H 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 AND 
 
 LEAVES OF GRASS 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 \V. H. TRIMBLE 
 
 il Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the 
 emotion, the actual condition of his own heart; and other men, so 
 strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will 
 give heed to him."— Carlt/le. 
 
 WATTS & CO., 
 17 JOHNSON'S COIJKT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. 
 
 1905 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 AND 
 
 LEAVES OF GRASS 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
 AND 
 
 LEAVES OF GRASS 
 
 dN INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. TRIMBLE 
 
 " Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the 
 emotion, the actual condition of his own heart ; and other men, so 
 strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will 
 give heed to him." — Carlyle. 
 
 WATTS & CO., 
 
 17, JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. 
 
 1905 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 Early Years .... 
 
 - 
 
 9 
 
 II. 
 
 "Leaves of Grass" 
 
 - 
 
 16 
 
 
 1. The Song of Myself 
 
 - 
 
 25 
 
 
 2. Children of Adam 
 
 - 
 
 29 
 
 
 3. Democratic Vistas 
 
 - 
 
 36 
 
 
 4. Eeligion - 
 
 - 
 
 51 
 
 
 5. Prudence, Charity, and Personal Force 
 
 - 
 
 56 
 
 
 6. Death and Immortality - 
 
 - 
 
 58 
 
 III. 
 
 "Drum Taps" .... 
 
 - 
 
 63 
 
 IV. 
 
 Whitman and Lincoln 
 
 - 
 
 71 
 
 V. 
 
 Whitman's Reception 
 
 - 
 
 74 
 
 VI. 
 
 Conclusion ----- 
 
 - 
 
 80 
 
 
 Appendix No. I. : Names given to certain 
 
 of 
 
 
 
 Whitman's Poems by Mr. William Michael 
 
 
 
 Eossetti - 
 
 - 
 
 89 
 
 
 Appendix No. II. : Bibliography - 
 
 - 
 
 92 
 
 MI65&59 
 
The references in this volume to Whitman's writings 
 are to : — 
 
 Leaves of Grass, including : " Sands at Seventy "; 
 " Good-Bye, My Fancy "; " Old-Age Echoes "; and 
 " A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads." (Boston 
 Small, Maynard, & Co., 1898.) 
 
 AND 
 
 Complete Prose Works : " Specimen Days and Collect "; 
 " November Boughs "; and " Good-Bye, My Fancy." 
 (Boston : Small, Maynard, & Co., 1898.) 
 
The following pages have been compiled from a series 
 of lectures given in Dunedin in the winter of 1903. 
 
 Dunedin, Neie Zealand, 
 November, 1904. 
 
I. 
 
 EARLY YEARS 
 
 Walt Whitman, the author of Leaves of Grass, known 
 to his friends and admirers as the "Good Grey Poet," 
 the " Poet of Hope," and the " Laureate of Demo- 
 cracy," was born on May 31st, 1819, at West Hills, 
 near Huntingdon, Suffolk County, Long Island, in 
 the State of New Y 7 ork, where his father was a farmer 
 and carpenter. 
 
 The Whitman family had been settled in Long 
 Island since about 1650 : the Van Velsors — the family 
 of the poet's mother — were also old settlers on Long 
 Island, having been located there about as long as the 
 Whitmans. 
 
 The Van Velsor people were noted for fine horses, which 
 the men bred and train'd from blood stock. My mother, 
 as a young woman, was a daily and daring rider. 1 
 
 The first five years of the future poet's life were 
 spent in the country ; but in 1824 his parents moved 
 into Brooklyn, where the boy Walt received such 
 rudimentary education as was procurable at that time. 
 
 It was here that he — 
 
 assisted the personal coming of Lafayette, in 1824-25, to 
 
 Brooklyn Numerous children arrived on the grounds, 
 
 of whom I was one, and were assisted by several gentlemen 
 to safe spots to view the ceremony. Among others, 
 
 1 Prose, p. 5. 
 9 
 
LO :\RLY YEAES 
 
 Lafayette, also helping the children, took me up — I was 
 five years old — press'd me a moment to his breast, gave me 
 a kiss, and set me down in a safe spot. 1 
 
 About 1832 Whitman was apprenticed to the print- 
 ing trade in the office of the Long Island Patriot. 
 Later he worked on the Long Island Star. In 1836-7 
 we find him working as a compositor in New York.' 2 
 His connection with the Press throughout his life is 
 detailed in an early issue of the Camden Courier, the 
 paragraph being reprinted in Specimen Days. 3 
 
 When about seventeen years old, Whitman took up 
 the occupation of itinerant school teacher in Suffolk 
 and Queen's counties, Long Island. Of this period of 
 his life he wrote : " This I consider one of my best 
 experiences, and deepest lessons in human nature, 
 behind the scenes and in the masses." 4 The short 
 story which he wrote in 1841, Death in the School 
 Room, 5 is probably based on some tragic experience of 
 this time. 
 
 In 1839, '40, 1 started and publish'd a weekly paper in my 
 native town, Huntingdon. Then, returning to New York 
 and Brooklyn, worked on as printer and writer ; mostly 
 prose ; but an occasional shy at " poetry." 
 
 Some of Whitman's writings of this period, princi- 
 pally short stories, are printed in his collected Prose 
 Works, under the heading of Pieces in Early Youth. 
 
 The years 1846, '47, and there along, see me still in New 
 York city, working as writer and printer; having my usual 
 good health, and a good time generally." 
 
 During these years Whitman availed himself of 
 every possible opportunity of becoming acquainted 
 
 1 Prose, p. 510. - Ibid, p. 10. " Ibid, p. 187. 
 
 4 Ibid, p. 10. ' Ibid, p. 336. ,; Ibid, p. 10. 
 
 7 Ibid, p. 12; and see an excellent article, " Walt Whitman as an 
 Editor," in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1003. 
 
EAKLY YEAES 11 
 
 with labouring people of all descriptions and occupa- 
 tions. To the end of his life he delighted in the 
 workers. His ideal citizen is to be a worker, a pro- 
 ducer : his Great City is not to include idlers or 
 parasites. He appears to have spent a good deal of 
 his spare time on the New York street cars, the drivers 
 of which impressed him very profoundly. Speaking 
 of Whitman's sojourn in Washington in the early 
 seventies, Peter Doyle said : — 
 
 Everybody knew him. He bad a way of taking the measure 
 of the driver's bands — bad calf-skin gloves made for them 
 every winter in Georgetown— these gloves were bis personal 
 presents to the men. He saluted the men on the other 
 cars as we passed, threw up bis band. They cried to him 
 " Hullo, Walt," and he would reply, " Ah, there," or some- 
 thing like it. He was welcome always as the flowers in 
 May. Everybody appreciated bis attentions, and be 
 seemed to appreciate our attentions to him. 1 
 
 I suppose the critics will laugh heartily; but the influence 
 of those Broadway omnibus jaunts, and drivers, and 
 declamations, and escapades, undoubtedly enter'd into the 
 gestation of Leaven of Grass. 2 
 
 The poet's love of the street cars survived into his old 
 age. Mr. Donaldson tells us that up to the time of his 
 last illness Whitman delighted in riding in the cars in 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 With bis back to the car, his feet on the fender, and cane 
 in band, be would enjoy this ride of eight miles or more, 
 watching the passers-by, but seldom speaking during the 
 
 ride Finally, Mr. Whitman became known on the line 
 
 as "Whitman, the Camden Poet." All the drivers liked 
 him, but thought him odd. z 
 
 And there is a very interesting anecdote of the poet 
 
 1 Calamus ; Letters to Peter Doyle. 2 Prose, p. 13. 
 
 3 Walt Whitman tlie Man. 
 
12 EA11LY SEARS 
 
 during his residence in Washington, prior to 1873, of 
 his taking charge of a street car so as to give the con- 
 ductor a rest, and at the same time holding and 
 pacifying a tired, and therefore cross, baby-passenger 
 for a worn-out mother. 1 
 
 In the same early years Whitman developed a 
 passion for the ferry between New York and Brooklyn. 
 
 My life then, and still more the following years, was 
 curiously identified with Fulton Ferry, already becoming 
 the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, 
 volume, variety, rapidity, and picturescmeness. Almost 
 daily, later ('50-'60), crossed on the boats, often up in the 
 pilot-houses, where I could get a full sweep, absorbing 
 
 shows, accompaniments, surroundings Indeed, I have 
 
 always had a passion for ferries ; to me they afford inimit- 
 able, streaming, never- failing, living poems.- 
 
 Mr. Donaldson mentions that in his old age Whitman 
 used to derive great enjoyment from the ferry trip 
 between Philadelphia and Camden. This passion for 
 the river doubtless inspired many of his finest lines, 
 notably Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. 
 
 Another influence of these years over Whitman's 
 life, writings, and character was the Fire Brigade of 
 New York. Although he made no reference, in Speci- 
 men Days, to the great fire of 1835 in New York, yet 
 he must have entertained lively* recollections of that 
 catastrophe, which possibly inspired the following lines 
 in the Song of Myself: — 
 
 " I am the mash'd fireman, with breast-bone broken ; 
 Tumbling walls buried me in their debris ; 
 Heat and smoke I inspired, I heard the yelling shouts of my 
 
 comrades ; 
 I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels ; 
 
 1 Bird* and Poet*, by John Burroughs. 3 Prose, p. 11. 
 
EARLY YEARS 13 
 
 They have cleared the beams away, they tenderly lift me forth ; 
 I lie in the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my 
 
 sake ; 
 Painless after all I lie exhausted, but not so unhappy ; 
 White and beautiful are the faces around me ; the heads are bared 
 
 of their fire-caps ; 
 The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches." 1 
 
 The following lines from A Song of Joys (1860) also 
 bear upon the same theme : — 
 
 " O, the fireman's joys ! 
 I hear the alarm at dead of night ; 
 I hear bells, shouts ! I pass the crowd ; I run ! 
 The sight of the flames maddens me with pleasure ! " 2 
 
 Emerson said he first met Whitman in New York, in 1855, 
 and asked him to dine with him at the Astor House. He 
 came, and at dinner, instead of drinking out of a glass, 
 called for a tin cup. He then took Emerson to an engine- 
 house, and showed him the conveniences there for the fire- 
 men to sit, or read, or chat with one another, and praised 
 the companionship of the men. 3 
 
 In these same years, also, Whitman revelled in the 
 drama and in music, hearing all the best actors and 
 musicians of the day. His reminiscences of the actors 
 of that time, published in an essay entitled The Old 
 Bowery, 4 are exceedingly interesting. It may also be 
 added that at that time Whitman was himself a mem- 
 ber of an amateur dramatic company, " and acted 
 parts in it several times — second parts, as they were 
 called." 5 The music he appreciated appears to have 
 been of the light, operatic, voluptuous, dramatic order. 
 In Specimen Days 6 he enumerates the Italian operas 
 he had witnessed, it being evident that in this direction 
 lay his musical taste. "I heard Albani every time 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 60. 2 Ibid, p. 143. 
 
 3 F. B. Sanborn, in the Arena, December, 1895. 
 
 4 Prose, p. 426. 5 Ibid, p. 518. « Ibid, p. 13. 
 
14 EARLY YEARS 
 
 she sang in New York and vicinity." 1 He also speaks 
 of Jenny Lind, who " had the most brilliant, captiva- 
 ting, popular musical style and expression of any one 
 known." 2 A verse, published in 18G0, To a Certain 
 Cantatrice? is said to have been addressed to Madame 
 Albani. Mr. Havelock Ellis wrote : — 
 
 The music he delighted in was simple and joyous melody, 
 
 as in Kossini's operas That Whitman could have truly 
 
 appreciated Beethoven, or understood Wagner's Tannhauser, 
 is not conceivable. 4 
 
 The experts and musicians of my present friends claim 
 that the new Wagner and his pieces belong far more truly 
 to me, and I to them, likely. But I was fed and bred under 
 the Italian dispensation, and absorbed it, and doubtless 
 show it. 5 
 
 In Specimen Days Whitman expresses the delight with 
 which he had listened to a performance of Beethoven 's 
 Septette ; but this, so far as we can find, is his only 
 mention of any classical music. 
 In 1849 Whitman 
 
 went off on a leisurely journey and working expedition 
 through all the middle States, and down the Ohio and 
 Mississippi Eivers. Lived a while in New Orleans, and 
 worked there on the editorial staff of the Daily Crescent 
 newspaper. After a time, plodded back northward ; up the 
 Mississippi, and around to and by way of the great lakes, 
 Michigan, Huron, and Erie, to Niagara Falls and lower 
 Canada ; finally returning through central New York, and 
 down the Hudson, travelling altogether probably 8,000 
 miles this trip, to and fro." 
 
 In 1887 the old poet wrote an article on his experi- 
 ences of New Orleans in those da}*s, which was printed 
 in the Picayune newspaper (New Orleans). 8 
 
 1 Prose, p. 14. 2 Ibid, p. 516. 
 
 3 Leaves of Grass, p. 16. * The New Spirit. 
 
 6 Prose, p. 515 ; and see Angels' Wings, by Edwin Carpenter. 
 
 6 Prose, p. 151. ' Ibid, p. 15*. 8 Ibid, p. 439. 
 
EAELY YEARS 15 
 
 From 1851 Whitman spent several years house- 
 building in Brooklyn. Although this occupation was 
 profitable, he found it too absorbing, and ultimately 
 gave it up. He became possessed by a living impulse 
 to build for eternity, not for mere time. He must 
 build something infinitely greater than mere houses. 
 
 This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully 
 express in literary and poetic form, and uncompromisingly, 
 my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic 
 personality ; in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous 
 spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current 
 America, and to exploit that personality, identified with 
 place and date, in a far more candid and comprehensive 
 sense than any hitherto poem or book. 1 
 
 1 A Backward Glance, etc. 
 
II. 
 
 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 " One's self I sing, a simple separate person." 
 
 Whitman's experiences of life and of natural objects 
 were to find expression in poetry of a new order. 
 
 He was moved to undertake this formidable poetic work 
 by his sense of the great materials which America could 
 offer for a really American poetry, and by his contempt for 
 
 the current work of his compatriots Thus incited to 
 
 poetic self-expression, Whitman [writes Mr. Conway] wrote 
 on a sheet of paper, in large letters, these words : 
 
 MAKE THE WORK, 
 
 and fixed it above his table, where he could always see it 
 while writing. Thenceforth every cloud that flitted over 
 him, every distant sail, every face and form encountered, 
 wrote a line in his book. 1 
 
 Leans of Grass, indeed (I cannot too often reiterate), has 
 mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and 
 other personal nature — an attempt, from first to last, to put 
 a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter part of the 
 nineteenth century, in America), freely, fully, and truly on 
 record. I could not find any similar personal record in 
 current literature that satisfied me. But it is not on Leaves 
 of Grass distinctively as literature, or a specimen thereof, that 
 I feel to dwell, or advance claims. No one uill e/et at my 
 verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, 
 or as aiming mainly toward art, or cestheticism. 2 
 
 1 Prefatory notice, by W. M. Eossetti, to Poems by Walt Whitman. 
 * A Backward Glance, etc.; the italics of the last sentence are ours. 
 
 16 
 
"LEAVES OP GRASS" 17 
 
 This passage may be taken as explanatory of much 
 that appears objectionable (in many ways) in Whit- 
 man's writings. 
 
 Whitman named his book after the grass, "which 
 makes a carpet over the earth, and which is a sign and 
 a presence rather than a form." 1 
 
 Of the matter contained in heaves of Grass Whitman 
 wrote : — 
 " This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is ; 
 
 This is the common air that bathes the globe." 2 
 
 Whitman began this work in 1853. 
 
 In 1855 commenced putting Leaves of Grass to press for 
 
 good after many MS. doings and undoings (I had 
 
 great trouble in leaving out the stock " poetical " touches, 
 but succeeded at last). 3 
 
 It has not been our fortune to see a copy of the first 
 issue of Leaves of Grass ; the few existing copies (out 
 of an edition of but a thousand) are greatly prized by 
 collectors. In March, 1903, a correspondent in 
 Philadelphia wrote : "I do not know where a first 
 edition of Leaves of Grass can be secured; the last 
 copy sold brought sixty-five dollars." Of the fate of 
 this first issue Mr. Donaldson tells us : — 
 
 One day at our table he detailed at length how he had 
 himself set up, printed, and gotten out his first edition of 
 Leaves of Grass in 1855 ; and that, at the time, he was 
 engaged in building small houses, and making money at 
 it. I asked him how much he made out of the book. He 
 gave a quiet chuckle, and replied : " Made ? well, if I 
 remember correctly, those persons to whom I sent them 
 returned them all but four or five, and the rest I prevailed 
 on friends and relatives, who could not refuse, to take 
 away by hand. Oh, as a money matter, the book was a 
 dreadful failure." 4 
 
 1 Whitman : A Stiuly, by John Burroughs. 
 
 2 Leaves of Grass, p. 43. 3 Prose, p. 15. 
 
 4 Walt Whitman the Man. 
 
 C 
 
18 "LEAVES OF GEASS" 
 
 Nor need we, however great our admiration of the 
 work, feel the least surprise at the hostility and 
 indifference which Whitman's book encountered. 
 How many of us, of a later generation, with the battle 
 of the perpetual Whitman controversy fresh in our 
 minds, and with every wish to read and welcome the 
 works of a strange writer, have accepted Whitman at 
 the first reading, or even been able to read his works 
 at sight? In the reading public of his own day he 
 had to contend with the indifference of the general 
 reader, the abuse of the respectable and inevitable 
 Mrs. Grundy, the dissuasions of his friends — in fact, 
 on every hand he encountered discouragement. 
 
