 America and her own country abounded. Only, 
 she believed, by the help of vital literature could 
 souls of nations come at last to speak to one an 
 other. 
 
 Through letters of introduction from Mr. Ros- 
 setti, she met, when in Boston, a circle of interest 
 ing people, including Charles Eliot Norton, Colonel 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Horace E. Scud- 
 der, etc., many of whom she said were of "such 
 intelligence, culture and geniality, that it was tan 
 talizing to have but brief intercourse with them." 
 She said she made more acquaintances in two 
 months spent there than in her whole life before. 
 She found Longfellow to be the most kindly, 
 good-natured, unaffected man possible, quite un 
 spoiled by his great popularity ;" while Emerson, 
 with whom she spent two evenings during her 
 
 45 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 stay in Concord, was the " picture of health and 
 cheerful serenity, having just such a home, 
 spacious, comfortable, as one could desire for him." 
 He seemed to her to be the central figure in the 
 town, " personally beloved and honored by his 
 townsmen in a way pleasant to see, as well he may 
 be." As they were both friends of Carlyle, the con 
 versation often reverted to him. " Sleepy Hollow " 
 was to her the " sweetest last resting-place poet 
 could desire." When, later, she was in New York 
 City, she looked back with increasing delight to 
 her three weeks stay in Concord, when she found 
 warm friends in Frederick May Holland and Mrs. 
 Holland. She wrote them she could not forget 
 her daily rows on the little river, which, to use a 
 favorite American phrase, was "just as pretty as 
 can be." "The Americans call it a mere stream," 
 she wrote Rossetti, "but the English would regard 
 it as a river of respectable dimensions." 
 
 While in New York she had some memorable 
 evenings with Richard Watson Gilder and other 
 literary lights. But she missed the companionship 
 of Walt Whitman, which had so filled the Philadel 
 phia life. He was near and yet so far, though 
 letters passed between them. He was on hand, 
 however, when the time came for the return to 
 England, June 7, 1879. They felt the parting 
 deeply, for her three years stay in America had 
 been a real joy and inspiration to both. 
 
 46 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 On arriving in England, Mrs. Gilchrist settled 
 for a time with her eldest son, wife, and baby ten 
 months old, in a little red-tiled village, in sight 
 of Durham Cathedral, to her the " noblest sam 
 ple of Normanesque in England." Twenty-eight 
 years before, just after her marriage, she had 
 spent a week there ; now, after all her wander 
 ings of soul and body into new and strange 
 regions, she was there again, enjoying her children 
 and the grandson who was to her an " endless 
 source of delight, as sunny and full of ceaseless 
 movement as the sea." Walt Whitman, in replying 
 to a letter of hers from this home, said he should 
 like to see that Cathedral, but he didn t know to 
 which he should go first to " the Cathedral or that 
 baby !" 
 
 She found " very precious " a little map he sent, 
 on which he traced in blue ink all the wanderings 
 of his youth, and in red, his recent journey to the 
 Rocky Mountains. " Wonders, revelations, I 
 would not have missed for my life," he wrote. 
 " Fifty years from now this region will have a 
 hundred millions of people, the most comfortable, 
 advanced and democratic on the globe ; indeed, it 
 is all this and here that America is for." 
 
 She had always noted this intense love for his 
 own land ; and yet, it was not at the expense of 
 other lands. In one of their Philadelphia tea- 
 table talks he had wished he could " poke about 
 
 47 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 amongst the antiquities of Europe for two years." 
 He was sure he would appreciate the treasures, 
 adding, slowly, " They are for me." I remember my 
 first thought on seeing the Vatican " torso " was 
 how Walt would have enjoyed it ! I had the same 
 feeling when in the Elgin room of the British 
 Museum. 
 
 On the return of Mrs. Gilchrist, Tennyson went 
 to see her, and talked of Walt Whitman and 
 America. He mentioned Niagara Falls as being 
 an inducement to him to cross the ocean. In 
 lunching with him she saw his beautiful grandson, 
 and, of course, compared him with her own. 
 
 Letters from America kept Anne in touch with 
 that country, upon which she looked back as a 
 "magnificent, sunny land of promise," which, if it 
 did not attain to a higher ideal than had anywhere 
 been reached, " humanity was a failure and a mis 
 take ;" for its chances there were "splendid, phys 
 ical, social, intellectual." She felt as if she must 
 go there again sometime, where there was " such in 
 tellectual stir and brightness, such sense of expan 
 sion and encouragement, sunshine without and 
 sunshine within." And yet to her it was "vast, 
 complex, contradictory phenomenal America," as 
 she wrote Rossetti. She did love and appreciate 
 its sunlight. " Don t you Americans grumble 
 about your climate," she wrote the Hollands in 
 Concord one foggy day, " for it is splendid ; leave 
 
 48 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 all the grumbling and some of the boasting to 
 us !" 
 
 A delightful correspondence with John Bur 
 roughs was followed by his visit to London. He 
 wished her to tell him the secret of the attraction 
 that London had for "such a city -hater" as he; 
 for there was something in the air and in the ex 
 pression of things that was different from more 
 tender and majestic than anything he had ex 
 perienced in cities at home. It seemed to exist 
 " not for commerce or trade, like New York, but 
 for life." Upon asking her what was this " subtle 
 charm apart from its obvious advantages and bene 
 fits," she replied she could not explain it. "It is 
 too much a part of me," she said, "born and 
 bred as I was there, for it to be possible for me to 
 look at it from without, or to question it as a whole ; 
 it is a curious miscellaneous bundle of experiences 
 and associations to me ; happy, unhappy, indifferent ; 
 and sometimes it looks grand to me, and some 
 times almost demoniac with its miles of misery 
 seething in the yellow, murky air and its hard and 
 cruel prosperity miles of that too ; but I suppose 
 neither the one nor the other is half so bad as it 
 looks, and that there is a solid good heart and the 
 best of brains within the monster." She hoped 
 that on his next visit to London he would see more 
 of " English humanity;" not "society," but a few 
 men and women in easy, friendly intercourse, such 
 4 49 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 as, perhaps, could be gathered from time to time ; 
 and, she concluded, " I can answer for their taking 
 cordially to you and you to them." 
 
 He wrote her that he was resting in the hope 
 that she would give herself up to writing the article 
 on Walt Whitman for which they were all looking. 
 " I feel sure," he said, " that you will cut your way 
 to the heart of this matter as no one has yet done." 
 
 But just then she had other work to do, the 
 Life of Mary Lamb for the Eminent Women Series, 
 written at the request of John H. Ingram. The 
 writing of this was a " great solace " to her. It en 
 abled her to bring out the domestic side of Charles 
 Lamb in a clearer light than Talfourd or Procter 
 had done. On its publication in 1883, Mary Cow- 
 den Clark wrote her, from Genoa, a most apprecia 
 tive letter, regarding it as one of the " most perfect 
 pieces of biographical compositions " she ever read. 
 She noted particularly the " exquisitely tender 
 spirit" in which she had achieved her task. The 
 Academy pronounced it to be a " thoughtful and 
 sympathetic life." W. M. Rossetti said of it, "A 
 very substantial, able and even masterly piece of 
 work ; full without wordiness and remarkable for 
 that true and nice discrimination of character which 
 neither sympathy without comprehension nor com 
 prehension unprompted by sympathy could sup 
 ply." It was said to be the best of the series, and, 
 with one exception, the most popular. 
 