 In his style of writing Whitman had little or nothing 
 in common with either contemporary poets or those 
 of previous times; for he abandoned the time-honoured 
 customs of rlryme and metre, leaving his words to 
 find their own rhythm. This is really the supreme 
 difficulty one is apt to experience when first attempting 
 to read Leaves of Grass, for this rhythm is not always 
 easy to grasp. 
 
 To the music of the opera, for which he had a passion, 
 more than to anything else, was due his emancipation from 
 what he called the " ballad style " of poetry ; by which he 
 meant poetry hampered by rhyme and metre. " But for 
 the opera," he declared that day on Prospect Hill, " I could 
 never have written Leaves of Grass." 1 
 
 This of course may account, to a great extent, for 
 the recitative form of Whitman's poems ; he recog- 
 nised, probably, in recitative a basic principle of 
 expression which would lead him into attempting to 
 express his thoughts in the rhythm of nature, the 
 sighing of the wind, the rustling of trees, the beating 
 
 1 J. T. Trowbridge, in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902. 
 
"LEAVES OF GRASS" 19 
 
 and restlessness of waves upon the shore ; and, 
 probably, it is only in the woods, " or back of a rock 
 in the open air," or by the sea, that Whitman's 
 writings can be properly understood, or their beauty 
 appreciated. These, and other — similar — comparisons 
 with natural processes and objects have been frequently 
 used as analogies with the spirit and rhythm of Leaves 
 of Grass ; but although, to many readers, they may 
 appear fanciful and extravagant, we do not know, and 
 cannot think, of any others, and they are here set 
 down for what they are worth, and because, to a very 
 great extent, we regard them as true. Before Leaves 
 of Grass can be read and understood this peculiar 
 rhythm must be mastered, or the lines appear to be 
 " without form, and void "; but, when once mastered, 
 this rhythm appears to be perfect — indeed, the dis- 
 cerning reader will almost feel disposed to doubt 
 whether the material of the book could have been 
 expressed better, or even in any other manner; from 
 being obscure, the poems become fascinating. How- 
 ever unequal in length the lines maybe (and on opening 
 the book at random we have encountered a line of 
 nineteen "feet" followed by one of fifty-one), they 
 always seem to us as though they could in no wise be 
 improved upon. All the poems breathe a sentiment 
 of subdued melancholy ; he is always conscious of 
 " that sobbing dirge of Nature"; in this respect, and 
 also in respect of their entire lack of humour (for we 
 cannot conscientiously call that gruesome Boston 
 Ballad humorous), many readers have recognised in 
 Leaves of Grass a great primitive poem. 
 
 Whitman has been accused of unadulterated egotism, 
 and certainly his continual use of the Ego frequently 
 appears to give colour to this charge ; but a little study 
 
20 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 will show the discerning reader that the Ego is used 
 vicariously, and that the pronoun You might have 
 been used with equal propriety. "Whitman asserts 
 this at the beginning of the Song of Myself : — 
 
 " I celebrate myself, and sing myself ; 
 And what I assume you shall assume ; 
 For every atom belonging tome as good as belongs to you." 
 
 There was no egotism in Whitman. There was the 
 consciousness of great personal power. He exerted this 
 power to general, not personal, ends. If he said " I," was 
 it not equally the part and duty of every other to say " I," 
 and to make for themselves all the claims he could make 
 for himself ? He would not only say for himself " I and 
 my father are one," but he would insist that it A\a< 
 necessary for the perfection of his claim that he should 
 also say " You and your father are one," and that you 
 should say "I and my father are one." 1 
 
 In his manner "Whitman is occasionally obscure ; 
 in much of his earlier work there is an arrogant, even 
 insolent, note, which the reader is apt to find rather 
 irritating ; and in some of his poems he inserted long 
 catalogues of occupations, articles, and so forth, 
 which are rather trying to the reader's patience. 2 
 Also, he frequently uses uncouth expressions ; and at 
 times he even goes so far as to manufacture words. 3 
 He also intrudes foreign words into his writings 
 where English ones would be equally (or more) 
 suitable ; a favourite expression is " Camerado " 
 (corrupted, apparently, by himself from the Spanish 
 camarada) , which he substitutes for the much more 
 appropriate and expressive English word " comrade." 
 
 1 Horace L. Traubel, in the Arena, January, 1896. 
 
 2 The " catalogues " are justified to some extent by Mr. Salter, 
 Professor Dowden, and Mr. Burroughs. 
 
 3 " Even in Whitman's best work there is constantly some rudeness 
 that jars, as if a piece of glass had got into our bread. ' ' — Prof. Nichol. 
 
"LEAVES OF GRASS" 21 
 
 Whitman's punctuation, also, is open to hostile 
 criticism ; he evidently had but a faint conception of 
 the use and value of the semicolon ; his perpetual 
 commas lead the reader into confusion, and add to 
 the difficulty of getting at his meanings ; and his use 
 of the parenthesis is much too frequent. His inspira- 
 tion was intermittent ; and often, in attempting to be 
 forcible in his language, he only succeeded in being 
 feeble. Some of his early work he subsequently 
 ruined with alterations which are distinctly inferior to 
 what Professor Nichol calls the " original scrawl." 
 He even entirely omitted some of the early pieces 
 from the final "authorised" edition of Leaves of 
 Grass ; some of these, notably Great are the Mytlis, 
 are particularly tine, and Whitman's reason for 
 dropping them can only be matter for conjecture. 
 
 We are aware that there are many readers of 
 Whitman who regard Leaves of Grass as above criti- 
 cism, and as artistically faultless ; and it will appear, 
 from the foregoing remarks, that we do not ourselves 
 take that position ; but, numerous and reprehensible 
 as Whitman's faults may be, these are merely 
 trifles when placed in contrast with his many 
 excellent qualities. We do not need, here, to make 
 more than a passing allusion to Whitman's unlimited 
 breadth of view : that is the first, as well as the finest, 
 of his characteristics that the student will immediately 
 notice for himself ; and, as a matter of course, this 
 is one of the characteristics of Leaves of Grass which 
 gives great offence to the redoubtable Mrs. Grundy : 
 that respectable old party does not approve of breadth 
 of view. 
 
 " I inhale great draughts of space," 
 says Whitman ; but the poor old lady cannot but 
 
22 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 suspect that this is an impropriety. This Cosmic 
 Sense leads "Whitman to recognise that man is his 
 " own master, total and absolute "; and to his rather 
 startling announcement that the Great City is " where 
 the men and women think lightly of the laws," 1 and 
 " where the children are taught to be laws to them- 
 selves, and to depend on themselves" 2 : and this 
 brings us to his ideal of Democracy, the fruition of 
 which will depend entirely upon the development of 
 each man's and each woman's individuality : — 
 
 " Underneath all, individuals ; 
 I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals ; 
 The only government is that which makes minute of individuals ; 
 The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one 
 single individual — namely, to You." :i 
 
 Whitman's intense sympathy with all sorrow and 
 suffering is evident throughout his writings, and was 
 abundantly exemplified in his devotion to the sick and 
 wounded of both sides (North and South) during the 
 American war. We must also add that Whitman 
 possessed a curious facility for making his readers 
 aware of the objects of the universe as if for the first 
 time ; the world is every hour a new Garden of Eden ; 
 and we are the new Adam and Eve, looking upon 
 nature, and ourselves, and one another, as though 
 newly sprung from the inane. From this attitude we 
 are made to regard the most common -place natural 
 objects with astonishment at their beauty : — 
 
 " A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the meta- 
 physics of books. 
 
 " I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the 
 stars ; 
 
 1 Song of the Broad A.re. - Ibid. 3 By Blue Ontario's Shore. 
 
"LEAVES OF GRASS 23 
 
 And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg 
 of the wren. 
 
 "And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven. 
 
 "And the cow, crunching with depress'd head, surpasses any statue ; 
 And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." 1 
 
 The poems are a constant and intimate appeal " to 
 you, whoever you are"; to each "simple, separate 
 person " with whom the poet comes into contact; he 
 and his readers, therefore, appear to be bound together 
 by a personal tie ; hence the contention of some 
 enthusiastic admirers that Whitman must be accepted 
 in toto or rejected. The reader who recognises the 
 force of this personal feeling will realise the meaning 
 of the lines : — 
 
 " Camarado ! this is no book ! 
 Who touches this, touches a man." 2 
 
 He wrote a great book. Yet he insisted by this very 
 book, and in all private mention of it, that he could not be 
 understood until the man back of the book had been 
 embraced. 3 
 
 If Whitman was more unfortunate in one respect 
 than another, it was in the titles he gave to his poems. 
 This fault was due, we think, to the thought that it is 
 the character of a man that is of consequence, not his 
 mere name. But although this is quite true of a 
 man, it certainly is not so of a book, or of a poem. 
 In a great number of instances (for there are excep- 
 tions) the names given to his poems by Whitman were 
 merely their first few words — e.g., Starting from 
 Paumanok ; Aboard at a Skills Helm ; First, Songs 
 for a Prelude ; Great Are The Myths, etc. Fortu- 
 
 1 Song of Myself. - Leaves of Grans, p. 282. 
 
 ;: Horace L. Traubel, in the Arena, January, 1896. 
 
24 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 nately for British readers, the first English editor of 
 a selection from Leaves of Grass, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, 
 gave names of his own choosing — names which we 
 would like to be perpetuated — to many of the poems. 
 To the poem, To Think of Time, Mr. liossetti gave the 
 expressive, sombre, entirely appropriate title, Burial 
 (a name which Whitman himself had originally given 
 to the poem, but had subsequently dropped) ; Who- 
 ever You Are, Holding Me Now In Hand, Mr. Rossetti 
 named Fit Audience ; 'Jinn' teas a Child Went Forth 
 he named Assimilations, etc. 1 
 
 The themes dealt with in Leaves of Grass are usually 
 classified under three headings, viz. : — 
 
 1. Human Freedom. 
 
 2. Human Brotherhood. 
 
 3. Death and Immortality. 
 
 The exclusively democratic poems are, of course, 
 grouped under the first of these headings ; the Drum 
 Taps (songs inspired by the war) under all three ; the 
 Sonr/s of Sex (most of which are known as Children or 
 Adam) under the first and second. Were we to sort 
 out the entire collection of poems, we would find that 
 the whole of Whitman's poetry can be grouped under 
 these three headings; for convenience we have, in this 
 work, rather extended this classification, and made a 
 further subdivision into six sections ; giving the Drum 
 Taps a chapter to themselves. 
 
 Whitman named his first volume of poems Leaves 
 of Grass ; from time to time he issued further series 
 of poems, such as J)rum Taps, Sands at Seventy, 
 Good-bye My Fancy, all of which were eventually 
 collected in a single volume, and published as Leaves 
 of Crass. 
 
 1 See Appendix No. 1. 
 
" SONG OF MYSELF " 25 
 
 1.—" SONG OF MYSELF." 
 " I celebrate myself, and sing myself." 
 
 The most important, as well as the most valuable, of 
 Whitman's poems is the Song of Myself 1 — a long 
 composition in fifty-two sections : in the first issue of 
 Leaves of Grass this poem had no name assigned to 
 it ; in later issues it was named Walt Whitman ; 
 finally, the author named it the Song of Myself. 
 Taking Leaves of Grass as the expression of 
 Whitman's personality, this is the backbone of that 
 personality, the other poems being merely collateral : 
 this is the main trunk, the other poems being 
 branches, twigs, foliage ; this is the central sun of the 
 kosmos, the other poems being attendant, though 
 important, satellites. Whitman's friend, Mr. John 
 Burroughs, describes this poem as 
 
 a series of utterances, ejaculations, apostrophes, enumera- 
 tions, associations, pictures, parables, incidents, suggestions, 
 with little or no structural or logical connection ; but all 
 emanating from a personality whose presence dominates 
 the page, and whose eye is ever upon us. 2 
 
 Whitman selected as his point of view some 
 imaginary position in time and space, whence he 
 viewed and reviewed the movements and history 
 of physical creation. Dr. Bucke — Whitman's bio- 
 grapher, and one of his literary executors — claims for 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 29. 
 2 Whitman : A Study, by John Burroughs. 
 
2(5 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 Whitman that he was gifted with " Cosmic Con- 
 sciousness," a sense which the majority of men do 
 not yet possess, but which is the result of evolution, 
 and which will, in course of time, in all probability, 
 become general in mankind; and that it is from this 
 position Whitman watches the processes of creation. 
 Dr. Bucke described " Cosmic Consciousness" as " ;i 
 clear conception, in outline, of the drift of the universe 
 — a consciousness that the over-ruling power which 
 resides in it is infinitely beneficent — a vision of the 
 WHOLE, or at least of an immense WHOLE, which 
 dwarfs all conception, imagination, or speculation, 
 springing from or belonging to ordinary self-con- 
 sciousness, making the old attempts to mentally 
 grasp the universe and its meaning petty, and even 
 ridiculous." 1 
 
 Dr. Bucke was of opinion that it was in this spirit 
 Whitman wrote the lines : — 
 
 " Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge 
 that pass all the argument of the earth ; 
 And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own; 
 And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own ; 
 And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the 
 
 women my sisters and lovers ; 
 And that a kelson of the creation is love."'- 
 
 This is a very interesting theory, quite worthy of 
 serious attention ; we cannot, however, pause to con- 
 sider it further here. 
 
 From this station in the universe, or from this 
 position of Cosmic Consciousness, Whitman looks 
 down into the " huge first nothing," knowing that he 
 " was even there." 3 
 
 1 In Ee Walt Whitman. " Leaves of Grass, p. 32. s Ibid, p. 71- 
 
"SONG OF MYSELF" 27 
 
 " 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 ; 
 Before I was born out of my mother generations guarded me ; 
 My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.'* 1 
 
 He looks at night at the "far- sprinkled systems": — 
 
 " And all I see, multiplied as high as I can cipher, edge but the rim 
 
 of the farther systems ; 
 Wider and wider they spread, expanding, always expanding, 
 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 surfaces, 
 
 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 surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther. 
 A few quadrillions of eras, a few octillions of cubic leagues, do not 
 
 hazard the span, or make it impatient ; 
 They are but parts, anything is but a part. 
 See ever so far, there is limitless space outside of that ; 
 Count ever so much, there is limitless time around that."' 2 
 
 He watches the "nebula cohere to an orb"; he sees 
 the globe cool down to the eras of " vast vegetables " 
 and "monstrous sauroids." 3 
 
 " All forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me ; 
 Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul." 4 
 
 And again : — 
 
 " I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, 
 grains, esculent roots ; 
 And am stucco" d with quadrupeds and birds all over ; 
 And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons ; 
 But call anything back again when I desire it.' ,;; 
 
 We are now, after rapidly glancing over the pro- 
 cesses of physical creation, standing on terra Jirma. 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 72. - Ibid, p. 73. 8 Ibid, p. 72. 
 
 4 Ibid, p. 72. 5 Ibid, p. 54. 
 
28 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 " The earth, that is sufficient ; 
 I do not want the constellations any nearer ; 
 I know they are very well where they are ; 
 I know they suffice for those who belong to them." 1 
 
 And the voyage through eternity of our " eloquent, 
 dumb, great mother." 
 
 " Tumbling on steadily, nothing dreading ; 
 Sunshine, storm, cold, heat, forever withstanding, passing, 
 
 carrying ; 
 The soul's realisation and determination still inheriting ; 
 The fluid vacuum around and ahead still entering and dividing ; 
 No balk retarding, no anchor anchoring, on no rock striking ; 
 Swift, glad, content, unbereav'd, nothing losing; 
 Of all, able and ready at any time to give strict account, 
 The divine ship sails the divine sea." 2 
 
 The " simple separate person " is now launched 
 into the turmoil of life. 
 
 " The guest that was coming, he waited long, he is now housed ; 
 He is one of those who are beautiful and happy, he is one of those 
 that to look upon and be with is enough." 3 
 
 Now read the poem, There Was a Child Went 
 Forth ,- 4 to this poem Mr. Kossetti gave the significant 
 title, Assimilations ; following up with Section 46 of 
 the Song of Myselj. 
 
 " The boy I love, the same becomes a man not through derived 
 power, but in his own right ; 
 Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear." 5 
 
 In the development of the individual Whitman 
 regards life in the open air as an important element. 
 
 " Now I see the making of the best persons ; 
 It is to live in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth." 
 
 And— 
 
 " Now I re-examine philosophies and religions ; 
 They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under 
 the spacious clouds, and along the landscape, and flowing 
 currents." 7 
 
 1 Leaves of Gras<, p. 121. - Ibid, p. 178. 3 Ibid, p, 336. 
 
 * Ibid, p. 282. fi Ibid, p. 74. ,J Ibid, p. 123. ' Ibid, p. 123. 
 
"SONG OF MYSELF" 29 
 
 The Song oj the Open Road and the Song of Joys are 
 mainly devoted to the joys of open-air life ; and the 
 latter part of Specimen Days (after the war) was 
 mostly written " under the spacious clouds, and along 
 the landscape and flowing currents." 
 
 Hovering over the clear brook-water, I am sooth'd by its 
 soft gurgle in one place, and the hoarser murmurs of its 
 three-foot fall in another. Come, ye disconsolate ones, in 
 whom any latent eligibility is left — come, get the sure 
 virtues of creek-shore, and wood, and field. Two months 
 have I absorb'd them, and they begin to make a new man 
 of me. Every day seclusion — every day at least two or 
 three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no dress, no 
 books, no manners. 1 
 
 All the artificialities, the shams of life ; all bowing 
 in the temples of custom and conventionality ; all our 
 petty meannesses and craving after constant change 
 and excitement ; and most of men's sins, diseases, and 
 follies, are the result of persistent indoor life — of 
 crowding into the cities. Man will have advanced 
 far in the direction of freedom when the country has 
 ceased congregating into the towns, and when the 
 cities have begun to scatter themselves into the 
 country. 
 