 5 
 
JOHN BURROUGHS. 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 When this work was done, Mrs. Gilchrist did not 
 forget John Burroughs desire and advice. " I must 
 try once more," she wrote, "to give a reason for 
 the faith that is in me." As a result, " A Confes 
 sion of Faith "* was written, which proved to be 
 about her last piece of finished work. It was 
 published in a London magazine a short time before 
 her death. " Most people will think her worship 
 of Walt Whitman excessive," said the Athenczum 
 (March 26, 1887), " but that its effect on her own 
 character was wholly beneficial can hardly be 
 doubted." 
 
 She was living at this time in the Hampstead 
 home, bought in 1879. A deep bow-window gave 
 her a pretty outlook over an old Hampstead gar 
 den. With different friends, or alone, she took 
 quiet rambles on the Hampstead Heath, or through 
 the old streets where Constable and Richardson 
 had worked, and where Du Maurier and many an 
 other artist lived. Her hospitable home was 
 thrown open on Sundays to her friends, including 
 Sir Frederick Leighton and other London artists. 
 In this Hampstead home she prepared a second 
 edition of the Life of William Blake, to which 
 she added a Memoir of her husband. In this, 
 as in the earlier edition, she had the assistance 
 of the Rossettis, especially Dante Gabriel. She 
 ever appreciated the genius of this painter, and 
 
 * See Appendix. 
 51 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 mourned his departure from earth. His death, she 
 wrote the brother William, made her believe more 
 than ever " in Nature s great laws of Continuity and 
 Indestructibility for souls as well as for atoms and 
 forces." If she had not believed this, as well as in 
 the " transfers and promotions," she said she could 
 not have borne the burden of life after her daughter 
 Beatrice was taken from her. 
 
 In this Hampstead home she had begun some per 
 sonal reminiscences of the Carlyles when her last ill 
 ness came upon her. The " transfer and promotion " 
 was finally hers one Sunday evening in November, 
 1885 (November 29), when she gave herself up to 
 the " sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death." 
 She was in her fifty-eighth year, and it was just 
 twenty-four years, lacking a day, since her husband 
 had been taken from her. 
 
 The leading London journals paid most beautiful 
 tributes to her. The Academy (December 5, 1885) 
 said " she combined in an unusual degree the quali 
 ties of mature wisdom, fine literary tact, and a per 
 fect womanly sweetness of temper." 
 
 Edward Dowden wrote, "I shall always have 
 the memory of her brightness, kindness, wisdom ; 
 and of the varied learning and culture which ap 
 peared, as it were, under and through a genial 
 humanity that put a spell on one beyond culture or 
 learning." 
 
 Her American friends deeply mourned her. John 
 52 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 Burroughs, upon hearing the news, wrote her son 
 Herbert, " Few men have had such a mother as 
 you. She was the only woman I have ever seen to 
 whose strength of mind and character I humbly 
 bowed. As I think of her death, a shadow comes 
 over the whole of that beautiful land ; now she is 
 gone, I see how much she stood to me for all 
 England." 
 
 Walt Whitman, on being told the news, sat quiet, 
 and finally, in a deeper tone than usual, he said, " A 
 sincere and loving friend." (Donaldson s Walt 
 Whitman.) He wrote to Herbert, "Nothing now 
 remains but a sweet and rich memory none more 
 beautiful, all time, all life, all the earth." But he 
 could not go on he " must sit alone and think." 
 
 Later, however, when this son was preparing a 
 biography of his mother, the poet made haste to 
 write, " I cannot let your book go to press without 
 at least saying and wishing it put on record 
 that among the perfect women I have known (and 
 it has been my unspeakable good fortune to have 
 had the very best for mother, sisters and friends), 
 I have known none more perfect in every relation 
 than my dear, dear friend, Anne Gilchrist." 
 
 To the close of his life, nearly seven years later, 
 he ever held her in tender remembrance. When 
 ever he mused and thought of his best friends in 
 their distant homes, either here or within the veil 
 of William O Connor, of Maurice Bucke, of John 
 
 53 
 
Anne Gilchrist and 
 
 Burroughs, he included her " friends of my soul 
 staunchest friends of my other soul, my poems." 
 At his last birthday dinner on earth 1891 upon 
 hearing greetings read from some English ladies, he 
 said, " I ask myself more than a little if my best 
 friends have not been women. My friend, Mrs. 
 Gilchrist, one of the earliest, a picked woman, pro 
 found, noble, sacrificing, saw clearly when almost 
 everybody else was interested in raising the dust 
 obscuring what was true." 
 
 One cannot read his tribute to her Going Some 
 where without catching glimpses of the breadth 
 and depth of soul which animated their intercourse. 
 
 " My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend, 
 
 (Now buried in an English grave and this a memory-leaf 
 for her dear sake) 
 
 Ended our talk The sum, concluding all we know of old 
 or modern learning, intuitions deep, 
 
 Of all Geologies Histories of all Astronomy of Evolu 
 tion, Metaphysics, all, 
 
 Is that we all are onward, onward, speeding, slowly, surely, 
 bettering, 
 
 Life, life an endless march, an endless army (no halt, but it 
 is duly over), 
 
 The world, the race, the soul in space and time the uni 
 verses, 
 
 All bound as is befitting each all surely going somewhere." 
 
 Whenever, in the far-distant future, Walt Whit 
 man s poems shall be read 
 
 (" See, projected through time, 
 For me an audience interminable,") 
 54 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 this tribute to Anne Gilchrist will be doubly glo 
 rious, because found to crown one of the grand 
 est, purest affections this age or any age has re 
 vealed. 
 
 ELIZABETH PORTER GOULD. 
 
 BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. 
 
 55 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 A Confession of Faitli 
 
 BY 
 
 ANNE GILGHRIST 
 
ANNE GILCIIRIST. 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 " Of genius in the Fine Arts," wrote Words 
 worth, "the only infallible sign is the widening the 
 sphere of human sensibility for the delight, honor, 
 and benefit of human nature. Genius is the intro 
 duction of a new element into the intellectual uni 
 verse, or, if that be not allowed, it is the application 
 of powers to objects on which they had not before 
 been exercised, or the employment of them in such 
 a manner as to produce effects hitherto unknown. 
 What is all this but an advance or conquest made 
 by the soul of the poet ? Is it to be supposed that 
 the reader can make progress of this kind like an 
 Indian prince or general stretched on his palanquin 
 and borne by slaves ? No ; he is invigorated and 
 inspirited by his leader in order that he may exert 
 himself, for he cannot proceed in quiescence, he 
 cannot be carried like a dead weight. Therefore 
 to create taste is to call forth and bestow power." 
 
 A great poet, then, is "a challenge and sum 
 mons ;" and the question first of all is not whether 
 we like or dislike him, but whether we are capable 
 of meeting that challenge, of stepping out of our 
 habitual selves to answer that summons. He works 
 on Nature s plan : Nature, who teaches nothing but 
 supplies infinite material to learn from ; who never 
 
 59 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 preaches but drives home her meanings by the re 
 sistless eloquence of effects. Therefore the poet 
 makes greater demands upon his reader than any 
 other man. For it is not a question of swallowing 
 his ideas or admiring his handiwork merely, but of 
 seeing, feeling, enjoying, as he sees, feels, enjoys. 
 " The messages of great poems to each man and 
 woman are," says Walt Whitman, " come to us on 
 equal terms, only then can you understand us. 
 We are no better than you ; what we enclose you 
 enclose, what we enjoy you may enjoy" no bet 
 ter than you potentially, that is ; but if you would 
 understand us the potential must become the actual, 
 the dormant sympathies must awaken and broaden, 
 the dulled perceptions clear themselves and let in 
 undreamed of delights, the wonder-working imagi 
 nation must respond, the ear attune itself, the lan 
 guid soul inhale large draughts of love and hope 
 and courage, those "empyreal airs" that vitalize 
 the poet s world. No wonder the poet is long in 
 finding his audience ; no wonder he has to abide 
 the "inexorable tests of Time," which, if indeed he 
 be great, slowly turns the handful into hundreds, 
 the hundreds into thousands, and at last, having done 
 its worst, grudgingly passes him on into the ranks 
 of the Immortals. 
 
 Meanwhile let not the handful who believe that 
 such a destiny awaits a man of our time cease to 
 give a reason for the faith that is in them. 
 
 So far as the suffrages of his own generation go 
 Walt Whitman may, like Wordsworth, tell of the 
 " love, the admiration, the indifference, the slight, 
 the aversion and even the contempt" with which 
 his poems have been received ; but the love and ad- 
 
 60 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 miration are from even a smaller number, the aver 
 sion, the contempt more vehement, more universal 
 and persistent than Wordsworth ever encountered. 
 For the American is a more daring innovator ; he 
 cuts loose from precedent, is a very Columbus who 
 has sailed forth alone on perilous seas to seek new 
 shores, to seek a new world for the soul, a world 
 that shall give scope and elevation and beauty to the 
 changed and changing events, aspirations, condi 
 tions of modern life. To new aims, new methods ; 
 therefore let not the reader approach these poems 
 as a judge, comparing, testing, measuring by what 
 has gone before, but as a willing learner, an unpre 
 judiced seeker for whatever may delight and nour 
 ish and exalt the soul. Neither let him be abashed 
 nor daunted by the weight of adverse opinion, the 
 contempt and denial which have been heaped upon 
 the great American even though it be the contempt 
 and denial of the capable, the cultivated, the recog 
 nized authorities ; for such is the usual lot of the 
 pioneer in whatever field. In religion it is above 
 all to the earnest and conscientious believer that 
 the Reformer has appeared a blasphemer, and in the 
 world of literature it is equally natural that the 
 most careful student, that the warmest lover of the 
 accepted masterpieces, should be the most hostile 
 to one who forsakes the methods by which, or at 
 any rate, in company with which, those triumphs 
 have been achieved. "But," said the wise Goethe, 
 " I will listen to any man s convictions ; you may 
 keep your doubts, your negations to yourself, I 
 have plenty of my own." For heartfelt convictions 
 are rare things. Therefore I make bold to indicate 
 the scope and source of power in Walt Whitman s 
 
 61 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 writings, starting from no wider ground than their 
 effect upon an individual mind. It is not criticism 
 I have to offer ; least of all any discussion of the 
 question of form or formlessness in these poems, 
 deeply convinced as I am that when great meanings 
 and great emotions are expressed with correspond 
 ing power, literature has done its best, call it what 
 you please. But my aim is rather to suggest such 
 trains of thought, such experience of life as having 
 served to put me en rapport with this poet may 
 haply find here and there a reader who is thereby 
 helped to the same end. Hence I quote just as 
 freely from the prose (especially from " Democratic 
 Vistas " and the preface to the first issue of " Leaves 
 of Grass," 1855) as from his poems, and more 
 freely, perhaps, from those parts that have proved a 
 stumbling-block than from those whose conspicu 
 ous beauty assures them acceptance. 
 
 Fifteen years ago, with feelings partly of indiffer 
 ence, partly of antagonism, for I had heard none 
 but ill words of them I first opened Walt Whit 
 man s poems. But as I read I became conscious 
 of receiving the most powerful influence that had 
 ever come to me from any source. What was the 
 spell ? It was that in them humanity has, in a new 
 sense, found itself; for the first time has dared to 
 accept itself without disparagement, without reser 
 vation. For the first time an unrestricted faith in 
 all that is and in the issues of all that happens has 
 burst forth triumphantly into song. 
 
 " . . . The rapture of the hallelujah sent 
 From all that breathes and is . . ." 
 
 rings through these poems. They carry up into 
 
 62 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 the region of Imagination and Passion those vaster 
 and more profound conceptions of the universe 
 and of man reached by centuries of that indomi 
 tably patient organized search for knowledge, that 
 "skilful cross-questioning of things" called science. 
 
 " O truth of the earth I am determined to press my way to 
 ward you. 
 
 Sound your voice ! I scale the mountains, I dive in the sea 
 after you," 
 
 cried science ; and the earth and the sky have an 
 swered, and continue inexhaustibly to answer her 
 appeal. And now at last the day dawns which 
 Wordsworth prophesied of: " The man of science," 
 he wrote, "seeks truth as a remote and unknown 
 benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his soli 
 tude. The Poet, singing a song in which all human 
 beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of 
 truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. 
 Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowl 
 edge ; it is the impassioned expression which is in the 
 countenance of all science, it is the first and last of all 
 knowlege ; it is immortal as the heart of man. If the 
 labors of men of science should ever create any 
 material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condi 
 tion, and in the impressions which we habitually 
 receive, the Poet will then sleep no more than at 
 present ; he will be ready to follow the steps of the 
 man of science not only in those general indirect 
 effects, but he will be at his side carrying sensation 
 into the midst of the objects of science itself. If 
 the time should ever come when what is now called 
 science, thus familiarized to man, shall be ready to 
 put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the 
 
 63 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfigur 
 ation, and will welcome the being thus produced as 
 a dear and genuine inmate of the household of 
 man." That time approaches : a new heaven and 
 a new earth await us when the knowledge grasped 
 by science is realized, conceived as a whole, related 
 to the world within us by the shaping spirit of 
 imagination. Not in vain, already, for this Poet 
 have they pierced the darkness of the past, and 
 read here and there a word of the earth s history 
 before human eyes beheld it ; each word of infinite 
 significance, because involving in it secrets of the 
 whole. A new anthem of the slow, vast, mystic 
 dawn of life he sings in the name of humanity : 
 
 " I am an acme of things accomplish d, and I am an en- 
 closer of things to be. 
 
 My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs ; 
 
 On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between 
 
 the steps ; 
 All below duly travell d and still I mount and mount. 
 
 Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me : 
 
 Afar down I see the huge first Nothing I know 
 
 I was even there ; 
 
 I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic 
 
 mist, 
 And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon. 
 
 Long I was hugg d close long and long. 
 
 Immense have been the preparations for me, 
 Faithful and friendly the arms that have help d me. 
 
 Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful 
 
 boatmen ; 
 
 For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, 
 They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided 
 
 me ; 
 My embryo has never been torpid nothing could overlay 
 
 it. 
 