 2.— "CHILDREN OF ADAM." 
 
 " We discourse freely, without shame, of one form of sensuality, 
 and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot 
 speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier 
 ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of, and 
 regulated by law." — Thoreau, Walden. 
 
 We have alluded to the Songs of Sex ; and we have 
 1 Prose, p. 96. 
 
30 "LEAVES OF GRASS"' 
 
 now to express ourselves as clearly as possible con- 
 cerning the most difficult part of Whitman's writings ; 
 difficult, not merely of acceptance, hut difficult even 
 to understand. 
 
 In his poem, Starting from Paumanok, which, 
 though not one of his earliest utterances, may he 
 taken as setting forth the general plan of his life's 
 work, Whitman wrote : — 
 
 And sexual organs and acts, do you concentrate in me ; 
 for I am determined to tell you with courageous, clear 
 voice ; to prove you illustrious. 
 
 Consistently with this announcement Whitman 
 inserted, in many of his poems, lines and sentiments 
 which — to the ordinary reader — are not only most 
 shocking and offensive, but are liable to produce the 
 impression that they were written by a man who 
 lived a licentious life, and who allowed his fine 
 intellect to wallow in impure and abominable ideas. 
 Whereas in reality Whitman's life appears to have 
 been remarkable for its manliness and cleanliness ; 
 and his greatest aim was to give his fellow-men a 
 helping hand in the direction of purity, and not to 
 lower them towards sensuality and moral degradation. 
 He was of opinion that any act which is not in itself 
 wrong is ipso facto a fit and proper theme for serious 
 conversation, for rational discussion, for literature. 
 And, further, that if life be a " honourable estate," 
 so must the fact of birth be ; and if birth, why not the 
 fact of conception ? and granting that conception is 
 honourable, and clean, and " illustrious," why should 
 consideration of the organs, passions, experiences, 
 necessary to bring about conception, birth, personal 
 existence, be relegated to a position of shame ? To 
 
" CHILDREN OF ADAM " 31 
 
 this question Whitman's reply — plain, straight- 
 forward, emphatic — will be found in the series of 
 poems named Children of Adam : — 
 
 " Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty 
 and clean ; 
 Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less 
 familiar than the rest." 1 
 
 Mr. Stedman wrote : — 
 
 Nature's own poet must adopt her own method ; and 
 she hides the processes that are unpleasant to see or con- 
 sider. Whitman often dwells upon the under side of 
 things — the decay, the ferment, the germination, which 
 nature conducts in secret ; though out of them she pro- 
 duces new life and beauty.' 2 
 
 For our own part, although it is now many years 
 since we realised the essential greatness of Whitman's 
 personality and writings, we for a long time found it 
 exceedingly difficult to form a decided opinion — to 
 arrive at any conclusion satisfactory to ourselves — 
 respecting this much-debated phase of Whitman's 
 work ; and it has been only in comparatively recent 
 years that we have finally accepted these passages. 
 A writer, quoted by Dr. Bucke, observed : " It takes 
 seven years to learn to appreciate Walt Whitman's 
 poetry." 3 This was, to some extent, our own experi- 
 ence ; and we have noticed that, while our apprecia- 
 tion of the Songs of Sex was originally merely nega- 
 tive, if not somewhat unfriendly, the study and reflec- 
 tion of years so developed our attitude that we now 
 regard this series of poems, not perhaps as the most 
 beautiful, but certainly as the most important and 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 31. 
 
 2 The Nature and Elements of Poetry. 
 
 3 Matador, in the New York Graphic. 
 
:« " LEAVES OF GRASS " 
 
 original part of Whitman's work, and the part most 
 deserving of careful study. 
 
 Whitman found — as all of us have found — sex 
 degraded to a condition of obscenity and shame. 
 Yet sex is the great central fact of life ; and it is b}- 
 means of the sexual attributes of men and women, 
 and by their means only, that the human race survives, 
 and will continue to exist. And Whitman endeavoured, 
 by asserting the cleanliness of sex, by admitting the 
 reproductive organs and their attributes as coequal in 
 sacredness and nobleness with the other organs and 
 their attributes, to prove sex "illustrious." 
 
 Whitman's endeavour to cleanse sex of its obscene 
 aspect may not have been successful ; and if the 
 popular position with regard to that part of the 
 human organism is to be changed (as it must be), he 
 possibly (as some of his critics have asserted) was 
 not the most suitable man to undertake the office ; 
 but it cannot be denied that the endeavours which he 
 made in this direction were conscientious ; and it is 
 something that somebody has made a beginning. 
 Moreover, Whitman has drawn attention in a some- 
 what forcible manner to the necessity for a change of 
 opinion in regard to this important subject ; and 
 there can be no doubt that opinion (how far due to 
 Whitman's writings we are not prepared to say) is, 
 gradually, however slowly, trying to abandon ribaldry 
 and shame, and accommodating itself to the demand 
 for rationalistic treatment. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the storm of adverse 
 criticism (frequently even going so far as personal 
 vituperation), to which the verses in question and 
 their author have been subjected, has been largely 
 instrumental in keeping those of Whitman's writings 
 
"CHILDREN OF ADAM" 33 
 
 to which no possible objection can be made, out of 
 the hands of many people who could not have failed 
 to benefit by their splendidly robust, transcendental, 
 and democratic spirit. Although we cannot think 
 that even the most infatuated lover of obscene litera- 
 ture could find any satisfaction for his appetite for 
 filth in anything Whitman wrote, yet even Whitman's 
 most devoted admirers cannot but admit that these 
 passages are meat too strong for babes. And although 
 Leaves of Grass, as finally presented to the world, 
 would in its very nature be incomplete without these 
 questionable passages, they are suitable only for those 
 readers who can appreciate the spirit in which they 
 " were written. 
 
 In 1869 Mrs. Gilchrist wrote to Mr. Rossetti as 
 follows : — 
 
 It seems to me that it would be wise in the future 
 editions to divide the poems into two entirely distinct, not 
 
 consecutive, volumes; the one very large the other 
 
 very small ; and to put a few words before this one that 
 should, if possible, guide it into the right hands — the 
 hands of those who can think greatly or love greatly, 
 either or both. Thus a stumbling-block would be removed 
 from those who might, to their own infinite joy, receive a 
 great part, but not yet all, that Walt Whitman has given them. 1 
 
 Whether this suggestion has ever been acted upon 
 in America or not we have had no means of ascer- 
 taining ; but there are several selections from Leaves 
 of Grass published both in England and in America 2 
 from which all the pieces to which this objection can 
 be made have been studiously omitted. The reader 
 who has learned, by perusing any of these selections, 
 to appreciate the free spirit of Whitman's poetry may 
 
 1 Anne Gilchrist : Her Life and Writings. 
 2 See Appendix No. 2. 
 
34 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 pursue the subject further by procuring a complete, 
 unabridged edition of Leaves of Grass. 
 
 In 1881 Whitman wrote : — 
 
 Up and down this breadth by Beacon Street — Boston 
 Common — I waik'd for two hours, of a bright, sharp 
 February mid-day, twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, 
 then in his prime, keen, physically and morally magnetic, 
 arm'd at every point, and, whenever he chose, wielding the 
 emotional just as well as the intellectual. During those 
 two hours he was the talker and I the listener. It was an 
 argument-statement, reconnoitering, review, attack, and 
 
 pressing home of all that could be said against that 
 
 part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, 
 < 'hildren of Adam. More precious than gold to me that 
 dissertion — it afforded me, ever after, this strange and 
 paradoxical lesson ; each part of E.'s statement was 
 unanswerable, no judge's charge ever more complete or 
 convincing ; I could never hear the points better put ; and 
 then I felt, down in my soul, the clear and unmistakeable 
 conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way. 
 " What have you to say then to such things ? " said 
 E., pausing in conclusion. " Only that, while I can't 
 answer them at all, I feel more settled than ever to adhere 
 to my own theory, and exemplify it," was my candid 
 response. Whereupon we went and had a good dinner at 
 the American house. And thenceforward I never waver'd 
 or was touched with qualms (as I confess I had been two 
 or three times before). 1 
 
 The following extract from the prose composition 
 printed at the end of Leaves of Grass — A Backward 
 Glance o'er TraveVd Roads — further illustrates the 
 poet's position with respect to this much-disputed 
 question : — 
 
 From another point of view Leaves of Grass is avowedly 
 the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality, 
 though meanings that do not usually go along with those 
 
 1 Prose, p. 184. 
 
" CHILDREN OF ADAM " 35 
 
 words are behind all, and will duly emerge; and all are 
 sought to be lifted into a different light and atmosphere. 
 Of this theme, intentionally palpable in a few linos, I shall 
 only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives 
 breadth of life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the 
 pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those 
 lines omitted. Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my 
 opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from 
 superior men and women towards the thought and fact of 
 sexuality, as an element in character, personality, and 
 emotions, and a theme in literature. I am not going to 
 argue the question by itself. The vitality of it is altogether 
 in its relations, bearings, significance, like the clef of a 
 symphony. At last analogy the lines I allude to, and the 
 spirit in which they are spoken, permeate all Leaves of 
 ( rrass, and the work must stand or fall with them, as the 
 human body and soul must remain an entirety. 1 
 
 When she had read the beautiful, "despised" poems, 
 
 Children of Adam, by the "light that glows out of the rest 
 of the volume, by the light of a clear, strong faith in God, 
 of an unfathomably deep and tender love for humanity, 
 light shed out of a soul that is possess'd of itself," Mrs. 
 Gilchrist wrote Rossetti that 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 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.' 2 
 
 Finally, referring to this series of poems, Whitman 
 wrote : — 
 
 I take occasion now to confirm those lines with the 
 settled convictions and deliberate renewals of thirty years, 
 and to hereby prohibit, so far as word of mine can do so, 
 any elision of them. 3 
 
 1 A Backward Glance, etc., p. 444. 
 
 2 Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. 
 
 3 A Backward Glance, etc., p. 445. 
 
3G "LEAVES OF GRASS 
 
 3.—" DEMOCRATIC VISTAS " 
 
 "In the meantime Leaves' of Grass is the Bible of Democracy, con- 
 taining the highest exemplar of life yet furnished, and suited to the 
 present age and to America. Within it is folded (as the oak in the 
 acorn, or the man in the new-born babe) a new spiritual life for 
 myriads of men and women." — Walt Whitman, by Dr. R. M. Bucke. 
 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis wrote: "It is as the prophet- 
 poet of Democracy that Whitman should be 
 approached." 1 We will now endeavour to examine 
 Whitman's writings — both prose and poetry — with a 
 view of ascertaining the meaning given by him to the 
 word " democracy." 
 
 We have frequently printed the word "democracy." 
 Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist 
 of which still sleeps, quite unawaken'd, notwithstanding 
 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 As I perceive, the 
 
 tendencies of our day are toward those vast and 
 
 sweeping movements, influences, moral and physical, of 
 humanity, now and always current over the planet, on the 
 scale of the impulses of the elements. Then it is also good 
 to reduce the whole matter to the consideration of a single 
 self, a man, a woman, on permanent grounds. Even for 
 the treatment of the universal, in politics, metaprn'sics, or 
 anything, sooner or later we come down to one single, 
 solitary soul. 
 
 There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that 
 rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like tbe 
 stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity — 
 yours for you, whoever you are, as mine for me. Miracle 
 of miracles, beyond all statement, most spiritual and 
 
 * The Psychology of Sc.r. 
 
"DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" 37 
 
 vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and only- 
 entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst 
 of the significant wonders of heaven and earth (significant 
 only because of the Me in the centre), creeds, conventions, 
 fall away and become of no account before this simple idea. 
 Under the luminousness of real vision, it alone takes 
 possession, takes value. 1 
 
 In Democratic Vistas Whitman gives a grim illus- 
 tration of the corrupt condition of modern society : — 
 
 I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly 
 in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. 
 Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at 
 present, and here in the United States genuine belief seems 
 to have left us. The underlying principles of the States 
 
 are not honestly believ'd in nor is humanity itself 
 
 believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere 
 see through the mask ? The spectacle is appalling. We 
 live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men 
 believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A 
 scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of 
 all the litterateur* is to find something to make fun of. A 
 lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I 
 know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass 
 of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all 
 
 false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable The 
 
 great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respect- 
 able robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life 
 flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no 
 aims at all, only to kill time. In business (this all-devour- 
 ing modern word — business) the one sole object is, by any 
 means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the 
 fable ate up all the other serpents ; and money-making is 
 our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the 
 field. The best class we show is but a mob of fashionably- 
 dress'd speculators and vulgarians.' 2 
 
 Such pictures are, unfortunately, common enough ; 
 and are to be found, without much seeking, in other 
 
 1 Prose, pp. 222, 223. * Ibid, p. 204. 
 
38 " LEAVES OF GRASS " 
 
 countries besides the United States of North America ; 
 patriotism, too, and religion, both of which are by 
 rights spontaneous, and without price, appear, more 
 and more, as time goes on, to be grasping after pay- 
 ment for their services. 
 
 Whitman's clearest definition of a democratic 
 citizen, of a " simple separate person," is given in 
 his Song of the Open Road: — 
 
 " From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines ; 
 Going where I list my own master total and absolute ; 
 Listening toothers, considering well what they say ; 
 Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating ; 
 Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds 
 that would hold me." 1 
 
 Democracy includes, and is, 
 
 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY — 
 
 words the real significance of which has been revealed 
 to but few of the children of men since the dawn of 
 history. 
 
 " Great is Liberty ! Great is Equality ! I am their follower : 
 Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft; where you sail, I sail ; 
 I weather it out with you, or sink with you." 2 
 
 Again : — 
 
 " Without extinction is Liberty ; without retrograde is Equality ; 
 They live in the feelings of young men, and the best women ; 
 Not for nothing have the indomitable heads of the earth been always 
 ready to fall for Liberty." 3 
 
 More precious than all worldly riches is Freedom : free- 
 dom from the painful constipation and poor narrowness of 
 ecclesiasticism ; freedom in manners, habiliments, furni- 
 ture ; from the silliness and tyranny of local fashions ; 
 entire freedom from party rings, and mere conventions in 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 122. 
 
 2 Great are the Myths ; in Gathered Leaves. 
 * Leaves of Grass, p. 270. 
 
" DEMOCRATIC VISTAS " 3l> 
 
 politics; and, better than all, a general freedom of One's 
 Self from the tyrannical domination of vices, habits, 
 
 appetites, under which nearly every man of us is enslaved. 
 
 Great, unspeakably great, is the Will, the free soul of 
 
 man For there is to the highest, that law as absolute 
 
 as any — more absolute than any — the Law of Liberty. 
 
 The shallow consider Liberty a release from all law, 
 
 from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, 
 the potent law of laws — namely, the fusion and combina- 
 tion of the conscious will, or partial individual law, with 
 those universal, eternal, unconscious ones, which run 
 through all time, pervade history, prove immortality, give 
 moral purpose to the entire objective, and the last dignity 
 to human life. 1 
 
 It is impossible to state too often — for it is frequently 
 forgotten — that liberty means freedom of thought, 
 freedom of speech, and freedom of action ; that these 
 are liberty, and that the denial of one, with what- 
 ever reservations such denial may be made, implies 
 equal denial of the others. 
 
 " The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers ; 
 The continuance of Equality shall be Comrades.'" 2 
 
 What is that equality, " the continuance " of which 
 " shall be comrades "? — the equality of every man and 
 woman with every other man and woman. There 
 are many people who consider this assertion an 
 arrogant assumption, perhaps even an absurdity ; but 
 this is the basic "principle of democracy. We cannot 
 stop short of this ; we cannot pause to consider the 
 necessity for caste distinctions between rich and 
 poor, learned and ignorant, vulgar and refined, wicked 
 and virtuous, teacher and pupils ; the world does not 
 need, and never can need, oppression and tyranny ; 
 arrogance is always offensive ; no overlaying of veneer 
 
 1 Prose, p. 331. a Leaves of Grass, p. 247. 
 
40 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 or varnish can make it appear graceful, or turn it 
 into a virtue ; there is no human being, however 
 poor or foolish, however ignorant or degraded, from 
 whom the rest of mankind has not much to learn, 
 and to whom the rest of mankind is not — or may not 
 be — deeply indebted. When we come to consider the 
 character of an individual — even of one with whom 
 we are intimately acquainted — to dispassionately 
 reflect upon his proclivities for good on the one hand, 
 and, on the other, his possibilities of evil, it is sur- 
 prising how nearly they balance. A slight inclination 
 of the scale towards the one side, and there is the 
 individual with all the qualities that go to make the 
 good citizen ; a suspicion on the other side, and we 
 have the man or woman who has yielded to tempta- 
 tion, and — " when a man's down, down with him." 
 The lesson of What Shall We Do ? must bring us to a 
 pause in our propensities for judging and under- 
 valuing our fellow men and women. 
 
 Of Equality — as if it harm'd me, giving others the same 
 chances and rights as myself — as if it were not indis- 
 pensable to my own rights that others possess the same. 1 
 
 Whitman's assertions of Equality do not, of course, 
 point to uniformity. Equality is one of Democracy's 
 basic principles, and is inseparable from perfect and 
 absolute Freedom. Uniformity, on the other hand, 
 is not ruerety own brother of tyranny, but can only 
 be secured or enforced by the sacrifice of Liberty, 
 and by ultimate resort to physical force. Mankind is 
 not to be regarded collectively as a mere machine ; 
 but each man and each woman is individually, 
 separately, " A Revelation in the Flesh." 
 
 1 Leaves of Crass, p. 218. 
 
" DEMOCBATIC VISTAS " 41 
 
 Whitman was fully aware of the tendency of man 
 to ignore the commandment, " Judge not, lest ye be 
 judged ": there is an expression which he uses very 
 frequently — Whoever you are ; his writings are 
 addressed to you, personally, individually, " whoever 
 you are " — that is, to every man and every woman. 
 In the Leaf Salut au Monde we find this assertion of 
 Equality : — 
 
 " All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent 
 
 of place, 
 All you on the numberless islands of the Archipelagoes of the sea, 
 And you of centuries hence when you listen to me ; 
 And you, each and everywhere, whom I specify not, but include just 
 
 the same. 
 Health to you ! good will to you all ! from me and America sent ! 
 Each of us inevitable ; 
 [ Each of us limitless ; each of us with his or her right upon the earth ; 
 Each of us here as divinely as any is here." 1 
 
 The Song of Occupations is addressed entirely to 
 working men and women : — 
 
 " Is it you thought the President greater than you ? 
 
 Or the rich better off than you ? or the educated wiser than 
 you ? " 2 
 
 And the Song of the Broad Axe is little more than a 
 rhapsody on the work originating with the imple- 
 ment which stands at the source of all industry — the 
 Axe — " the mighty and friendly emblem of the power 
 of my own race — the newest, largest race." 3 
 
 It is to the workers, not to the idlers and parasites, 
 that Whitman looks for realisation of his democratic 
 ideal: — 
 
 " I raise a voice 
 
 To teach the average man the glory of his daily walk and trade ; 
 
 i Leaves of Grass, p. 119. 2 Ibid, p. 170. s Ibid, p. lo5. 
 
42 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 To sing in songs how exercise and chemical life are never to be 
 
 baffled ; 
 To manual work for each and all, to plough, hoe, dig, 
 To plant and tend the tree, the berry, vegetables, flowers, 
 For every man to see to it that he really do something for every 
 
 woman too ; 
 To use the hammer and the saw ; 
 
 To cultivate a turn for carpentering, plastering, painting ; 
 To work as tailor, tailoress, nurse, hostler, porter ; 
 To invent a little, something ingenious, to aid the washing, 
 
 cooking, cleaning ; 
 And hold it no disgrace to take a hand at them themselves." 1 
 
 But on the general body of the people, so long as 
 they lean, and live, and depend upon the thoughts 
 and opinions of others, he places no reliance ; he 
 looks to the future development of the individuality 
 of each unit to produce a community of " simple 
 separate persons"; and he never ceases reminding us 
 that every man and every woman possesses a wonder- 
 ful, a glorious personality, which is only dormant and 
 awaiting development. He makes much of the old 
 saying, Know Thyself, but would have us go a step 
 further — Be Thyself ; which sentiment we find 
 expressed with peculiar emphasis in the beautiful 
 poem, To You {Whoever you are, I fear you are walking 
 the walk of Dreams). 2 
 
 The object of all work should be, firstly, utility to 
 our fellow men ; and secondly, though perhaps 
 equally, the development of the worker's character : 
 not, as appears to be commonly supposed, merely the 
 satisfying of the greed for money-getting : — 
 
 Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for 
 burial-money, and of a few clap-boards around and shingles 
 overhead on a lot of American soil own'd, and the easy 
 
 i Leaves of Grats, 162. " Ibid, p. 186. 
 
"DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" 43 
 
 dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals ; 
 the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a 
 great being as man is to the toss and pallor of years of 
 money-making, with all their scorching days and icy nights, 
 and all their stifling deceits and underhand dodgings, or 
 infinitesimals of parlours, or shameless stuffing while others 
 starve ; and all the loss of the bloom and odour of the 
 earth, and of the flowers and atmosphere, and of the sea, 
 and of the true taste of the women and men you pass and 
 have to do with in youth and middle age ; and the issuing 
 sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without 
 elevation or naivete (even if you have achieved a secure 
 10,000 a year, or election to Congress, or the Governorship), 
 and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or 
 majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilisation and 
 forethought, blotching the surface which civilisation un- 
 deniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense 
 features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before 
 the reached kisses of the soul. 1 
 
 Whitman was unmistakably a Revolter. The title 
 Revolters would have been highly appropriate for the 
 verse he inscribed to Beginners' 2, : — 
 
 " How they are provided for upon the earth (appearing at intervals) ; 
 How dear and dreadful they are to the earth ; 
 How they inure to themselves as much as to any — what a paradox 
 
 appears their age ; 
 How people respond to them, yet know them not ; 
 How there is something relentless in their fate, all times ; 
 How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and 
 
 reward ; 
 How the same inexorable price must be paid for the same great 
 
 purchase." 
 
 In Leaves of Grass there are many passages cele- 
 brating Revolt. The poem, To A Foil'd Revolter or 
 Revoltress, is one of Whitman's most powerful 
 writings : — 
 
 " I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over ; 
 
 1 Prose, p. 265. 2 Leaves of Gran, p. 15. 
 
44 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 And he going with me leaves peace and routine behind him, 
 And stakes his life to be lost at any moment." 1 
 
 In one of the Inscriptions — To the States — he wrote 
 
 " Resist much ! Obey little ! " 2 
 
 Elsewhere he exclaims : — 
 
 " O latent right of insurrection ! 
 quenchless indispensable fire ! " ' 
 
 And :— 
 
 Then courage, Revolter, Revoltress, 
 
 For till all ceases neither must you cease ! 
 
 Whitman lived in stirring times, when revolt 
 against the old order of things was abroad on every 
 hand. At the time of his birth, and during the early 
 years of his childhood, Simon Bolivar was leading the 
 revolt of the Spanish American Colonies against the 
 supremacy of Spain : Whitman was familiar with the 
 circumstances of the mad Revolt against slavery of 
 John Brown ; with the supremacy, in the United 
 States, of the slave-holding oligarchy, and the Revolt 
 of the Northern States against the attempt of " the 
 South " to destroy the Union. And we may readily 
 understand with what eagerness he must have 
 watched and studied the careers of such Revolters as 
 Mazzini, Kossuth, and Garibaldi ; while he himself is 
 in many respects in close affinity with that greatest of 
 modern Revolters — Leo Tolstoy. 
 
 In the foregoing remarks and quotations on the 
 subject of Revolt, we have no intention of claiming 
 Whitman as an upholder of perpetual rebellion 
 against things as they are for the mere sake of 
 change. To advocate change for the mere grasping 
 after variety is only folly ; but to " nourish active 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 287. 2 Ibid, p. 15. 3 Ibid, p. 17. 
 * Ibid, p. 288. 
 
"DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" 43 
 
 rebellion " against all shams, and against such 
 customs, laws, and conventionalities as are permitted 
 to form a barrier between man and nature, and 
 between each individual and complete religious and 
 civil freedom, is not only justifiable, but incumbent 
 upon all " simple separate persons," at all times, and 
 under whatever circumstances. The development of 
 personality can only go hand in hand with renuncia- 
 tion of custom, which, as Professor Teufelsdroch 
 reminded us long ago, " doth make dotards of us all." 
 
 At the same time we cannot but admit that 
 throughout Whitman's writings there does run a 
 strong under-current of restlessness : he is always 
 " afoot and light-hearted," on the " Open Road." 
 
 Mr. Havelock Ellis wrote : — 
 
 When we read certain portions of Leaves of Grass, we 
 seem to see a vast phalanx of Great Companions passing 
 for ever along the cosmic roads ; pioneers of the Universe. 
 There are superb young men, athletic girls, splendid and 
 savage old men — for the weak seem to have perished by 
 the road-side — and they radiate an infinite energy, an 
 infinite joy. 1 
 
 W 7 hile foreseeing in the future the perfect freedom, 
 athletic vigour, and strenuousness of a liberated race, 
 Whitman does not lose sight of the world's outcasts 
 and failures, who, owing to our lack of proper social 
 organisation, have not been afforded opportunities of 
 fulfilling their proper — natural — vocations in life. 
 
 " I make the poem of evil also, I celebrate that part also ; 
 I am myself just as much evil as good, and my nation is— and I 
 
 say there is in fact no evil ; 
 Or if there is, I say it is just as important to you, to the land, or to 
 
 me, as anything else." - 
 
 1 The New Spirit. - Leaves of Grass, p. 22. 
 
46 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 But although he " commemorates " evil, he does not 
 class it as positive, nor as goodness undeveloped ; 
 more as a veil or mist of weakness and ignorance sus- 
 pended between men and the "eternal verities"; this 
 will gradually disappear as men acquire wisdom. He 
 is forced to recognise the inherent divineness of each 
 human unit, " whoever you are." 
 
 " In this broad earth of ours, 
 Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, 
 Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
 Nestles the seed perfection. 
 By every life a share more or less, 
 
 None born but it is born ; conceal'd or unconceal'd, the 
 seed is waiting." x 
 
 In the poem To You : — 
 
 " Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre-figure 
 
 of all ; 
 From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold- 
 
 color'd light ; 
 But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus 
 
 of gold-color'd light; 
 From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, 
 
 effulgently flowing for ever." 2 
 
 From every man and woman ; not from the virtuous 
 only, or the honest, or the respectable, or the well- 
 dressed, but from the failure and the outcast as well ; 
 " from the brain of every man and woman." 
 
 " Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good 
 hastening towards immortality ; 
 And the vast all that is call'd Evil I saw hastening to merge itself, 
 and become lost and dead." 3 
 
 Freedom and equality cannot be secured to us by 
 statute ; but they may become part of the human life 
 by means of a force of unlimited strength — Love — 
 the love of Comrades ; a force which is insisted upon, 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 81. 2 Ibid, p. 187. 3 Ibid, 21G. 
 
"DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" 47 
 
 and dwelt upon at great length, throughout Leaves of 
 Grass. The series of poems named Calamus is entirely 
 devoted to the subject of "manly love," which 
 Whitman regards as the only force which can perma- 
 nently bind mankind together into one homogeneous 
 whole. 
 
 "Affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet ; 
 Those who love each other shall become invincible. 
 
 No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers ; 
 
 If need be, a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one. 
 
 It shall be customary in the houses and streets to see manly affec- 
 tion ; 
 The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly ; 
 The dependence of liberty shall be lovers ; 
 The continuance of Equality shall be comrades. 
 These shall tie and bind you stronger than hoops of iron ; 
 I, ecstatic, partners ! O lands ! with the love of lovers tie you ! 
 Were you looking to be held together by lawyers ? 
 Or by an agreement on paper ? Or by arms ? 
 Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere." 1 
 
 And he 
 
 " Will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon ; 
 By the love of Comrades, 
 By the manly love of Comrades." 2 
 
 The Calamus series of poems, coupled with the fact 
 that he never married, has been interpreted into a 
 suspicion against Whitman of " sexual inversion "; 
 he "celebrates a friendship in which physical contact, 
 with a kind of silent voluptuous emotion, are essential 
 elements"; 3 but we take leave to doubt if material 
 proof of any value has been produced for such a sus- 
 picion. Whitman told Dr. Bucke, " I suppose the 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 247. i Ibid, p. 99. 
 
 3 The Psychology of Sex, by Havelock Ellis. 
 
48 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 chief reason why I never married must have been an 
 overmastering passion for entire freedom, uncon- 
 straint ; I had an instinct against forming ties that 
 would bind me." 1 It is true that the Calamus poems 
 were written before the war of 1861-65, so that Whit- 
 man's experiences, in the military hospitals and camps, 
 of those who risked or laid down their lives for the 
 " old cause " — the experiences which proved that his 
 Leaves of Grass were realities, and not mere arrogant 
 and sentimental verbiage — had no part in their com- 
 position. But, so far as we have been able to ascertain, 
 from very careful study both of Whitman's own 
 writings and a considerable number of accounts of 
 his personality — his manners, conversation, thoughts, 
 daily life — written by people who knew and loved him, 
 the " Love of Comrades " is the poet's ideal condition 
 of society, to be realised in the future. 
 
 In fond fancy leaping those hundreds of years ahead, let us 
 survey America's works, poems, philosophies ; fulfilling 
 
 prophecies, and giving form and decision to best ideals 
 
 Intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate 
 attachment of man to man, which, hard to define, underlies 
 the lessons and ideals of the profound saviours of every 
 land and age, and which seems to promise, when thoroughly 
 develop'd, cultivated, and recognised in manners and litera- 
 ture, the most substantial hope and safety of these States, 
 will then be fully express'd. 2 
 
 To the above passage Whitman added this foot- 
 note : — 
 
 It is to the development, identification, and general pre- 
 valence of that fervid comradeship (the adhesive love, at 
 least rivalling the amative love hitherto possessing imagina- 
 tive literature, if not going beyond it) that I look for the 
 counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar 
 
 1 Walt Whitman, by Dr. E. M. Bucke. > Prose, pp, 239, 240. 
 
" DEMOCRATIC VISTAS" 49 
 
 American democracy, and for the spiritualisation thereof. 
 Many will say it is a dream, and will not follow my infer- 
 ences ; but I confidently expect a time when there will be 
 seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad 
 audible and visible worldly interests of America, threads 
 of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong 
 and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown — not 
 only in giving tone to individual character, and making it 
 unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, 
 but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say 
 democracy infers such loving comradeship as its most 
 inevitable twin or counterpart ; without which it would be 
 incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself. 1 
 
 So much for Whitman's hopes of, and faith in, 
 democracy. To sum up the matter as briefly as 
 possible, Whitman believed in encouraging discontent 
 with, even to revolt against, all things which are 
 repulsive to the soul of man, particularly the tyranny 
 of custom. For the making of a community of 
 " simple, separate persons," he asks for no finer 
 material than such as existed around him in his own 
 time ; he does not call upon humanity to change its 
 nature; he does not pray for a new heaven and a new 
 earth ; all he asks of man is that he realise his own 
 inherent nobleness, that he shake the " hopples " 
 from his ankles, and inure himself to " pluck, reality, 
 self-esteem, definiteness, elevatedness "; so each 
 " simple, separate, person " shall be governed by but 
 one law, and that the law of his or her own conscience 
 — a sentiment emphasised by Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann : 
 " the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most 
 alone." 
 
 The purpose of democracy — supplanting old belief in the 
 necessary absoluteness of establish'd dynastic rulership, 
 temporal, ecclesiastical, and scholastic, as furnishing the 
 
 1 Prose, p. 240. 
 
50 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 only security ;i gainst chaos, crime, and ignorance — is, 
 through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, 
 arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all 
 hazards, the doctrine and theory that man, properly train'd 
 in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, 
 and series of laws, unto himself ; surrounding and provid- 
 ing for, not only his own personal control, but all his 
 relations to other individuals, and to the State ; and that, 
 while other theories, as in the past histories of nations, 
 have proved wise enough, and indispensable perhaps for 
 their conditions, this, as matters now stand in our civilised 
 world, is the only scheme worth working from, as warrant- 
 ing results like those of Nature's laws, reliable, when once 
 established, to carry on themselves. 1 
 
 In obedience to the law of conscience, each indivi- 
 dual — a world, a cosmos, ruled over by himself — will 
 revolve in his or her own orbit ; accepting the attrac- 
 tions and influences of the innumerable universes 
 revolving around him, not subordinately, but only as 
 nourishment for his or her own individuality. 
 
 "From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary 
 
 lines ; 
 Going where I list, my own master total and absolute ; 
 Listening to others, considering well what they say; 
 Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating ; 
 Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that 
 
 would hold me." 2 
 
 It is true that at the present time we appear to be a 
 long distance away from the attainment of Whitman's 
 ideal ; indeed, the present-day legislation of most 
 civilised communities, and the general trend of public 
 opinion, are rather in the direction of curtailing than 
 of increasing individual freedom. But we must not 
 overlook the fact that our neighbour's suspicions, that 
 our desires for complete freedom are based upon 
 
 1 Prose, p. 208. 2 Leaves of Grass, p. 122. 
 
RELIGION 51 
 
 corrupt and self-seeking motives, arise from his failure 
 to recognise and understand the great fact of human 
 equality. But such presumptions are merely transient, 
 being part of that evil which Whitman sees "hastening 
 to merge itself, and become lost and dead"; while the 
 law of Liberty is eternal. 
 
 " What we believe in waits latent for ever through all the continents, 
 and all the islands and arehipelagoes of the sea ; 
 
 What we believe in invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calm- 
 ness and light, is positive and composed, knows no discourage- 
 ment; 
 
 Waiting patiently, waiting its time." 1 
 
 4.— RELIGION. 
 
 In Starting from Paumanok Whitman announced : — 
 
 "I, too, following many, and followed by many, inaugurate a 
 religion." 
 
 Whitman's religion is the love of man ; not the 
 love of humanity in the abstract (generally so abstract 
 as to mean nothing but mere talk), but an emotional 
 and personal affection for each individual of the 
 race. 
 
 He must needs embrace each — all — without dis- 
 tinction of caste, creed, colour, or (best of all) 
 character. 
 
 " He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a 
 helpless thing." 
 
 Whitman's lines, To a Common Prostitute, are almost 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 287. i Ibid, p. 2G9. 
 