 For it the nebula cohered to an orb, 
 The long slow strata piled to rest it on, 
 Vast vegetables gave it sustenance, 
 
 Monstrous saurpids transported it in their mouths and de 
 posited it with care. 
 
 All forces have been steadily employ d to complete and de 
 light me; 
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul." 
 
 Not in vain have they pierced space as well as 
 time and found " a vast similitude interlocking all." 
 
 " I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled sys 
 tems, 
 
 And all I see, multipled as high as I can cypher, edge but 
 the rim of the farther systems. 
 
 Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expand 
 ing, 
 Outward, and outward, and for ever outward. 
 
 My sun has his sun, and round him obediently wheels, 
 He joins with his partners a group of superior circuit, 
 And greater sets follow, making specks of the greatest inside 
 them. 
 
 There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage ; 
 
 If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their sur 
 faces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid 
 float, it would not avail in the long run ; 
 
 We should surely bring up again where we now stand, 
 
 And as surely go as much farther and then farther and 
 farther." 
 
 Not in vain for him have they penetrated into 
 the substances of things to find that what we thought 
 5 65 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 poor, dead, inert matter is (in Clerk Maxwell s 
 words), " a very sanctuary of minuteness and power 
 where molecules obey the laws of their existence, 
 and clash together in fierce collision, or grapple in 
 yet more fierce embrace, building up in secret the 
 forms of visible things ;" each stock and stone a 
 busy group of Ariels plying obediently their hidden 
 tasks. 
 
 " Why ! who makes much of a miracle ? 
 
 As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, 
 
 To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 
 
 Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, 
 
 Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with 
 
 the same, .... 
 Every spear of grass the frames, limbs, organs, of men and 
 
 women, and all that concerns them, 
 All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles." 
 
 The natural is the supernatural, says Carlyle. 
 It is the message that comes to our time from all 
 quarters alike ; from poetry, from science, from the 
 deep brooding of the student of human history. 
 Science materialistic ? Rather it is the current 
 theology that is materialistic in comparison. Sci 
 ence may truly be said to have annihilated our 
 gross and brutish conceptions of matter, and to 
 have revealed it to us as subtle, spiritual, energetic 
 beyond our powers of realization. It is for the 
 Poet to increase the powers of realization. He it 
 is who must awaken us to the perception of a new 
 heaven and a new earth here where we stand on 
 this old earth. He it is who must, in Walt Whit 
 man s words, indicate the path between reality and 
 the soul. 
 
 Above all is every thought and feeling in these 
 66 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 poems touched by the light of the great revolution 
 ary truth that man, unfolded through vast stretches 
 of time out of lowly antecedents, is a rising, not a 
 fallen creature ; emerging slowly from purely ani 
 mal life ; as slowly as the strata are piled and the 
 ocean beds hollowed ; whole races still barely 
 emerged, countless individuals in the foremost races 
 barely emerged : " the wolf, the snake, the hog" 
 yet lingering in the best ; but new ideals achieved, 
 and others come in sight, so that what once seemed 
 fit is fit no longer, is adhered to uneasily and with 
 shame ; the conflicts and antagonisms between what 
 we call good and evil, at once the sign and the means 
 of emergence, and needing to account for them no 
 supposed primeval disaster, no outside power 
 thwarting and marring the Divine handiwork, the 
 perfect fitness to its time and place of all that has 
 proceeded from the Great Source. In a word that 
 Evil is relative ; is that which the slowly developing 
 reason and conscience bid us leave behind. The 
 prowess of the lion, the subtlety of the fox, are 
 cruelty and duplicity in man. 
 
 " Silent and amazed, when a little boy, 
 
 I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in 
 
 his statements, 
 As contending against some being or influence," 
 
 says the poet. And elsewhere, " Faith, very old 
 now, scared away by science " by the daylight 
 science lets in upon our miserable inadequate, 
 idolatrous conceptions of God and of His works, 
 and on the sophistications, subterfuges, moral im 
 possibilities, by which we have endeavored to recon 
 cile the irreconcilable the coexistence of omnip- 
 
 67 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 otent Goodness and an absolute Power of Evil, 
 " Faith must be brought back by the same power 
 that caused her departure : restored with new sway, 
 deeper, wider, higher than ever." And what else, 
 indeed, at bottom, is science so busy at? For 
 what is Faith ? " Faith," to borrow venerable and 
 unsurpassed words, "is the substance of things 
 hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." And 
 how obtain evidence of things not seen but by a 
 knowledge of things seen ? And how know what 
 we may hope for, but by knowing the truth of what 
 is, here and now ? For seen and unseen are parts 
 of the Great Whole : all the parts interdependent, 
 closely related ; all alike have proceeded from and 
 are manifestations of the Divine Source. Nature is 
 not the barrier between us and the unseen, but the 
 link, the communication ; she too has something 
 behind appearances, has an unseen soul ; she too is 
 made of "innumerable energies." Knowledge is 
 not faith, but it is faith s indispensable preliminary 
 and starting ground. Faith runs ahead to fetch 
 glad tidings for us ; but if she start from a basis 
 of ignorance and illusion, how can she but run in 
 the wrong direction ? " Suppose," said that impet 
 uous lover and seeker of truth, Clifford, " Suppose 
 all moving things to be suddenly stopped at some 
 instant, and that we could be brought fresh, with 
 out any previous knowledge, to look at the petri 
 fied scene. The spectacle would be immensely 
 absurd. Crowds of people would be senselessly 
 standing on one leg in the street looking at one an 
 other s backs ; others would be wasting their time 
 by sitting in a train in a place difficult to get at, 
 nearly all with their mouths open, and their bodies 
 
 68 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 in some contorted, unrestful posture. Clocks would 
 stand with their pendulums on one side. Every 
 thing would be disorderly, conflicting, in its wrong 
 place. But once remember that the v/orld is in 
 motion, is going somewhere, and everything will be 
 accounted for and found just as it should be. Just 
 so great a change of view, just so complete an ex 
 planation is given to us when we recognize that the 
 nature of man and beast and of all the world is 
 going somewhere. The maladaptions in organic 
 nature are seen to be steps toward the improvement 
 or discarding of imperfect organs. The baneful 
 strife which lurketh inborn in us, and goeth on the 
 way with us to hurt us, is found to be the relic of a 
 time of savage or even lower condition." " Going 
 somewhere !" That is the meaning then of all our 
 perplexities ! That changes a mystery which stul 
 tified and contradicted the best we knew into a 
 mystery which teaches, allures, elevates ; which 
 harmonizes what we know with what we hope. 
 By it we begin to 
 
 " . . . see by the glad light, 
 And breathe the sweet air of futurity." 
 
 The scornful laughter of Carlyle as he points with 
 one hand to the baseness, ignorance, folly, cruelty 
 around us, and with the other to the still unsur 
 passed poets, sages, heroes, saints of antiquity, 
 whilst he utters the words " progress of the species !" 
 touches us no longer when we have begun to realize 
 "the amplitude of time ;" when we know some 
 thing of the scale by which Nature measures out 
 the years to accomplish her smallest essential modi 
 fication or development ; know that to call a few 
 
 69 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 thousands or tens of thousands of years antiquity, 
 is to speak as a child, and that in her chronology 
 the great days of Egypt and Syria, of Greece and 
 Rome are affairs of yesterday. 
 