62 "LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 too well known to justify repetition here, yet they 
 cannot be quoted too often : — 
 
 " Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you ; 
 Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you, and the leaves to rustle 
 for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you." 1 
 
 Yet, from some points of view, it may be main- 
 tained that Whitman not only had no religion what- 
 ever, but that his words frequently savour of blasphemy. 
 His sentiments concerning Deity are indefinite. In 
 the Song of Myself he is apparently Pantheist ; in 
 The Square Deific the Deity is God, Saviour, Santa 
 Spirita, and Satan (Satan being the father of Revolt) ; 
 elsewhere he appears rather inclined towards Poly- 
 theism ; and, again : — 
 
 "I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, 
 beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself." 2 
 
 But, since he enjoins us to " be not curious about 
 God," we must conclude that he regards as mere 
 waste of breath any attempt to define the unknow- 
 able. 
 
 " And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God ; 
 For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God : 
 (No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and 
 
 about Death.) 
 I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in 
 
 the least ; 
 Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. 
 Why should I wish to see God better than this day? 
 I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each 
 
 moment then ; 
 In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in 
 
 the glass ; 
 I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is signed 
 
 by God's name ; 
 And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go 
 Others will punctually come for ever and ever." 3 
 
 i Leaves of Grass, p. 299. " Ibid, p. 186. 3 Ibid, p. 7G. 
 
EELIGION 53 
 
 And, from Passage to India : — 9 
 
 " Thou transcendent, 
 
 Nameless, the fibre and the breath ; 
 
 Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them ; 
 
 Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving ; 
 
 Thou moral, spiritual fountain — affection's source — thou reservoir ; 
 
 Thou pulse — thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, 
 That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, 
 Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space." 1 
 
 Whitman was reared in the Society of Friends, in 
 that branch which broke away from the main body 
 under the leadership of Elias Hicks. 2 His training 
 was, therefore, a rather mystical Unitarianism ; but 
 his conception of Deity never crystallised into any 
 confession of faith. Miss Helen E. Price, who was 
 well acquainted with Whitman from 1856 to 1873, 
 wrote : — 
 
 If I were asked what I considered Walt Whitman's 
 leading characteristic, I should say his religimis senti- 
 ment or feeling. It pervades and dominates his life, and 
 I think no one could be in his presence any length of time 
 without being impressed by it. He is a born exalte. His 
 is not that religion, or show of it, that is comprised in 
 dogmas, churches, creeds, etc. These are of little or no 
 consequence to him ; but it is that habitual state of feeling 
 in which the person regards everything in God's universe 
 with wonder, reverence, perfect acceptance, and love. He 
 has more of this than any one I have ever met. 3 
 
 And we quote the following passage from Democratic 
 Vistas : — 
 
 The ripeness of religion is doubtless to be looked for in 
 this field of individuality, and is a result that no organisa- 
 tion or church can ever achieve. As history is poorly 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 321. 
 
 2 Whitman's Notes Founded on Elias Hicks (Prose, p. 4-57) are 
 worthy of careful study. 
 
 : Walt Whitman, by Dr. E. M. Bucke. 
 
54 '-LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 retained by what the technists call history, and is not given 
 out from their pages, except the learner has in himself 
 the sense of the well-wrapt, never yet written, perhaps 
 impossible to be written, history — so Religion, although 
 casually arrested, and, after a fashion, preserved in the 
 churches and creeds, does not depend at all upon them, but 
 is a part of the identified soul, which can really confront 
 Religion when it extricates itself entirely from the 
 churches, and not before. Personalism fuses this, and 
 favours it. I should say, indeed, that only in the perfect 
 uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the 
 spirituality of religion positively come forth at all. Only 
 here, and on such terms, the meditation, the elevoutecst 
 the soaring flight. Only here, communion with the 
 mysteries, the eternal problems, whence '? whither ? 
 Alone, and identity, and the mood — and the soul emerges, 
 and all statements, churches, sermons, melt away like 
 vapours. Alone, and silent thought and awe, and aspira- 
 tion — and then the interior consciousness, like a hitherto 
 unseen inscription, in magic ink, beams out its wondrous 
 lines to the sense. Bibles maj- convey, and priests 
 expound ; but it is exclusively for the noiseless operation 
 of one's isolated Self, to enter the pure ether of venera- 
 tion, reach the divine levels, and commune with the 
 unutterable. 1 
 
 Mr. "Whitman impressed me, by his conversation on 
 life, immortality, and such topics, as one who, in common 
 with others who had investigated and reflected on the 
 subject, was reluctant to even attempt to formulate a 
 description of Deity, or to describe in detail its or his 
 
 attributes The truth was that he considered life too 
 
 short to quibble over immaterial questions of creed 
 
 He was in faith, if anything, a Unitarian.'-' 
 
 But somewhere Whitman himself characterises 
 Unitarianism as a " soul-less religion." Unitarianism, 
 as we have known it, is cautious, cool-headed, rational ; 
 quite different from the spontaneity which is so con- 
 spicuous a characteristic of "Whitman's personality. 
 
 1 Prose, p. 22G. a Walt Whitman the Man, by Thomas Donaldson. 
 
RELIGION 55 
 
 Peter Doyle told Dr. Bucke : — 
 
 He had pretty vigorous ideas on religion, but he never 
 said anything slighting the church. I don't know if he 
 felt different from what he spoke. He never went to 
 church — didn't like form, ceremonies — didn't seem to 
 
 favour preachers at all I have heard him say that if a 
 
 person was a right kind of person — and I guess he thought 
 all persons right kind of persons — he couldn't be destroyed 
 in the next world or this. 1 
 
 One day, talking about religious experiences, Whit- 
 man said : — 
 
 I never had any particular religious experiences — never 
 felt that I needed to be saved — never felt the need of 
 spiritual regeneration — never had any fear of hell, or 
 distrust of the scheme of the universe. I always felt that 
 it was perfectly right, and for the best. 2 
 
 Mr. Traubel wrote : — 
 
 Whitman did not negative the churches. He included 
 them. He never ceased his refusal of all special claims 
 made for one faith. " I am as much Mohammedan as 
 Buddhist, as much nothing as something. I have a good 
 deal of use for the religions. But if I am to be dragooned 
 into some small desert place which in the churches is 
 called a creed, and left there to die, I must act on my 
 always reserved right of decision. The time will come 
 when even Christians will acknowledge that Ingersoll, 
 reforming the average Christianity of our day, was a direct 
 witness of God. Nevertheless, while I expect to see the 
 whole nature of Christian theory changed, much old 
 trumpery and barbarity dismissed, I do not feel called upon 
 to use an axe myself." 3 
 
 1 Calamus ; Letter* to Peter Doyle. 
 
 2 Walt Whitman, by Dr. R. M. Bucke. 
 
 3 Horace L. Traubel, in the Arena, January, 1890. 
 
56 "LEAVES OF GRASS'' 
 
 5.— PRUDENCE, CHARITY, AND PERSONAL FORCE. 
 
 " I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the Soul : 
 The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are 
 
 with me ; 
 The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate 
 
 into a new tongue." 1 
 
 We have already endeavoured to draw attention to 
 Whitman's conscientious endeavours to cleanse sex of 
 its obscene aspect; this was one of "the pains of 
 hell" which he translated in a "new tongue." The 
 principles of Deniocrac}', also, he translated into a 
 "tongue" quite different from tyranny by show of 
 hands, or (as Carlyle facetiously terras it) " tremendous 
 cheers." Another of these "pains of hell" is Pru- 
 dence. Whitman found Charity degenerated into 
 what is usually termed " Prudence ": the boundless 
 Charity of those whom he felicitously terms " the 
 profound saviours of every land and age," debased, in 
 these latter days, into mere calculation. He, there- 
 fore, endeavoured to "translate" Prudence into "a 
 new tongue." 
 
 He defined Prudence as — 
 
 " All the brave actions of war and peace ; 
 All help given to relatives, strangers, the poor, old, sorrowful, young 
 
 children, widows, the sick, and to shunn'd persons; 
 All self-denial that stood steady and aloof on wrecks, and saw others 
 
 fill the seats of the boats ; 
 All offering of substance or life for the good old cause, or for a 
 
 friend's sake, or for opinion's sake ; 
 All pains of enthusiasts mocked at by their neighbours ; 
 All the limitless sweet love and precious suffering of mothers; 
 All honest men bafiied in strifes, recorded or unrecorded." 2 
 
 1 Leave* of Grast, p. 45. - Ibid, p. 290. 
 
PRUDENCE, CHARITY, AND PERSONAL FORCE 57 
 
 And Prudence — 
 
 "Knows that the young man who composedly perill'd his life and lost 
 it has done exceedingly well for himself without doubt ; 
 That he who has never perill'd his life, but retains it to old age in 
 riches and ease, has probably achiev'd nothing for himself worth 
 mentioning." 1 
 
 Also— 
 
 "Charity and personal force are the only investments worth any- 
 thing. " 2 
 
 Whitman defined Charity and Personal Force in the 
 Preface to the original issue of Leaves of Grass : — 
 
 This is what you shall do : Love the earth, and sun, 
 and the animals ; despise riches ; give alms to every one 
 that asks; stand up for the stupid and crazy; devote your 
 income and labour to others ; hate tyrants ; argue not 
 concerning God ; have patience and indulgence towards the 
 people ; take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, 
 or to any man or number of men ; go freely with powerful 
 uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the 
 
 mothers of families; re-examine all you have been 
 
 told at school, or church, or in any book, dismiss whatever 
 insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great 
 poem ; and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, 
 but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the 
 lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your 
 body. 3 
 
 This is Charity and Personal Force : it is only 
 Charity — " which suffereth long, and is kind" — that 
 can develop the Personal Force of the "fluid and 
 attaching character." 
 
 " The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of 
 man and woman ; 
 (The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day 
 out of the roots themselves than it sprouts fresh and sweet con- 
 tinually out of itself.) 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 291. - Ibid, p. 290. 3 Prote, p. 259. 
 
"LEAVES OF GRASS" 
 
 Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the 
 
 love of young and old ; 
 From it falls distill'd the charm that mocks beauty and attainments ; 
 Toward it heaves the shuddering, longing ache of contact." 1 
 
 " Give alms to everyone that asks," Peter Doyle 
 said. 
 
 Dollars and cents have no weight with Walt, at all. He 
 didn't spend recklessly, but he spent everything — mostly 
 
 on other people He always had a few pennies for 
 
 beggars along the streets. I'd get out of patience some- 
 times, he was so lenient. " Don't you think it wrong ? " 
 I'd ask him. "No," he always said, "it's never wrong, 
 Peter." " Wouldn't they drink it away ? " He shook his 
 head : " No, and if they did, it wouldn't alter the matter. 
 For it is better to give to a dozen who do not need what is 
 given than to give to none at all, and so miss the one that 
 should be fed." 2 
 
 6.— DEATH AND IMMORTALITY. 
 
 " My embryo has never been torpid " : he saw it down 
 in the "huge first Nothing"; through the ages he 
 has watched it developing ; and he knows that 
 development cannot be stopped by the grave. "I tramp 
 a perpetual journey." The problem of Death thus 
 confronts him with neither terrors nor anxieties, only 
 — joyful anticipations of fresh experiences. 
 
 "And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than 
 deaii 
 
 In the Death Carol, in When Lilacs Last in the Door- 
 yard Bhom'd, 4 Whitman addresses Death as " lovely 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 125. ,J Calamus ; Letters to Peter Doyle. 
 
 •"• Leaves of Grass, p. 24. 4 Ibid, p. 235. 
 
DEATH AND IMMORTALITY 59 
 
 and soothing," "strong deliveress," "vast and well- 
 veil'd death. 7 ' In The Sinner in the Prison 1 death is 
 referred to as " the heavenly pardoner." 
 
 In Whitman's view, Death is neither to be fearecl^ 
 nor to be merely accepted philosophically, but to be / 
 welcomed as the gateway to a fuller life — fuller even ' 
 than the material life which he glorifies throughout 
 his writings as one continual experience of joys. 
 
 " O Death (for life has served its turn), 
 Opener and usher to the heavenly mansion, 
 Be thou my God."' J 
 
 On the subject of Death and Immortality Whitman 
 wrote a very fine poem, To Think of Time, 3 which, 
 beginning with a death-bed scene and a description of 
 " the funeral of an old Broadway stage-driver," leads 
 through death and into immortality. 
 
 " To think the thought of death merged in the thought of materials ; 
 
 To think of all these wonders of city and country, and others taking 
 interest in them , and we taking no interest in them ; 
 
 To think how eager we are, building our houses ; 
 
 To think that others shall be just as eager, and we quite indif- 
 ferent." -1 
 
 And— 
 
 " I have dreamed that the purpose and essence of the known life, 
 the transient, 
 Is to form and decide identity for the unknown life, the permanent." 
 
 In his inspirations concerning the persistence of 
 the ego Whitman's position is occasionally rather 
 confusing ; for, although he generally regards body 
 and soul as separable entities, we have at times been 
 puzzled by passages not altogether consistent with 
 this theory ; but, taking Leaves of Grass as a whole, 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 292. 2 Ibid, p. 213. 
 
 3 Ibid, p. 333. * Ibid, p. 333. ■ Ibid, p. 337. 
 
00 "LEAVES OF GRASS"' 
 
 Whitman's expectation of conscious existence after 
 physical death cannot be doubted. 
 
 " I believe in you, my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you ; 
 And you must not be abased to the other.*' 1 
 
 Again — 
 
 " Was somebody asking to see the Soul ? 
 
 See, your own shape and countenance, persons, substances, beasts, 
 
 the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands ; 
 All hold spiritual joys, and afterwards loosen them ; 
 How can the real body ever die, and be buried? 
 Of your real body, and any man's or woman's real body, 
 Item for item it will elude the hands of the corpse-cleaners and pass 
 
 to fitting spheres ; 
 Carrying what has accrued from the moment of birth to the moment 
 
 of death." 2 
 
 The series of poems, Whispers of Heavenly Death, 
 all breathe the certainty of personal immortality; 
 also the poem, Passage to India. In the Song of the 
 Rolling Earth "Whitman wrote : — 
 
 " The soul is also real ; it, too, is positive and direct : 
 No reasoning, no proof, has established it ; 
 Undeniable growth has established it."" 
 
 In Leaves of Grass there are many indications that 
 Whitman was aware of the doctrine of Re-incarnation ; 
 but he does not appear to have deliberately adopted 
 it into his theory of the universe. Nor does he 
 appear to have been led away into the absurdities and 
 extravagancies of amateur spiritualistic "investiga- 
 tion." 
 
 In A Dialogue in Hades Whitman informs Omar 
 Khayyam that his belief in personal immortality 
 "was based chiefly on the theory of evolution"; 4 
 but our own view of the matter is that Whitman's 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 32. 5 Ibid, p. 25. 
 
 3 Ibid, p. 180. * The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1902. 
 
DEATH AND IMMORTALITY Gl 
 
 belief in immortality was intuitive, not scientific ; 
 hence his carelessness as to details. All that we can 
 assert with confidence is that Whitman was strongly 
 convinced of the reality of a conscious life beyond 
 the grave. He told Mr. Traubel : — 
 
 There are arguments against immortality; but there is 
 no vision of denial. Did it never occur to some people how 
 little way argument would carry them? how short the 
 term of life of a thing proved by what is called logic. 1 
 
 In 1881, referring to the death of Thomas Carlyle, 
 Whitman wrote : — 
 
 In ways perhaps eluding all the statements, lore, and 
 speculations of ten thousand years — eluding all possible 
 statements to mortal sense — does he yet exist, a definite, 
 vital being ; a spirit, an individual — perhaps now wafted 
 in space among those stellar systems, which, suggestive 
 and limitless as they are, merely edge more limitless, far 
 more suggestive systems? I have no doubt of it. In 
 silence of a fine night, such questions are answer'd to the 
 soul ; the best answers that can be given. 2 
 
 At a complimentary dinner given to Whitman by 
 his friends on the 31st of May, 1890, in Philadelphia 
 (his seventy-first birthday), the poet said : — 
 
 To me the final and ultimate purpose of everything is 
 completed, as it were, only by the unknown futurity of 
 immortality. 3 
 
 And yet Whitman also had his moments of 
 doubt : — 
 
 " Yet, yet, ye downcast hours, I know ye also ; 
 Weights of lead, how ye clog and cling at my ankles ; 
 Earth to a chamber of mourning turns — I hear the o'erweening, 
 
 mocking voice, 
 Matter is conqueror — matter, triumphant only, continues onward."* 
 
 1 H. L. Traubel, in the Arena, January, 1896. 2 Prose, p. 163. 
 
 3 In Be Walt Whitman, p. 350. 4 Leaves of Grass, p. 341. 
 
G2 "LEAVES OF GRASS"' 
 
 And elsewhere : — 
 
 " Of the terrible doubt of appearances ; 
 Of the uncertainty, after all, that we may be deluded ; 
 That may be reliance and hope are but speculations after all ; 
 That may be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only. 
 
 To me these and the like of these are curiously answer'd by my 
 
 lovers, my dear friends ; 
 When he whom I love travels with me, or sits a long while holding 
 
 me by the hand ; 
 When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and 
 
 reason hold not, surround us and pervade us, 
 Then I am charg'd with untold and untellable wisdom, I am silent, 
 
 I require nothing further ; 
 I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity 
 
 beyond the grave ; 
 But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied ; 
 He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me." 1 
 
 Finally, The Base of all Metaphysics is — 
 
 " The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend to 
 friend ; 
 Of the well-married husband and wife ; of children and parents ; 
 Of city for city, and land for land."' 2 
 
 As with all the "profound saviours of every land 
 and age," Whitman's first and last words to mankind 
 are: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"; 
 this, and this only, is the foundation and the essence 
 of all religions and all philosophies. 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 101. 2 Ibid, p. 102. 
 
III. 
 
 " DRUM TAPS " 
 
 The war of 1861-65, between the Federal Government 
 and the Southern Confederacy, was the most important 
 period of Whitman's life. 
 