 " Each of us inevitable ; 
 
 Each of us limitless each of us with his or her right upon 
 
 the earth ; 
 
 Each of us allow d the eternal purports of the earth ; 
 Each of us here as divinely as any are here. 
 
 You Hottentot with clicking palate ! You woolly hair d 
 hordes ! 
 
 You own d persons, dropping sweat-drops or blood-drops ! 
 
 You human forms with the fathomless ever-impressive coun 
 tenances of brutes ! 
 
 I dare not refuse you the scope of the world, and of time 
 and space are upon me. 
 
 I do not prefer others so very much before you either ; 
 
 I do not say one word against you, away back there, where 
 
 you stand ; 
 (You will come forward in due time to my side.) 
 
 My spirit has pass d in compassion and determination around 
 
 the whole earth ; 
 I have look d for equals and lovers, and found them ready 
 
 for me in all lands ; 
 I think some divine rapport has equalized me with them. 
 
 vapors ! I think I have risen with you, and moved away 
 
 to distant continents and fallen down there, for rea 
 sons ; 
 
 1 think I have blown with you, O winds ; 
 
 waters, I have finger d every shore with you. 
 
 1 have run through what any river or strait of the globe has 
 
 run through ; 
 
 I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas, and on 
 the high embedded rocks, to cry thence. 
 70 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 Salut au monde ! 
 What cities the light or warmth penetrates, I penetrate those 
 
 cities myself; 
 All islands to which birds wing their way I wing my way 
 
 myself. 
 
 Toward all, 
 
 I raise high the perpendicular hand I make the signal, 
 To remain after me in sight forever, 
 For all the haunts and homes of men." 
 
 But " Hold !" says the reader, especially if he be 
 one who loves science, who loves to feel the firm 
 ground under his feet, " That the species has a great 
 future before it we may well believe ; already we 
 see the indications. But that the individual has is 
 quite another matter. We can but balance proba 
 bilities here, and the probabilities are very heavy on 
 the wrong side ; the poets must throw in weighty 
 matter indeed to turn the scale the other way !" 
 Be it so : but ponder a moment what science her 
 self has to say bearing on this theme ; what are the 
 widest, deepest facts she has reached down to. 
 INDESTRUCTIBILITY : Amidst ceaseless change and 
 seeming decay all the elements, all the forces (if 
 indeed they be not one and the same) which oper 
 ate and substantiate those changes, imperishable ; 
 neither matter nor force capable of annihilation. 
 Endless transformations, disappearances, new com 
 binations, but diminution of the total amount never ; 
 missing in one place or shape to be found in an 
 other, disguised ever so long, ready always to re- 
 emerge. "A particle of oxygen/ wrote Faraday, 
 "is ever a particle of oxygen; nothing can in the 
 least wear it. If it enters into combination and 
 disappears as oxygen, if it pass through a thousand 
 combinations, animal, vegetable, mineral, if it lie 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 hid for a thousand years and then be evolved, it is 
 oxygen with its first qualities neither more nor 
 less." So then out of the universe is no door. 
 CONTINUITY again is one of Nature s irrevocable 
 words ; everything the result and outcome of what 
 went before ; no gaps, no jumps ; always a connect 
 ing principle which carries forward the great scheme 
 of things as a related whole, which subtly links 
 past and present, like and unlike. Nothing breaks 
 with its past. "It is not," says Helmholtz, "the 
 definite mass of substance which now constitutes 
 the body to which the continuance of the individual 
 is attached. Just as the flame remains the same in 
 appearance and continues to exist with the same 
 form and structure although it draws every moment 
 fresh combustible vapor and fresh oxygen from the 
 air into the vortex of its ascending current ; and 
 just as the wave goes on in unaltered form and 
 is yet being reconstructed every moment from fresh 
 particles of water, so is it also in the living being. 
 For the material of the body like that of flame is 
 subject to continuous and comparatively rapid 
 change, a change the more rapid the livelier the 
 activity of the organs in question. Some constitu 
 ents are renewed from day to day, some from 
 month to month, and others only after years. That 
 which continues to exist as a particular individual 
 is, like the wave and the flame, only the form of 
 motion which continually attracts fresh matter into 
 its vortex and expels the old. The observer with a 
 deaf ear recognizes the vibration of sound as long as 
 it is visible and can be felt, bound up with other 
 heavy matter. Are our senses in reference to life 
 like the deaf ear in this respect ?" 
 
 72 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 " You are not thrown to the winds you gather certainly and 
 safely around yourself; 
 
 It is not to diffuse you that you were born of your mother 
 
 and father it is to identify you ; 
 It is not that you should be undecided, but that you should 
 
 be decided ; 
 Something long preparing and formless is arrived and form d 
 
 in you, 
 You are henceforth secure, whatever comes or goes. 
 
 O Death ! the voyage of Death ! 
 
 The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few 
 moments for reasons ; 
 
 Myself discharging my excrementitious body to be burn d or 
 reduced to powder or buried. 
 
 My real body doubtless left me for other spheres, 
 
 My voided body, nothing more to me, returning to the puri 
 fications, farther offices, eternal uses of the earth." 
 
 Yes, they go their way, those dismissed atoms 
 with all their energies and affinities unimpaired. 
 But they are not all ; the will, the affections, the in 
 tellect are just as real as those affinities and ener 
 gies, and there is strict account of all ; nothing 
 slips through ; there is no door out of the universe. 
 But they are qualities of a personality, of a self, 
 not of an atom, but of what uses and dismisses 
 those atoms. If the qualities are indestructible so 
 must the self be. The little heap of ashes, the 
 puff of gas, do you pretend that is all that was 
 Shakespeare ? The rest of him lives in his works, 
 you say ? But he lived and was just the same man 
 after those were produced. The world gained, but 
 he lost nothing of himself, rather grew and strength 
 ened in the production of them. 
 
 Still farther, those faculties with which we seek 
 for knowledge are only a part of us, there is some- 
 
 73 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 thing behind which wields them, something that 
 those faculties cannot turn themselves in upon and 
 comprehend ; for the part cannot compass the whole. 
 Yet there it is with the irrefragable proof of con 
 sciousness. Who should be the mouthpiece of 
 this whole ? Who but the poet, the man most fully 
 "possessed of his own soul," the man of the 
 largest consciousness ; fullest of love and sympathy 
 which gather into his own life the experiences of 
 others, fullest of imagination ; that quality whereof 
 Wordsworth says that it 
 
 ". . . in truth 
 Is but another name for absolute power, 
 And clearest insight, amplitude of mind 
 And reason in her most exalted mood." 
 
 Let Walt Whitman speak for us : 
 
 " And I know I am solid and sound ; 
 
 To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually 
 
 flow: 
 All are written to me, and I must get what the writing 
 
 means. 
 
 I know I am deathless ; 
 
 I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter s 
 
 compass ; 
 I know I shall not pass like a child s carlacue cut with a 
 
 burnt stick at night. 
 
 I know I am august ; 
 
 I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be under 
 stood ; 
 
 I see that the elementary laws never apologize ; 
 
 (I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my 
 house by, after all.) 
 
 I exist as I am that is enough ; 
 
 If no other in the world be aware I sit content ; 
 
 And if each one and all be aware, I sit content. 
 
 74 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is 
 
 myself ; 
 And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or 
 
 ten million years, 
 I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can 
 
 wait. 
 
 My foothold is tenon d and mortis d in granite ; 
 I laugh at what you call dissolution ; 
 And I know the amplitude of time." 
 
 What lies through the portal of death is hidden 
 from us ; but the laws that govern that unknown 
 land are not all hidden from us, for they govern 
 here and now ; they are immutable, eternal. 
 
 " Of and in all these things 
 
 I have dream d that we are not to be changed so much, nor 
 
 the law of us changed, 
 I have dream d that heroes and good doers shall be under 
 
 the present and past law, 
 And that murderers, drunkards, liars, shall be under the 
 
 present and past law, 
 For I have dream d that the law they are under now is 
 
 enough." 
 
 And the law not to be eluded is the law of conse 
 quences, the law of silent teaching. That is the 
 meaning of disease, pain, remorse. Slow to learn 
 are we ; but success is assured with limitless Benefi 
 cence as our teacher, with limitless time as our op 
 portunity. Already we begin 
 
 " To know the Universe itself as a road as many roads 
 
 As roads for travelling souls. 
 
 For ever alive ; for ever forward. 
 
 Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, 
 
 feeble, dissatisfied; 
 Desperate, proud, fond, sick ; 
 Accepted by men, rejected by men. 
 
 75 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 They go ! they go ! I know that they go, but I know not 
 
 where they go. 
 But I know they go toward the best, toward something 
 
 great ; 
 The whole Universe indicates that it is good." 
 
 Going somewhere ! And if it is impossible for 
 us to see whither, as in the nature of things it must 
 be, how can we be adequate judges of the way ? 
 how can we but often grope and be full of per 
 plexity ? But we know that a smooth path, a 
 paradise of a world, could only nurture fools, cow 
 ards, sluggards. " Joy is the great unfolder," but 
 pain is the great enlightener, the great stimulus in 
 certain directions, alike of man and beast. How 
 else could the self-preserving instincts, and all that 
 grows out of them, have been evoked ? How else 
 those wonders of the moral world, fortitude, pa 
 tience, sympathy ? And if the lesson be too hard 
 comes Death, come " the sure-enwinding arms of 
 Death " to end it, and speed us to the unknown 
 land. 
 
 " . . . . Man is only weak 
 Through his mistrust and want of hope," 
 
 wrote Wordsworth. But man s mistrust of him 
 self is, at bottom, mistrust of the central Fount of 
 power and goodness whence he has issued. Here 
 comes one who plucks out of religion its heart of 
 fear, and puts into it a heart of boundless faith and 
 joy ; a faith that beggars previous faiths because it 
 sees that All is good, not part bad and part good ; 
 that there is no flaw in the scheme of things, no 
 primeval disaster, no counteracting power; but 
 orderly and sure growth and development, and that 
 
 76 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 infinite Goodness and Wisdom embrace and ever 
 lead forward all that exists. Are you troubled that 
 He is an unknown God ; that we cannot by search 
 ing find Him out ? Why, it would be a poor pros 
 pect for the Universe if otherwise ; if, embryos that 
 we are, we could compass Him in our thoughts : 
 
 " I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God 
 not in the least." 
 
 It is the double misfortune of the churches that 
 they do not study God in his works man and Na 
 ture and their relations to each other ; and that they 
 do profess to set Him forth ; that they worship 
 therefore a God of man s devising, an idol made by 
 men s minds it is true, not by their hands, but none 
 the less an idol. " Leaves are not more shed out 
 of trees than Bibles are shed out of you," says the 
 poet. They were the best of their time, but not of 
 all time ; they need renewing as surely as there is 
 such a thing as growth, as surely as knowledge 
 nourishes and sustains to further development ; as 
 surely as time unrolls new pages of the mighty 
 scheme of existence. Nobly has George Sand, 
 too, written "Everything is divine, even matter; 
 everything is superhuman, even man. God is 
 everywhere. He is in me in a measure propor 
 tioned to the little that I am. My present life 
 separates me from Him just in the degree deter 
 mined by the actual state of childhood of our race. 
 Let me content myself in all my seeking to feel 
 after Him, and to possess of Him as much as this 
 imperfect soul can take in with the intellectual sense 
 I have. The day will come when we shall no 
 longer talk about God idly; nay, when we shall 
 
 77 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 talk about Him as little as possible. We shall 
 cease to set Him forth dogmatically, to dispute 
 about His nature. We shall put compulsion on no 
 one to pray to Him, we shall leave the whole busi 
 ness of worship within the sanctuary of each man s 
 conscience. And this will happen when we are 
 really religious." 
 
 In what sense may Walt Whitman be called the 
 Poet of Democracy ? It is as giving utterance to 
 this profoundly religious faith in man. He is rather 
 the prophet of what is to be than the celebrator of 
 what is. " Democracy," he writes, " is a word the 
 real gist of which still sleeps quite unwakened, not 
 withstanding the resonance and the many angry 
 tempests out of which its syllables have come from 
 pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, 
 I suppose, remains unwritten because that history 
 has yet to be enacted. It is in some sort younger 
 brother of another great and often used word, Na 
 ture, whose history also waits unwritten." Political 
 democracy, now taking shape, is the house to live 
 in, and whilst what we demand of it is room for all, 
 fair chances for all, none disregarded or left out as 
 of no account, the main question, the kind of life 
 that is to be led in that house is altogether be 
 yond the ken of the statesmen as such, and is in 
 volved in those deepest facts of the nature and des 
 tiny of man which are the themes of Walt Whit 
 man s writings. The practical outcome of that ex 
 alted and all-accepting faith in the scheme of things, 
 and in man, toward whom all has led up and in 
 whom all concentrates as the manifestation, the 
 revelation of Divine Power is a changed estimate of 
 himself; a higher reverence for, a loftier belief in 
 
 78 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 the heritage of himself; a perception that pride, not 
 humility, is the true homage to his Maker ; that 
 " noblesse oblige" is for the Race, not for a hand 
 ful ; that it is mankind and womankind and their high 
 destiny which constrain to greatness, which can no 
 longer stoop to meanness and lies and base aims, 
 but must needs clothe themselves in " the majesty 
 of honest dealing" (majestic because demanding 
 courage as good as the soldier s, self-denial as good 
 as the saint s for every-day affairs), and walk erect 
 and fearless, a law to themselves, sternest of all law 
 givers. Looking back to the palmy days of feu 
 dalism, especially as immortalized in Shakespeare s 
 plays, what is it we find most admirable ? what is it 
 that fascinates ? It is the noble pride, the lofty 
 self-respect ; the dignity, the courage, and audacity 
 of its great personages. But this pride, this dignity 
 rested half upon a true, half upon a hollow founda 
 tion ; half upon intrinsic qualities, half upon the 
 ignorance and brutishness of the great masses of 
 the people, whose helpless submission and easily 
 dazzled imaginations made stepping-stones to the 
 elevation of the few, and hedged round kings," 
 with a specious kind of "divinity." But we have 
 our faces turned towards a new day, and toward 
 heights on which there is room for all. 
 