 In Specimen Days he narrated the story of the out- 
 burst of patriotic feeling in the North — the confident 
 anticipations of easily suppressing what at first 
 appears to have been mistaken for something of but 
 little more consequence than a riot — the battle of 
 Bull Run ; and the feeling of stupor in the North 
 consequent upon the result of that engagement ; and 
 the reaction following the defiant attitude of the great 
 New York dailies. 
 
 The enthusiasm — for the war — aroused in New 
 York is powerfully drawn in First, Songs for a 
 Prelude! 1 The forcible call to arms, Beat.' Beat! 
 Drums! 2 was probably inspired by recollections of the 
 same circumstances. 
 
 In December, 1862, at the battle of Fredericksburgh, 
 Whitman's brother George, a captain (subsequently 
 lieutenant-colonel) in the 51st New York Volunteers, 
 received a wound in the face, 3 and the poet, having 
 
 i Leaves of Grass, p. 219. s Ibid, p. 222. 
 
 3 Prose, p. 71: "My brother, George W. Whitman — in active service 
 all through, four years, re-enlisting twice — was promoted, step by step 
 (several times immediately after battles), lieutenant, captain, major, 
 and lieut. -colonel — was in the actions at Eoanoke, Newbern, 2d. Bull 
 
 63 
 
04 "DRUM TAPS" 
 
 hurried South to look after his brother, was now 
 introduced to experiences which made a lasting im- 
 pression upon his mind. After being at the front but 
 a very short time, he realised that, for the present, 
 the work of his life lay with the army, in the 
 hospitals and camps. 
 
 Whitman's prose work, Specimen Days, up to the 
 end of 1865, is mainly a record of his experiences 
 and impressions in and about the military camps and 
 hospitals. Some of the writing of this record is 
 simple and commonplace ; at times it is powerful, 
 often pathetic, and occasionally even sublime. 
 
 " To anyone dying, thither I speed and twist the knob of the door ; 
 Turn the bedclothes toward the foot of the bed ; 
 Let the physician and priest go home ! 
 I seize the descending man and raise him with resistless will ; 
 
 despairer, here is my neck ; 
 
 By God, you shall not go down ! hang your whole weight upon 
 me! 
 
 1 dilate you with tremendous breath ; I buoy you up ; 
 Every room of the house I fill with an arm'd force ; 
 Lovers of me, barriers of graves.'' 1 
 
 Whitman first published the above lines in 1855 ; 
 in 1863-4-5 he was living them. The ideal, so 
 strenuously insisted upon in the poems grouped as 
 Calamus, of " intense and loving comradeship, the 
 personal and passionate attachment of man to man," 2 
 now becomes the familiar atmosphere of every-dav 
 life. 
 
 Apart from such revelations of his movements in 
 those years as Whitman has given us in Sjwcimen 
 Days, we have a more intimate account of his life in 
 
 Run, Chantilly, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburgh, Vicks- 
 burgh, Jackson, the bloody conflicts of the Wilderness, and at 
 Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, and afterwards around Petersburgh. " 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 66. 2 Prose, p. 239. 
 
"DBUM TAPS" 05 
 
 The Wound Dresser, 1 a collection of letters written 
 by the poet from the camps and hospitals. Mr. 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, quoting a letter from 
 Specimen Days 2 — written by Whitman to the mother 
 of a young soldier who had died after an amputation 
 — remarks : "If you are of the weeping order of 
 mankind, you will certainly find your eyes fill with 
 tears, of which you have no reason to be ashamed." 3 
 We may use precisely the same words with reference 
 to the letters included in The Wound Dresser. They 
 are simple and natural ; no conscious appeal to the 
 emotions of an audience ; no word-painting, no 
 straining after effect; just the every-day words that 
 " a patient, helpful, reverent man, full of kind 
 speeches " 4 writes to his mother and other relatives, 
 and nearly every page may draw tears. These letters 
 also reveal the peculiarly close affection which the 
 poet bore for his immediate relatives — his brothers 
 and sisters and their children, and, of course, his 
 mother : — 
 
 In my visits to the hospitals I found it was in the simple 
 matter of personal presence, and emanating ordinary 
 cheer and magnetism, that I succeeded, and help'd, more 
 than by medical nursing, or delicacies, or gifts of money, 
 or anything else. During the war I possess'd the perfection 
 of physical health. My habit, when practicable, was to 
 prepare for starting out on one of those daily or nightly 
 tours of from a couple to four or five hours, by fortifying 
 myself with previous rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good 
 meal, and as cheerful an appearance as possible^ 
 
 In 1865, after Whitman had been dismissed from a 
 post he had held in the public service, at Washington, 
 
 1 Edited by Dr. R. M. Bucke. - Prose, p. 264. 
 
 3 Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 4 Ibid. 
 
 5 Prose, p. 32. 
 
66 " DRUM TAPS " 
 
 for being the author of Leaves of Grass, 1 his friend, 
 Mr. William Douglas O'Connor, published an expos- 
 tulatory pamphlet, entitled The Good Gray Poet* from 
 which work we quote the following sentences : — 
 
 Usually his plan is to pass, with haversack strapped 
 across his shoulder, from cot to cot, distributing small 
 gifts ; his theory is that these men, far from home, lonely, 
 sick at heart, need more than anything some practical 
 token that they are not forsaken ; that someone feels a 
 fatherly or brotherly interest in them; hence, he gives 
 them what he can ; to particular cases, entirely penniless, 
 he distributes small sums of money, fifteen cents, twenty 
 cents, thirty cents, fifty cents, not much in each case, for 
 there are many ; but under the circumstances these little 
 sums are and mean a great deal. He also distributes and 
 directs envelopes ; gives a letter, paper, postage stamps, 
 tobacco, apples, figs, sweet biscuit, preserves, blackberries ; 
 gets delicate food for special cases ; sometimes a dish of 
 oysters, or a dainty piece of meat, or some savoury morsel 
 for some poor creature who loathes the hospital fare, but 
 whose appetite may be tempted. In the hot weather he 
 buys boxes of oranges, and distributes them, grateful to lips 
 
 baked with fever he buys whatever luxuries his limited 
 
 resources will allow, and he makes them go as far as he 
 can. Where does he get the means for this expenditure ? 
 For Walt Whitman is poor ; he is poor, and has a right to 
 be proud of his poverty ; for it is the sacred, the ancient, 
 the immemorial poverty of goodness and genius. He gets 
 the means by writing for newspapers ; he expends all he 
 gets upon his boys, his darlings, the sick and maimed 
 soldiers. He adds to his own earnings the contributions 
 
 of noble souls, often strangers, who have heard that 
 
 such a man walks the hospitals, and who volunteer to send 
 him this assistance ; when at last he gets a place under 
 
 Government he has a salary which he spends in the 
 
 same way ; sometimes his wrung heart gets the better of 
 
 1 See Chapter VI. 
 
 - Reprinted in the Appendix to Part I. of Walt Whitman, by Dr. 
 R. M. Bucke. 
 
"DRUM TAPS" 67 
 
 his pi'udence, and he spends till he himself is in difficulties. 
 He gives all his money, he gives all his time, he gives all 
 his love. 1 
 
 And elsewhere : — 
 
 Now realise a man without worldly inducement, without 
 
 reward, from love and compassion only foregoing 
 
 pleasure and rest for vigils, as in chambers of torture, 
 among the despairing, the mangled, the dying, the forms 
 upon which shell and rifle and sabre have wrought every 
 bizarre atrocity of mutilation ; immuring himself in the 
 air of their sighs, their moans, the mutter and scream of 
 their delirium ; breathing the stench of their putrid 
 wounds; taking up his part and lot with them, living a 
 life of privation and denial, and hoarding his scanty means 
 for the relief and mitigation of their anguish. That man 
 is Walt Whitman. 2 
 
 From Mr. Donaldson's book we make the following 
 extract, only regretting that we have not space to 
 quote the entire chapter : — 
 
 From cot to cot they called him, often in tremulous 
 tones or whispers ; they embraced him ; they touched his 
 hand ; they gazed at him. To one he gave a few words of 
 cheer ; for another he wrote a letter home ; to others he 
 gave an orange, a few comfits, a cigar, pipe, or tobacco, a 
 sheet of paper, or a postage stamp ; all of which, and 
 many other things, were in his capacious haversack. From 
 another he would receive a dying message for mother, 
 wife, or sweetheart ; for another he would promise to go an 
 errand; to another, some special friend, he would give a 
 manly, farewell kiss. He seemed to leave a benediction at 
 every cot as he passed along. The lights had gleamed for 
 hours in that hospital that night before he left it ; and as 
 he took his way toward the door you could hear the voice 
 of many a stricken hero calling " Walt ! Walt ! Walt ! 
 come a^ain ! come aq-ain ! " 3 
 
 1 The Good Gray Poet, by W. D. O'Connor. 
 
 2 Ibid. 3 Walt Whitman, the Man. 
 
68 "DRUM TAPS" 
 
 The following quotation from Specimen Days sums 
 up Whitman's experiences of these years : — 
 
 During those three years in hospital, camp, or field, I 
 made over six hundred visits or tours ; and went, as I 
 estimate, counting all, among from eighty thousand to a 
 hundred thousand of the wounded and sick, as sustainer of 
 spirit and body in some degree, in time of need. These 
 visits varied from an hour or two to all day or night; for 
 with dear or critical cases I generally watch'd all night. 
 Sometimes I took up my quarters in the hospital, and 
 slept or watch'd there several nights in succession. Those 
 three years I consider the greatest privilege and satisfac- 
 tion (with all their feverish excitements and lamentable 
 sights), and, of course the most profound lesson of my life. 
 I can say that in my ministerings I comprehended all, 
 whoever came in my way, Northern or Southern, and 
 slighted none. It arous'd, and brought out, and decided 
 undream'd of depths of emotion. 1 
 
 In his old age Whitman rarely spoke of these expe- 
 riences, but he thus expressed himself to Mr. Sidney 
 Morse : — 
 
 They were the precious hours of my life. My mother's 
 love and the love of those dear fellows, secesh or union. 
 It was awful, or would have been, had it not been grand. 
 They took it all in the most matter-of-fact way. No 
 complaining. The fate of war. One rebel boy quoted 
 Emerson (he had been to Harvard or Yale) : 
 " Whoever fights, whoever falls, 
 Justice conquers evermore." 
 
 It seemed to me all the while not that I was away some- 
 where, out nursing strangers, but right at home with my 
 own flesh and blood. So it was. No ties could be dearer 
 than bound me to each and all of them. My heart bled 
 hour by hour as for its own. 2 
 
 Whitman's recollections of, and reflections upon, 
 the war, comprising about a third part of the prose 
 
 1 Prose, p. 71. - In Re Walt Whitman. 
 
" DRUM TAPS " 09 
 
 work, Specimen Days, should be most valuable 
 material for an historian of that great struggle ; 
 apart altogether from the light which they throw 
 upon Whitman's life and character. 
 
 It has been made a ground for adverse criticism of 
 Whitman that, with his healthy, powerful physique, 
 and his decided opinions upon the subject of slavery, 
 he was not moved, at the outbreak of the war, to serve 
 " the North " as a soldier, leaving his self-imposed 
 task of Wound Dresser to be undertaken by men of 
 less robust constitution. We have gathered from 
 Origins of Attempted Secession 1 and other sources that 
 Whitman was very doubtful whether war was, or was 
 not, a justifiable or the only way to settle the Slavery 
 question in America ; but altogether apart from this, 
 a man's conscience may at times ask of him, "Is it 
 better to save life or to kill ? " and Whitman's answer 
 to this question appears to us to have been the right 
 one. Had he gone into the war as a combatant, it is 
 possible that a few more " rebs " might have been 
 maimed or slaughtered ; but he took the better part, 
 and devoted (and, as it ultimately proved, sacrificed) 
 his life to the nation — which, it must not be forgotten, 
 included both parties to the war — North and South. 
 
 Besides the work, Specimen Days — which, although 
 we have frequently been told that W T hitman could not 
 write prose, we have liked the better as our familiarity 
 with it has progressed — Whitman's experiences of the 
 war and various matters bearing upon its history are 
 also dwelt upon in the following prose writings : — 
 
 Origins of Attempted Secession. 2 
 
 Some War Memoranda? 
 
 Last of the War Cases. 1 
 
 1 Prose, p. 251. - Ibid, p. 251. s Ibid, p. 418. 4 Ibid, p. 448. 
 
70 "DRUM TAPS" 
 
 His experiences of the war inspired Whitman to 
 compose a fresh series of poems, entitled Drum Taps, 
 which was published in 18G5. Of these pieces some 
 are descriptive, others martial, while many of them 
 are dirges. Here we find the arrogant note of the 
 original Leaves of Grass disappearing, and giving 
 place to a gentler tone, which ultimately reached 
 perfection in the solemn and magnificent poem on the 
 death of Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard 
 Bloom' d. 1 
 
 1 Leaves of Chrass, p. 255. 
 
IV. 
 
 WHITMAN AND LINCOLN 
 
 One of the results of the history of 1860-65 was to 
 make Whitman a most enthusiastic admirer of 
 Abraham Lincoln, whom he considered "the grandest 
 figure yet, on all the crowded canvass of the Nine- 
 teenth Century." 1 
 
 For several years, on the anniversary of Lincoln's 
 assassination, Whitman delivered a lecture — The 
 Assassination of Abraham Lincoln ; the lecture, which 
 eulogises the President, and describes the circum- 
 stances under which the murder was committed, is 
 printed in the volume of Whitman's collected prose 
 writings. 2 
 
 The celebration of Lincoln's death (said he) is no narrow 
 or sectional reminiscence. It belongs to these States in 
 their entirety — not the North only, but the South — perhaps 
 belongs more tenderly and devoutly to the South, of all ; 
 for there really this man's birth-stock ; there and then his 
 antecedent stamp. Why should I not say that thence his 
 manliest traits, his universality, his canny, easy ways and 
 words upon the surface — his inflexible determination at 
 heart ? Have you ever realised it, my friends, that Lincoln, 
 though grafted on the West, was essentially, in personnel 
 and character, a Southern contribution ? 3 
 
 Mr. Donaldson wrote : — 
 
 At the dinner given to Mr. Whitman by his personal 
 friends in 1JS90, May 81, in honour of his seventieth 
 
 1 Prose, p. 438. a Prose, p. 301. 
 
 3 Reminiscences of Walt Whitman, by William Sloane Kennedy. 
 
 71 
 
72 WHITMAN AND LINCOLN 
 
 birthday, Julian Hawthorn said that he liked Whitman 
 
 best for the fact of his friendship and personal love of 
 Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Hawthorne had been misinformed. 
 Air. Whitman never talked to Mr. Lincoln in his life, or 
 Mr. Lincoln to him. Mr. Lincoln, one day in 1864, while 
 looking out of a window of the White House, and being 
 told that a passer-by was Walt Whitman, said, " Well, he 
 looks like a man." 1 
 
 Again : — 
 
 Mr. Whitman used to see him — Lincoln — at a distance, 
 watch for him, go to his receptions, and stand off and 
 admire him. W 7 hen Mr. Lincoln made a public address, 
 Mr. Whitman was, when possible, in the audience and close 
 up to the speaker. Yet, when he took Mr. Lincoln by the 
 hand, he gave it a grasp and spoke no words beyond 
 " Howdy? " and he never conversed with Mr. Lincoln. 2 
 
 Whitman made several allusions to President 
 Lincoln in Specimen Days : — 
 
 I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, 
 with the deep cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a 
 deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so 
 
 that Ave exchange bows; and very cordial ones He 
 
 bowed and smiled ; but far beneath his smile I noticed 
 well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists 
 or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and 
 indirect, expression of this man's face. There is some- 
 thing else there. One of the great portrait painters of two 
 or three centuries ago is needed. 3 
 
 Of all the days of the war there are two especially I can 
 never forget. Those were the day following the news, in 
 New York and Brooklyn, of that first Lull Eun defeat ; 
 and the day of Abraham Lincoln's death. I was home in 
 Brooklyn on both occasions. The day of the murder we 
 heard the news very early in the morning. Mother 
 prepared breakfast — and other meals afterward — as usual ; 
 but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We 
 each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was 
 
 1 Walt Whitman the Man. 2 jj^, s Prose, pp. 37, 38. 
 
WHITMAN AND LINCOLN 73 
 
 said. We got every newspaper, morning and evening, and 
 the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them 
 silently to each other. 1 
 
 Of the series of poems called Memories of President 
 Lincoln — When Lilacs Ljast in the Door-yard Bloom' d, 2 
 generally admitted to be the finest of Whitman's 
 poems, was first published in 1866. O Captain .' 
 My Captain.' 3 also published in 1866, is one of 
 Whitman's few poems condescending to conventional 
 style. Hush'd be the Camps To-day* was first 
 published with Drum Taps in 1865 ; and the verse, 
 This Dust was Once the Man, was added in 1870. 
 
 Whitman's prose writings which have special 
 reference to Lincoln are : — 
 
 Death of Abraham Lincoln (p. 301). 
 
 A Lincoln Reminiscence (p. 381). 
 
 Abraham Lincoln (p. 436). 
 
 Walt Whitman's Last Public (p. 508). 
 
 1 Prose, p. 21. 2 Leaven of Grass, p. 255. 
 
 3 Ibid, p. 262. * Ibid, p. 263. 
 
V. 
 
 WHITMAN'S RECEPTION 
 
 Consequent upon his peculiar, unconventional style 
 of versification, as -well as his straightforward utter- 
 ances upon the sex question, Whitman's little volume 
 met with no favour from the general reader ; and the 
 welcome extended to the new writer by men of letters 
 was, to speak mildly, frigid. 
 