 " By God, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their 
 counterpart of on the same terms " 
 
 is the motto of the great personages, the great souls 
 of to-day. On the same terms, for that is Nature s 
 law and cannot be abrogated, the reaping as you 
 sow. But all shall have the chance to sow well. 
 This is pride indeed ! Not a pride that isolates, but 
 
 79 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 that can take no rest till our common humanity is 
 lifted out of the mire everywhere, " a pride that 
 cannot stretch too far because sympathy stretches 
 with it :" 
 
 "Whoever you are ! claim your own at any hazard ! 
 These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to 
 
 you; 
 
 These immense meadows these interminable rivers 
 You are immense and interminable as they ; 
 These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of 
 
 apparent dissolution you are he or she who is master 
 
 or mistress over them, 
 Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, 
 
 pain, passion, dissolution. 
 
 The hopples fall from your ankles you find an unfailing 
 
 sufficiency ; 
 Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, 
 
 whatever you are promulges itself; 
 Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, 
 
 nothing is scanted ; 
 Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance and ennui, 
 
 what you are picks its way." 
 
 This is indeed a pride that is "calming and excellent 
 to the soul ;" that " dissolves poverty from its need 
 and riches from its conceit. * 
 
 And humility ? Is there, then, no place for that 
 virtue so much praised by the haughty ? Humility 
 is the sweet spontaneous grace of an aspiring, 
 finely developed nature which sees always heights 
 a-head still unclimbed, which outstrips itself in 
 eager longing for excellence still unattained. Gen 
 uine humility takes good care of itself as men rise 
 in the scale of being ; for every height climbed dis 
 closes still new heights beyond. Or it is a wise 
 caution in fortune s favorites lest they themselves 
 
 80 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 should mistake, as the unthinking crowd around 
 do, the glitter reflected back upon them by their 
 surroundings for some superiority inherent in them 
 selves. It befits them well if there be also due 
 pride, pride of humanity behind. But to say to a 
 man Be humble is like saying to one who has a 
 battle to fight, a race to run, You are a poor, 
 feeble creature ; you are not likely to win and you 
 do not deserve to. Say rather to him, Hold up 
 your head ! You were not made for failure, you 
 were made for victory : go forward with a joyful 
 confidence in that result sooner or later, and the 
 sooner or later depends mainly on yourself. 
 
 " What Christ appeared for in the moral-spiritual 
 field for humankind, namely, that in respect to the 
 absolute soul there is in the possession of such by 
 each single individual something so transcendent, so 
 incapable of gradations (like life) that to that extent 
 it places all beings on a common level, utterly re 
 gardless of the distinctions of intellect, virtue, sta 
 tion, or any height or lowliness whatever" is the 
 secret source of that deathless sentiment of Equality 
 which how many able heads imagine themselves to 
 have slain with ridicule and contempt, as Johnson, 
 kicking a stone, imagined he had demolished 
 Idealism when he had simply attributed to the word 
 an impossible meaning. True, /inequality is one 
 of Nature s words : she moves forward always by 
 means of the exceptional. But the moment the 
 move is accomplished, then all her efforts are to 
 wards equality, towards bringing up the rear to that 
 standpoint. But social inequalities, class distinc 
 tions, do not stand for, or represent Nature s in 
 equalities. Precisely the contrary in the long run. 
 6 81 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 They are devices for holding up many that would 
 else gravitate down and keeping down many who 
 would else rise up ; for providing that some should 
 reap who have not sown, and many sow without 
 reaping. But literature tallies the ways of Nature ; 
 for though itself the product of the exceptional, its 
 aim is to draw all men up to its own level. The 
 great writer is " hungry for equals day and night," 
 for so only can he be fully understood. "The 
 meal is equally set;" all are invited. Therefore is 
 literature, whether consciously or not, the greatest 
 of all forces on the side of Democracy. 
 
 Carlyle has said there is no grand poem in the 
 world but is at bottom a biography the life of a 
 man. Walt Whitman s poems are not the biogra 
 phy of a man, but they are his actual presence. It 
 is no vain boast when he exclaims, 
 
 " Camerado ! this is no book; 
 Who touches this touches a man." 
 
 He has infused himself into words in a way that 
 had not before seemed possible ; and he causes each 
 reader to feel that he himself or herself has an 
 actual relationship to him, is a reality full of inex 
 haustible significance and interest to the poet. The 
 power of his book, beyond even its great intellec 
 tual force, is the power with which he makes this 
 felt ; his words lay more hold than the grasp of a 
 hand, strike deeper than the gaze or the flash of an 
 eye ; to those who comprehend him he stands 
 "nigher than the nighest." 
 
 America has had the shaping of Walt Whitman, 
 and he repays the filial debt, with a love that knows 
 
 82 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 no stint. Her vast lands with their varied, brilliant 
 climes and rich products, her political scheme, her 
 achievements and her failures, all have contributed 
 to make these poems what they are both directly 
 and indirectly. Above all has that great conflict, 
 the Secession War, found voice in him. And if the 
 reader would understand the true causes and nature 
 of that war, ostensibly waged between North and 
 South, but underneath a tussle for supremacy be 
 tween the good and the evil genius of America (for 
 there were just as many secret sympathizers with 
 the secession-slave-power in the North as in the 
 South) he will find the clue in the pages of Walt 
 Whitman. Rarely has he risen to a loftier height 
 than in the poem which heralds that volcanic up 
 heaval : 
 
 " Rise, O days, from your fathomless deeps, till you loftier 
 and fiercer sweep ! 
 
 Long for my soul, hungering gymnastic, I devour d what the 
 earth gave me ; 
 
 Long I roam d the woods of the north long I watch d 
 Niagara pouring ; 
 
 I travel d the prairies over, and slept on their breast 
 
 I cross d the Nevadas, I cross d the plateaus; 
 
 I ascended the towering rocks along the Pacific, I sail d out 
 to sea ; 
 
 I sail d through the storm, I was refresh d by the storm ; 
 
 I watch d with joy the threatening maws of the waves ; 
 
 I mark d the white combs where they career d so high, curl 
 ing over ; 
 
 I heard the wind piping, I saw the black clouds ; 
 
 Saw from below what arose and mounted, (O superb ! O 
 wild as my heart, and powerful !) 
 
 Heard the continuous thunder, as it bellow d after the light 
 ning; 
 
 Noted the slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sud 
 den and fast amid the din they chased each other 
 across the sky ; 
 
 83 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 These, and such as these, I, elate, saw saw with wonder, 
 
 yet pensive and masterful ; 
 
 All the menacing might of the globe uprisen around me ; 
 Yet there with my soul I fed I fed content, supercilious. 
 
 Twas well, O soul ! twas a good preparation you gave me ! 
 
 Now we advance our latent and ampler hunger to fill ; 
 
 Now we go forth to receive what the earth and the sea never 
 gave us ; 
 
 Not through the mighty woods we go, but through the 
 mightier cities ; 
 
 Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pour 
 ing ; 
 
 Torrents of men (sources and rills of the Northwest, are you 
 indeed inexhaustible ?) 
 
 What, to pavements and homesteads here what were those 
 storms of the mountains and sea ? 
 
 What, to passions I witness around me to-day ? Was the 
 sea risen ? 
 
 Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black 
 clouds ? 
 
 Lo ! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly 
 and savage ; 
 
 Manhattan, rising, advancing with menacing front Cincin 
 nati, Chicago, unchain d ; 
 
 What was that swell I saw on the ocean ? behold what 
 comes here ! 
 
 How it climbs with daring feet and hands ! how it dashes ! 
 
 How the true thunder bellows after the lightning ! how bright 
 the flashes of lightning ! 
 
 How DEMOCRACY, with desperate, vengeful port strides on, 
 shown through the dark by those flashes of light 
 ning! 
 
 (Yet a mournful wail and low sob I fancied I heard through 
 the dark, 
 
 In a lull of the deafening confusion.) 
 
 Thunder on ! stride on, Democracy ! stride with vengeful 
 
 stroke ! 
 
 And do you rise higher than ever yet, O days, O cities ! 
 Crash heavier, heavier yet, O storms ! you have done me 
 
 good ; 
 My soul, prepared in the mountains, absorbs your immortal 
 
 strong nutriment, 
 
 84 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 Long had I walk d my cities, my country roads, through 
 
 farms, only half satisfied ; 
 One doubt, nauseous, undulating like a snake, crawl d on the 
 
 ground before me, 
 
 Continually preceding my steps, turning upon me oft, ironi 
 cally hissing low ; 
 The cities I loved so well, I abandon d and left I sped to 
 
 the certainties suitable to me ; 
 Hungering, hungering, hungering for primal energies, and 
 
 nature s dauntlessness ; 
 
 I refresh d myself with it only, I could relish it only ; 
 I waited the bursting forth of the pent fire on the water and 
 
 air I waited long ; 
 But now I no longer wait I am fully satisfied I am 
 
 glutted ; 
 I have witness d the true lightning I have witness d my 
 
 cities electric ; 
 I have lived to behold man burst forth, and warlike America 
 
 rise; 
 Hence I will seek no more the food of the northern solitary 
 
 wilds, 
 No more on the mountains roam, or sail the stormy sea. 
 
 But not for the poet a soldier s career. " To sit 
 by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch 
 the dead" was the part he chose. During the 
 whole war he remained with the army, but only to 
 spend the days and nights, saddest, happiest of his 
 life, in the hospital tents. It was a beautiful destiny 
 for this lover of men, and a proud triumph for this 
 believer in the People ; for it was the People that 
 he beheld, tried by severest tests. He saw them 
 " of their own choice, fighting, dying for their own 
 idea, insolently attacked by the secession-slave- 
 power." From the workshop, the farm, the store, 
 the desk, they poured forth, officered by men who 
 had to blunder into knowledge at the cost of the 
 wholesale slaughter of their troops. He saw them 
 " tried long and long by hopelessness, mismanage- 
 
 85 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 ment, defeat ; advancing unhesitatingly through in 
 credible slaughter ; sinewy with unconquerable 
 resolution. He saw them by tens of thousands in 
 the hospitals tried by yet drearier, more fearful 
 tests the wound, the amputation, the shattered 
 face, the slow hot fever, the long impatient anchor 
 age in bed ; he marked their fortitude, decorum, 
 their religious nature and sweet affection." Finally, 
 newest, most significant sight of all, victory achieved, 
 the Cause, the Union safe, he saw them return 
 back to "the workshop, the farm, the desk," the 
 store, instantly reabsorbed into the peaceful indus 
 tries of the land : 
 
 " A pause the armies wait. 
 
 A million flush d embattled conquerors wait. 
 
 The world, too, waits, then soft as breaking night and sure 
 
 as dawn 
 They melt, they disappear." 
 
 " Plentifully supplied, last-needed proof of De 
 mocracy in its personalities !" ratifying on the 
 broadest scale Wordsworth s haughty claim for 
 average man " Such is the inherent dignity of 
 human nature that there belong to it sublimities of 
 virtue which all men may attain, and which no man 
 can transcend." 
 
 But, aware that peace and prosperity may be 
 even still severer tests of national as of individual 
 virtue and greatness of mind, Walt Whitman scans 
 with anxious, questioning eye the America of to 
 day. He is no smooth-tongued prophet of easy 
 greatness. 
 
 " I am he who walks the States with a barb d tongue ques 
 tioning every one I meet ; 
 86 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 Who are you, that wanted only to be told what you knew 
 
 before ? 
 Who are you, that wanted only a book to join you in your 
 
 nonsense?" 
 
 He sees clearly as any the incredible flippancy, the 
 blind fury of parties, the lack of great leaders, the 
 plentiful meanness and vulgarity ; the labor ques 
 tion beginning to open like a yawning gulf. . . . 
 " We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, all 
 so dark and untried. ... It seems as if the 
 Almighty had spread before this nation charts of 
 imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with 
 many a deep intestine difficulty, and human aggre 
 gate of cankerous imperfection, saying lo ! the 
 roads ! The only plans of development, long and 
 varied, with all terrible balks and ebullitions ! You 
 said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, put 
 ting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests, 
 behind me as of no account making a new his 
 tory, a history of democracy. ... I alone in 
 augurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O 
 lands of America, are indeed the prizes, the deter 
 minations of your soul, be it so. But behold the 
 cost, and already specimens of the cost. Thought 
 you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear ? If 
 you would have greatness, know that you must 
 conquer it through ages . . . must pay for it 
 with proportionate price. For you, too, as for all 
 lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in 
 office, scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, 
 the demonism of greed, the hell of passion, the 
 decay of faith, the long postponement, the fossil- 
 like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, 
 prophets, thunderstorms, deaths, new projections 
 and invigorations of ideas and men." 
 
 87 
 
A Confession of Faith 
 
 "Yet I have dreamed, merged in that hidden- 
 tangled problem of our fate, whose long unraveling 
 stretches mysteriously through time dreamed, 
 portrayed, hinted already a little or a larger band, 
 a band of brave and true, unprecedented yet, arm d 
 and equipt at every point, the members separated, 
 it may be by different dates and states, or south or 
 north, or east or west, a year, a century here, and 
 other centuries there, but always one, compact in 
 soul, conscience-conserving, God-inculcating, in 
 spired achievers not only in literature, the greatest 
 art, but achievers in all art a new undying order, 
 dynasty from age to age transmitted, a band, a class 
 at least as fit to cope with current years, our dan 
 gers, needs, as those who, for their time, so long, 
 so well, in armor or in cowl, upheld and made illus 
 trious that far-back-feudal, priestly world." 
 
 Of that band, is not Walt Whitman the pioneer ? 
 Of that New World literature, say, are not his 
 poems the beginning ? A rude beginning if you 
 will. He claims no more and no less. But what 
 ever else they may lack they do not lack vitality, 
 initiative, sublimity. They do not lack that which 
 makes life great and death, with its " transfers and 
 promotions, its superb vistas," exhilarating, a re 
 splendent faith in God and man which will kindle 
 anew the faith of the world : 
 
 " Poets to come ! Orators, singers, musicians to come ! 
 Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am for ; 
 But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater 
 than before known, 
 
 Arouse ! Arouse for you must justify me you must an 
 swer. 
 
 88 
 
Anne Gilchrist 
 
 I myself but write one or two indicative words for the fu 
 ture, 
 
 I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back in 
 the darkness. 
 
 I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stopping, 
 turns a casual look upon you, and then averts his 
 face, 
 
 Leaving it to you to prove and define it, 
 
 Expecting the main things from you." 
 
 ANNE GILCHRIST. 
 
 89 
 
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