 It is true that Emerson tendered him cordial 
 greetings " at the beginning of a great career." 
 Thoreau and Alcott appear to have been introduced 
 to Leaves of Grass by Emerson ; and they also 
 expressed admiration for the work. But these appear 
 to have been Whitman's only admirers of any 
 eminence in his own country. In 1856 Thoreau 
 wrote : — 
 
 On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and 
 
 American, after whatever deductions We ought to 
 
 rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests some- 
 thing a little more than human Since I have seen 
 
 him, I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egotism 
 in his book. He may turn out the least of a braggart of 
 all, having a better right to be confident. He is a great 
 fellow. 1 
 
 I spoke of Whitman and his poetry. Emerson said that 
 when Whitman came to Boston in the Spring of 18G0, to 
 print there an edition of Leaves of Crrass, he asked Long- 
 fellow, Holmes, and Lowell whether he should invite 
 Whitman to the Saturday Club, as he would gladly have 
 
 1 Walt Whitman, by Dr. R. M. Bucke. 
 74 
 
WHITMAN'S RECEPTION 75 
 
 done. But they declared no wish to meet him, so he 
 was not asked. I remembered, but did not recall the fact 
 to his mind, that Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau all wished 
 to invite Whitman to Concord ; but neither Mrs, Allcott, 
 Mrs. Emerson, nor Sophia Thoreau was willing to meet 
 him; so the invitation was not given. In 1881 became 
 to visit me in Concord ; and Emerson, Alcott, and 
 Louisa Alcott all met him at my house; the next day 
 Mrs. Emerson invited him to dinner ; and we all dined 
 together there. 1 
 
 I remember walking with Mr. Lowell once in Cambridge, 
 when he pointed out a doorway sign, Groceries, with the 
 letters set zigzag, to produce a bizarre effect. " That," said 
 said he, " is Walt Whitman — with very common goods 
 inside." 2 
 
 A writer in the Philadelphia Conservator (October, 
 1903) stated that "Whitman had no bitterer or more 
 unfair enemy than Lowell." 
 
 Longfellow visited Whitman at Camden in 1878, 
 and Whitman returned the courtesy at Boston in 
 1881 ; and in 1885 Holmes was a subscriber to 
 Whitman's horse and buggy ; but we have had no 
 means of ascertaining the sentiments expressed late 
 in life (if any) by either Holmes or Longfellow with 
 respect to Leaves of Grass. 3 
 
 Whitman told Mr. Donaldson that Whittier was 
 said — after reading Leaves of Grass — to have thrown 
 the book into the fire. 4 In 1885, when Whitman's 
 friends presented him with a horse and buggy, 
 Whittier was one of the subscribers, though pointedly 
 avowing his disapproval of much that Whitman had 
 written. 
 
 1 F. B. Sanborn, in the Arena, December, 1895. 
 
 - J. T. Trowbridge, in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902. 
 
 3 In his book, Over the Tea-cups, Holmes refers to Whitman in a 
 playful manner, but pronounces no serious opinion upon Leaves of 
 Grass. 
 
 4 Walt Whitman the Man. 
 
76 WHITMAN'S RECEPTION 
 
 On the eastern shore of the Atlantic Whitman 
 found a life-long friend in Mr. William Michael 
 Kossetti. 
 
 Certain copies of Leaves of Grass fell — in 1856 — into 
 the hands of Thomas Dixon, a well-known native of 
 Sunderland, to whom Buskin wrote the famous letters 
 ultimately published as Time and Tide by Weare ami Tyne. 
 
 Thomas Dixon sent three of the copies to William Bell 
 Scott — the well-known poet and artist — who, at once 
 perceiving the unique quality of the book, sent forthwith 
 one copy, which has become in its way historical, to 
 William Michael Bossetti. 1 
 
 Mr. Scott recommended Mr. Rossetti to — 
 
 read as one does the books that express human life, like 
 the Bible — books that have aggregated rather than been 
 written — and one finds these Leaves of Grass grow up in a 
 wonderful manner. The book is very like an opening into 
 quite a new poetic condition.' 2 
 
 In 1868 Mr. Rossetti edited the first British 
 selection from Leaves of Grass. In his " Prefatory 
 Notice " he wrote : — 
 
 I believe that Whitman is one of the huge, as yet mainly 
 unrecognised, forces of our time ; privileged to evoke, in a 
 country hitherto still asking for its poet, a fresh, athletic, 
 and American poetry ; and predestined to be traced up to 
 by generation after generation of believing and ardent — let 
 
 us hope not servile — disciples His voice will one day 
 
 be potential or magisterial wherever the English language 
 is spoken ; that is to say, in the four corners of the earth ; 
 and in his own American atmosphere the uttermost avatars 
 of democracy will confess him not more their announcer 
 than their inspirer. 3 
 
 In 1869 a copy of Mr. Rossetti's selection fell into 
 
 1 Introduction to Whitman volume of the Canterbury Poets, by 
 Ernest Rhys. 
 
 2 Rmkin ; Rossetti; Pre-Raphaelite Papers. 
 
 3 Poems by ll'alt Whitman : Introduction by W. M. Rossetti. 
 
WHITMAN'S RECEPTION 77 
 
 the hands of Mrs. Gilchrist, the writer — in collabora- 
 tion with her husband, Alexander Gilchrist — of a life 
 of William Blake. 
 
 Mrs. Gilchrist, heaving heard nothing but ill words of the 
 poems, opened the book with feelings partly of indifference, 
 partly of antagonism. But as she read she became con- 
 scious of a new and most powerful influence affecting her. 
 "I can read no other book," she wrote Eossetti a fortnight 
 later. " It holds me entirely spell-bound, and I go through 
 it again and again with deepening delight and wonder." 1 
 
 These friendly readers — Mrs. Gilchrist and Mr. 
 Rossetti — made a nucleus of a Whitman cult in 
 England, which has gradually increased in extent 
 until the poet's position and influence in English 
 literature has become assured. 
 
 The literature of which Whitman's writings consti- 
 tute the subject-matter is very extensive. He has 
 been abused vigorously, and even cruelly, in many 
 of the periodicals on either side of the Atlantic ; and 
 the most noticeable feature of adverse criticisms of 
 Whitman's writings is that they are generally true : 
 we candidly admit the charges ; we cannot deny 
 them. We confess, without hesitation, to deriving 
 the greatest enjoyment, the keenest possible satisfac- 
 tion, from witnessing a bombardment of Leaves 
 of Grass with the heavy artillery of adverse conven- 
 tional literary criticism. But we have invariably 
 found that this — however clever or unjust it may be 
 —cannot in any wise injure Whitman's position : the 
 cessation of the cannonade, and the clearing away 
 of the smoke, only reveal Walt and his Leaves of 
 Grass standing, not only uninjured, but actually 
 
 1 Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. 
 
78 WHITMAN'S RECEPTION 
 
 strengthened. Whitman himself feared more harm 
 from his friends than from his enemies. 
 
 " I call to the world to distrust the accounts of my friends, but listen 
 to my enemies, as I myself do." 1 
 
 But although, from the first, the book, Leaves oj 
 Grass, was unfashionable, unliterary, and — financially 
 — unsuccessful, Whitman was never at a loss for 
 friends to stand up for him ; the Study of Whitman, 
 b}' the American nature-lover, Mr. John Burroughs, 
 is almost too extravagant in its appreciation of the 
 poet; and both in America and Europe Whitman's 
 work has been eulogised, justified, and defended by a 
 large number of eminent — as well as obscure — writers. 
 So that, while at first he was confronted with the 
 hostility of almost the entire literary world, since his 
 death — and, indeed, for several years before that 
 event — he has been generally regarded as a real, vital, 
 and permanent force in literature. Indeed, it is 
 scarcely possible to read any American verse of the 
 last few years in which the influence of Leaves of 
 Grass is not perceptible; at times we have even 
 found Whitman's own phrases and lines used ; his 
 peculiar style of versification has been made use of by 
 several recent American poets ; 2 and the well-known 
 English writer, Mr. Edward Carpenter, has written 
 the whole of the collection of poems which he named 
 Towards Democracy in this same free, untrammelled 
 style. So it would appear that already Whitman's 
 lines, Poets to Come, 3 are being justified. 
 
 Much of Whitman's life had been stormy. He lived to 
 see the storm dying, if not dead. He never doubted of 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 190. 
 
 2 /•:.;/., Ernest Crosby, Horace L. Traubel, C. F. Johnson. 
 
 3 Leaves of Grass, p. 18. 
 
WHITMAN'S RECEPTION 79 
 
 final acceptance. But he was scarcely prepared to have 
 positive evidences of recognition appear in his lifetime. 
 " The world moves at a faster pace than of old," he 
 reflected ; " its instruments of movement are prompt and 
 numerous; the harvest is hastened." I remember that he 
 avowed himself in this way : "I am here at last. From 
 1855 until the last few years I wondered if I had yet 
 arrived. I am here to stay." 1 
 
 Quotations from Leaves of Grass may be found in 
 many books ; and, although the majority of the 
 writers of Whitman's own generation failed to 
 understand him, yet a younger generation recognised 
 his greatness, to which numerous tributes have been 
 forthcoming from eminent writers, not only in 
 England and America, but in other countries also. 
 
 Extracts from Leaves of Grass are usually published 
 in miscellaneous selections of poetry, both English 
 and American. Not so very many years ago 
 Whitman was either unknown or treated as a 
 negligeable quantity in England ; and it was cus- 
 tomary to publish selections from the American 
 poets with Whitman studiously ignored ; yet now — 
 to such an extent has opinion changed — any selection 
 of American poetry without a substantial selection 
 from Leaves of Grass would be almost analogous to 
 " playing Hamlet with Hamlet omitted." 
 
 1 H. L. Traubel, in the Arena, January, 1S96. 
 
VI. 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 A second issue of Leaves of Grass was published in 
 1856, and a third in 18C0. 
 
 In 1863, when Whitman was working in the 
 military hospitals in Washington, his friend, Mr. 
 Trowbridge, asked the Hon. Salmon P. Chase, 
 Secretary of the Treasury, to give him (Whitman) 
 employment in his department ; but Mr. Chase 
 refused. 
 
 He had understood that Whitman was a rowdy — one of 
 the roughs — according to his description of himself. I 
 said "he is as quiet a gentleman in his manners and con- 
 versation as any guest who enters your door." He replied: 
 " I am bound to believe what you say ; but his writings 
 have given him a bad repute ; and I should not know what 
 sort of a place to give to such a man " — with more to the 
 same effect. 1 
 
 Subsequent^ Whitman procured an appointment 
 in the Department of the Interior ; but at the end of 
 June, 1865, he was dismissed from his position by 
 the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, 
 for being the author of Leaves of Grass, which Mr. 
 Harlan characterised as "full of indecent passages." 2 
 This tyrannical act of the minister drew from 
 Whitman's friend and admirer, William Douglas 
 O'Connor, the pamphlet entitled The Good Gray Poet, 
 
 1 J. T. Trowbridge, in the Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902. 
 - The Good Gran Poet, p. 101. 
 80 
 
CONCLUSION 81 
 
 in which the theory of Leaves of Grass is powerfully 
 upheld and Mr. Harlan's conduct indignantly 
 denounced. 
 
 I claim that to expel an author from a public office, and 
 subject him to public contumely, solely because he has 
 published a book which no one can declare immoral with- 
 out declaring all the grand books immoral, is to affix a 
 penalty to thought, and to obstruct the freedom of letters. 
 I declare this act the audacious captain of a series of acts, 
 and a style of opinions whose tendency and effect through- 
 out Christendom is to dwarf and degrade literature, and 
 to make great books impossible except under pains of 
 martyrdom. As such I arraign it before every liberal and 
 thoughtful mind. I denounce it as a sinister precedent ; 
 as a ban upon the free action of genius ; as a logical insult 
 to all-commanding literature ; and as in every way a most 
 serious wrong. 1 
 
 Probably but for this incident Mr. Harlan's name 
 would have sunk into well-merited oblivion ; but he 
 earned an unenviable notoriety by perpetrating an 
 ill-considered act of petty tyranny. 
 
 Immediately after his dismissal Whitman was 
 given an appointment in the office of the Attorney 
 General, the Hon. James Speed. In this position he 
 continued until 1873 ; issuing, at intervals, further 
 editions of his writings. His health appears to have 
 been indifferent most of the time. In 1864 he had 
 been laid up with " hospital malaria," the result " of 
 poison absorbed by his system assisting at the 
 amputation of the gangrened limb of a Virginia 
 Union soldier to whom he was much attached." 2 
 From this illness he never recovered. 
 
 He wrote to his mother, June 10th, 1861: " The 
 doctor tells me I have continued too long in the 
 
 1 The Good Gray Poet, p. 129. In Be Walt Whitman. 
 
 G 
 
82 CONCLUSION 
 
 hospitals, especially in a very bad place, Armoury 
 Building, where the worst wounds were, and have 
 absorbed too much of the virus into my system." 1 
 A few days later he wrote: "It is probable that the 
 hospital poison has affected my system ; and I find it 
 worse than I calculated." 2 
 
 In 1873 he was attacked by paralysis in the left 
 side ; and, being unfit for work, he left Washington, 
 and retired to Camden, New Jersey, where, after the 
 sudden death of his mother (March, 1873), his illness 
 became worse. 
 
 For several years Whitman was completely dis- 
 abled, and in 1873, 1874, and 1875 he did not issue 
 any further editions of his writings. But in 1876 
 his health was sufficiently restored to enable him to 
 superintend the publication of his Centennial issue of 
 Leaves of Grass ; also a volume entitled Tico Rivulets, 
 consisting of alternate pieces of prose and verse. 
 
 I found Whitman much crippled and quieter in manner 
 than when we met before. Eleven years had wrought their 
 changes. He was, however, in a less perturbed frame of 
 mind. In 1876 he had not the returns from his volumes 
 sent to England, and was undoubtedly poor enough in 
 pocket, and, as he said, " disposed occasionally to feel 
 blue." He was at that time quartered with his brother. 
 He came in, as I remember, with something of a dis- 
 heartened air, but presently was speaking in cheeriest 
 tones. " Whatever happens, I quite believe in the old 
 world. Take it for all and all, for better or for worse, in 
 sickness or in health, I cleave to it." He now — 1887 — 
 recalled that day of our first meeting, and said : " I believe 
 that must have been about the darkest period of my life ; 
 but before the summer had gone there came that burst of 
 sunlight over the sea. The money, and the friendliness of 
 it all, turned the tide and made me about the happiest 
 
 1 The Wound Dresser, p. 196. 2 Ibid, p. 197. 
 
CONCLUSION 83 
 
 critter that ever lived. I felt too good almost. I wondered 
 if I could stand it. It was worth living for, anyway, if I 
 then died outright. For evermore I shall love old England. 
 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 discounting of 
 friends at home, I must say that English business stands 
 apart in my thought from all else. 1 
 
 In 1876 Whitman had the pleasure of becoming 
 personally acquainted with Mrs. Anne Gilchrist and 
 her children, who visited Philadelphia for the 
 purpose of seeing the Centennial Exhibition. The 
 Gilchrists remained in America for three years, 
 during which time Whitman saw them frequently. 
 Whitman remembered Mrs. Gilchrist to his dying 
 day, and never missed an opportunity of expressing 
 his admiration of her fine character and his gratitude 
 for her disinterested friendship to himself. 
 
 Some of Mrs. Gilchrist's most " beautiful, characteristic, 
 and copious " letters were, according to the Atlunuium, 
 written to her great American friend, Walt Whitman. 
 These the poet kept 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 exclusively to himself. 2 
 
 At this time (1876), also, he became acquainted 
 personally with Mr. Edward Carpenter, the author of 
 Towards Democracy, who "came to America mainly 
 for the purpose of seeing Mr. W T hitman." 3 
 
 During these years of sickness and of partial 
 recovery Whitman spent a great deal of his time 
 
 1 Sidney Morse, In Re Walt Whitman. 
 -Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman. 
 
 8 Anne Gilchrist: Her Life and Writings. 
 
84 CONCLUSION 
 
 in the open air. His favourite and chief place of 
 resort was a — 
 
 charmingly recluse and rural spot along Timher Creek, 
 twelve or thirteen miles from where it enters the Delaware 
 River. Domicil'd at the house of my friends, the Staffords, 
 near by, I lived half the time along this creek and its 
 adjacent fields and lanes. And it is to my life here that I 
 perhaps owe partial recovery (a sort of second wind, or 
 semi-renewal of the lease of life) from the prostration of 
 1874-75. 1 
 
 In June, 1S78, Whitman was present — at New York 
 City — at the funeral of "William Cullen Bryant. 
 Referring to this incident, he wrote : — 
 
 I had known Mr. Bryant over thirty years ago, and he 
 had been markedly kind to me. Off and on, along that 
 time for years as they pass'd, we met and chatted together. 
 I thought him very sociable in his way, and a man to 
 become attach'd to. We were both walkers, and when I 
 work'd in Brooklyn he several times came over, middle of 
 afternoons, and we took rambles, miles long, till dark, out 
 towards Bedford or Flatbush, in company. On these 
 occasions he gave me clear accounts of scenes in Europe — 
 the cities, architecture, art, especially Italy — where he had 
 travel'd a good deal. 2 
 
 Mr. Bryant does not appear to have expressed any 
 opinion (that is, any to which publicity has been 
 given) respecting Whitman's writings. 
 
 Afterwards Whitman visited his friend, Mr. John 
 Burroughs, " on the W r est bank of the Hudson, 
 eighty miles north of New York"; 3 and in April- 
 May, 1879, he spent nearly two months visiting 
 friends in the neighbourhood of New York, including 
 another visit to Mr. Burroughs. In September, 1879, 
 he travelled as far west as Denver, in Colorado ; 
 
 » Prose, p. 75. - Ibid, p. 107. s Ibid, p. 103. 
 
CONCLUSION 85 
 
 on his way home he was laid up for a time in 
 St. Louis ; but he eventually returned to Camden 
 with his health greatly benefited by the trip. His 
 health was now fairly set up ; and in the following 
 year he was able to pay a prolonged visit to his friend, 
 Dr. R. M. Bucke, at London, Ontario, and to make 
 quite extensive journeys in Southern and Eastern 
 Canada. 1 
 
 In 1881 Messrs. J. R. Osgood & Co., of Boston, 
 published the seventh issue of Leaves of Grass ; but, 
 being threatened with prosecution by the Government 
 of Massachusetts, they abandoned the publication. 
 In the following year, however, Whitman arranged 
 with Rees, Welsh, & Co. (afterwards David McKay), 
 of Philadelphia, to publish his works ; and the eighth 
 issue appeared in 1882 ; also the prose volume, 
 Specimen Days and Collect. 
 
 In 1881 Whitman visited Boston and delivered his 
 lecture on Abraham Lincoln ; he remained in Boston 
 about three weeks ; and " it was well I got away in 
 fair order ; for if I had stayed another week I should 
 have been killed with kindness and with eating and 
 drinking." 2 In July of the same year he visited New 
 York and Long Island. In the following October 
 he visited his old friend, Mr. F. B. Sanborn, at 
 Concord (Massachusetts). 
 
 Whitman's rambles were now at an end ; he spent 
 the remaining years of his life at Camden in a house 
 in Mickle Street, which he purchased in 1884. In 
 August, 1885, Whitman's "infirmities increasing, 
 and his out-door locomotion being prevented thereby," 
 
 1 Mr. William Sloane Kennedy proposes to publish Whitman's 
 Diary in Canada. 
 
 2 Prcse, p. 175. 
 
86 CONCLUSION 
 
 a horse and buggy were subscribed for and presented 
 to the poet by thirty-two American friends. " The 
 horse and buggy were sold in 1888 by Mr. "Whitman 
 after he had become too infirm to move about 
 unaided. They had been a source of joy and comfort 
 to him, and aided him to pass three years of an 
 invalid's life in comparative ease. Scores of times 
 he expressed his gratitude for the gift, as it gave him 
 touches of life, and air, and sceneiy, otherwise 
 impossible." 1 
 
 In 1887 a Bill was introduced into Congress to 
 provide Whitman with a pension. In the report on 
 the Bill man} 7 references were made to "Whitman's 
 services in the hospitals. The passing of the Bill 
 "was chiefly prevented b/y Mr. Whitman. His 
 pecuniary condition had changed — and for the 
 better. He was not a dependent, and did not want 
 to be so considered. Therefore the Bill, although 
 favourably reported to the House of Representatives, 
 was not pressed." 2 
 
 Although, after 1883, Whitman's physical health 
 became greatly impaired, and in 1888 he was 
 attacked by a severe illness to which he nearly 
 succumbed, yet he still continued to write a few 
 lines now and then. In 1888 he published a series 
 of poems entitled Sands at Seventy ; in 1891, Good- 
 Bye, My Fancy ; and after his death his literary 
 executors published a collection of thirteen short 
 pieces which Whitman himself had named Old-Aye 
 Echoes. All these additions were subsequently bound 
 up with his earlier works and published as Leaves of 
 Grass. 
 
 1 Walt Whitman the Man, chapter ix. 2 Ibid. 
 
CONCLUSION 87 
 
 On his seventieth birthday (May 31st, 1889) 
 Whitman was present at a banquet given in his 
 honour by his Camden friends. The speakers 
 included R. W. Gilder, Julian Hawthorne, and 
 Hamlin Garland ; an account of the function was 
 afterwards published by Mr. Horace Traubel, as 
 Camden's Compliment to JJ'alt Whitman. Mr. Traubel 
 also published a large number of congratulatory 
 letters and telegrams from Whitman's friends and 
 admirers, including Lord Tennyson, Henry Irving, 
 W. M. Rossetti, William Morris, Professor Dowden, 
 Edward Carpenter, Colonel John Hay, John Bur- 
 roughs, R. G. Ingersoll, E. C. Stedman, W. D. 
 Howells, J. G. Whittier, Mark Twain, Will Carleton, 
 J. A. Symonds, and T. B. Aldrich. 
 
 On his seventy-second birthday (May 31st, 1891) 
 thirty-three of his friends entertained the poet at a 
 dinner in his own home at Camden ; messages of 
 congratulation were read from Lord Tennyson, the 
 Hon. Roden Noel, Professor Dowden, John Bur- 
 roughs, Moncure D. Conway, R. H. Dana, Ernest 
 Rhys, Hamlin Garland, and others. Notes of the 
 proceedings were taken, and afterwards published by 
 Mr. Traubel. 1 
 
 During the first years of his illness Whitman was 
 in very poor circumstances ; but latterly, owing to 
 the increased demand for his books and the kindness 
 of his many friends (who were determined that while 
 the poet lived he should want for nothing), he 
 lived — not in luxury perhaps — but certainly very 
 comfortably. 
 
 His friends were legion, and varied from the very 
 
 1 In Be Walt Whitman. 
 
88 CONCLUSION 
 
 poor to the wealthy, and from the obscure to the 
 famous. Among the latter were some of the most 
 eminent men of letters of the time. 
 
 After a long and painful illness, endured with 
 characteristic fortitude, during which he was tended 
 by the most devoted of nurses and friends, Walt 
 Whitman died on March 26th, 1892. 
 
 " At the last, tenderly, 
 From the walls of the powerfully fortress'd 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, soul." 1 
 
 1 Leaves of Grass, p. 346. 
 
APPENDIX No. I. 
 
 Names Given to Certain of Whitman's Poems by Mr. William 
 
 Michael Rossettt. 
 
 Rossetti. 
 
 Whitman. 
 
 After the War. 
 
 To the Leaven'd Soil they 
 
 
 Trod. 
 
 American Feuillage. 
 
 Our Old Feuillage. 
 
 Assimilations. 
 
 There was a Child Went 
 
 
 Forth. 
 
 Appearances. 
 
 Of the Terrible Doubt of 
 
 
 Appearances. 
 
 Auxiliaries. 
 
 What Place is Besieged ? 
 
 Burial. 
 
 To Think of Time. 
 
 Centuries Hence. 
 
 Full of Life Now. 
 
 The City of Friends. 
 
 I Dreamed in a Dream. 
 
 The Dark Side. 
 
 I Sit and Look Out. 
 
 A Dream. 
 
 Of Him I Love Day and Night. 
 
 Elemental Drifts. 
 
 As I Ebb'd with the Ocean 
 
 
 of Life. 
 
 Envy. 
 
 When I Peruse the Con- 
 
 
 quered Fame. 
 
 The Friend. 
 
 Recorders Ages Hence. 
 
 Fit Audience. 
 
 Whoever You Are, Holding 
 
 
 Me Now in Hand. 
 
 Flux. 
 
 Of These Years I Sing. 
 
 A Grave. 
 
 As Toilsome I Wander'd 
 
 
 Virginia's Woods. 
 
 Greatnesses. 
 
 Great are the Myths. 
 
 A Letter From Camp. 
 
 Come Up From the Fields, 
 
 
 Father. 
 
 89 
 
90 
 
 APPENDIX No. I. 
 
 Rossi tii . 
 
 I'/iitmaii. 
 
 Links. 
 
 Think of the Soul. 
 
 Longings for Home. 
 
 Magnet, South. 
 
 Love of Comrades. 
 
 For You, Democracy. 
 
 Manhattan Arming. 
 
 First, Songs, for a Pre- 
 
 
 lude. 
 
 Manhattan Faces. 
 
 Give Me the Splendid Silent 
 
 
 Sun. 
 
 Meeting Again. 
 
 When I Heard at the Close 
 
 
 of the Day. 
 
 The Mother of All Music. 
 
 Pensive, On Her Dead Gaz- 
 
 
 ing. 
 
 Music. 
 
 Nearing Departure. 
 Night and Death. 
 Other Lands. 
 
 Out of the Crowd. 
 
 Parting Friends. 
 
 The Past-Present. 
 
 The Poet. 
 
 President Lincoln's Funeral 
 
 Hymn. 
 Pulse of my Life. 
 
 Questionable. 
 
 Realities. 
 
 A Ship. 
 Similitude. 
 
 Singers and Poets. 
 
 Singing in Spring. 
 
 I Heard you, Solemn Sweet 
 
 Pipes of the Organ. 
 As the Time Draws Nigh. 
 Night on the Prairies. 
 This Moment Yearning and 
 
 Thoughtful. 
 Out of the Rolling Ocean, 
 
 the Crowd. 
 What Think you I Take My 
 
 Pen in Hand. 
 I was Looking for a Long 
 
 While. 
 Song of the Answerer. 
 When Lilacs Last in the 
 
 Door-Yard Bloom'd. 
 Not Heaving from My 
 
 Ribb'd Breast Only. 
 As I lay with My Head in 
 
 Your Lap, Camerado. 
 As I Walk These Broad Ma- 
 jestic Days. 
 Aboard, at a Ship's Helm. 
 On the Beach, at Night, 
 
 Alone. 
 Song of the Answerer (Sec. 
 
 These, I, Singing in Spring. 
 
APPENDIX No. I. 
 
 91 
 
 Eossetti. 
 
 Whitman. 
 
 The Square Deific. 
 
 Chanting the Square Deific. 
 
 Survivors. 
 
 How Solemn, as One by One. 
 
 The Bivouac's Flame. 
 
 By the Bivouac's Fitful 
 
 
 Flame. 
 
 To the Sayers of Words. 
 
 Song of the Rolling Earth. 
 
 The Uprising. 
 
 Rise, Days, from Your 
 
 
 Fathomless Depths. 
 
 Vigil on the Field. 
 
 Vigil Strange I Kept on the 
 
 
 Field One Night. 
 
 Visages. 
 
 Of the Visages of Things. 
 
 The Waters. 
 
 The World Below the Brine. 
 
 Wherefore ? 
 
 Me ! Life ! 
 
 Whosoever. 
 
 To You. 
 
 A Word Out of the Sea. 
 
 Out of the Cradle, Endlessly 
 
 
 Rocking. 
 
 Wonders. 
 
 Who Learns My Lesson 
 
 
 Complete. 
 
 The Wounded. 
 
 A March in the Ranks, Hard 
 
 
 Prest. 
 
APPENDIX No. II. 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The following is a Catalogue of our private Collection of 
 Whitman literature : — 
 
 A. — The Writings of Walt Whitman. 
 
 Leaves of Grass. With Portrait. Boston; Thayer and 
 Eldridge : Year 85, of the States (1860-61). 
 
 "From the Library of R. L. Stevenson, Vailima. Given to 
 me by Mr. Gurr, in April, 1898, at Vailima; and by me to Mr. 
 W. H. Trimble, on December 19th, 1903. 
 
 " D. Colquhoun, M.D., Duneclin." 
 
 Mr. Horace L. Traubcl proposes to publish — by sub- 
 scription — a reprint of this edition, with facsimile of 
 Whitman's corrections and marginal notes (in black 
 ink, and pencils of various colours) superimposed on 
 the text. 
 
 Leaves of Grass. Including " Sands at Seventy," " Good- 
 Bye, My Fancy," " Old-Age Echoes," and "A Backward 
 Glance O'er Travel'd Roads." With two Portraits. 
 Boston : Small, Maynard, & Co. ; London : G. P. 
 Putnam's Sons. 1898. 
 
 Leaves of Grass. Including "Sands at Seventy," " Good- 
 Bye, My Fancy," " A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd 
 Roads." With Portrait. Philadelphia: DavidMcKay. 
 
 Leaver of Grass. Including a Facsimile Autobiography, 
 Variorum Readings of the Poems, and a Department 
 of Gathered Leaves. With four portraits. Phila- 
 delphia: DavidMcKay. 1900. 
 
 roans of Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass). With Bio- 
 graphical Introduction by John Burroughs. New 
 York : Thomas Y. dwell & Co. 1902. 
 92 
 
APPENDIX No. II. 93 
 
 Poems by Walt Whitman. Selected and edited by William 
 Michael Rossetti. With portrait. London: Chatto k 
 Windus. 1895. 
 
 The Poems of Walt Whitman (selected). Edited by Ernest 
 Rhys. (The Canterbury Poets.) London : Walter 
 Scott. 1887. 
 
 Poems by Walt Whitman. (The Masterpiece Library.) 
 London : Review of Reviews Office. 
 
 (Jems from Walt Whitman. Selected by Elizabeth Porter 
 Gould. Philadelphia : David McKay. 1889. 
 
 Memories of President Lincoln ; ami Selection from Pram 
 Taps ; in TIw Bibelot. With Introduction by Horace 
 Traubel. Portland (Maine) : Thomas B. Mosher. 
 August, 1904. 
 
 Whitman's Song of Myself . East Aurora (New York) : The 
 Roycrofters. 1904. 
 
 Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Stud;/ and a S, ■lection. By 
 Edmond Holmes. London : John Lane. 1902. 
 
 Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Walt Whitman. 
 Edited by Oscar L. Triggs, Ph.D. '(Chicago). With 
 Portrait. Boston : Small, Maynard, & Co. 1898. 
 
 Complete Prose Works: Specimen Dai/* and Collet: 
 November Roughs ; and Good-bye, My Fancy. With 
 six Illustrations, including Portrait. Boston : Small, 
 Maynard, & Co. ; London : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
 1898. 
 
 Specimen Days in America. By Walt Whitman. Newly 
 revised by the Author. With fresh preface and addi- 
 tional note. London : Walter Scott. 1887. 
 
 Democratic Vistas; and Other Papers. By Walt Whitman. 
 (Published by arrangement with the author.) London : 
 Walter Scott. 1888. 
 
 Calamus. A Series of Letters written during the years 
 1868-1880. By Walt Whitman. To a young friend 
 (Peter Doyle). Edited, with an Introduction, by 
 Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D. With Portrait. 
 Boston : Small, Maynard, & Co. 1897. 
 
94 APPENDIX No. II. 
 
 The Wound Dresser. A Series of Letters written from the 
 Hospitals in Washington during the War of the 
 Rebellion. By Walt Whitman. Edited by Richard 
 Maurice Bucko, M.D. With two Portraits. Boston : 
 Small, Maynard, & Co. 1898. 
 
 It. — Biographical and Critical. 
 
 1. — Books and Pamphlets. 
 
 Helen Born. Whitman's Ideal Democracy : and Other 
 Writings. With a Biography of the Author by the 
 editor, Helen Tufts ; and Portrait of Miss Born. 
 Boston : The Everett Press. 1902. 
 
 Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D. Walt Whitman. With 
 eight Illustrations. This volume includes "The Good 
 Gray Poet," by William Douglas O'Connor. Phila- 
 delphia: David McKay. 1883. 
 
 John Burroughs. Whitman : A Study. Boston: Houghton, 
 Mifflin, & Co. 1896. 
 
 In 1867 Mr. Burroughs published his Notes on Walt 
 Whitman as Poet and Person. This is now out of 
 print. We have not been able to procure a copy of it. 
 
 William Clarke, M.A. Walt Whitman. With Portrait. 
 London : Sonnenschein & Co. 1892. 
 
 Thomas Donaldson. Walt Whitman the Iran. With 
 thirteen Illustrations. London : Gay & Bird. 1896. 
 
 William Gay. Walt Whit man, the Poet of Democracy. 
 Melbourne: E. A. Petherick & Co. 
 
 Elizabeth Porter Gould. Anne (iilchrist and Walt 
 Whitman. Philadelphia : David McKay. 1900. 
 
 William Norman Guthrie. Walt Whitman (the Camden 
 Sage) — As Religious and Moral Teacher: A Study. 
 Cincinnati : The Robert Clarke Company. 
 
 Edmond Holmes. W r alt Whitman's Poetry: A Study and a 
 Selection. London : John Lane. 1902. 
 
 Robert G. Ingersoll. TMerty in Literature: Testimonial 
 to Walt Whitman. An Address delivered in Phila- 
 delphia, October 21st, 1890. With Portrait of Whit- 
 man. And Address at the Funeral of Walt Whitman, 
 
APPENDIX No. II. 95 
 
 at Harleigh, Camden, New Jersey, March 30th, 1902. 
 New York : Truth Seeker Company. 
 
 J. Johnston, M.D. Notes of a Visit to Walt Whitman. 
 
 Manchester : Tha Labour Press. 1898. 
 
 William Sloane Kennedy. The Poet as a Craftsman. 
 Philadelphia: David McKay. 1886. 
 
 Beminiscences of Walt Whitman. With Extracts 
 from his Letters, and Eemarks on his Writings. 
 London : Alexander Gardner. 189G. 
 
 Mila Tupper Maynard. Walt Whitman, the Poet of the 
 Wider Selfhood. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co. 
 1903. 
 
 John Robertson. Walt Whitman: Poet and Democrat. 
 Edinburgh : William Brown. 1884. 
 
 William Mackintire Salter. Walt Whitman : Two 
 Addresses. Philadelphia : S. Burns Weston. 1899. 
 
 John Addington Symonds. Walt Whitman: A Study. 
 With Portrait and four Illustrations. London : John 
 C. Nimmo. 1893. 
 
 A slip of paper has been attached to the fly-leaf of 
 this copy, with — in Whitman's handwriting — " J. 
 Addington Symonds, Davos Platz, Switzerland "; and 
 in Symonds' writing, " Walt Whitman's autograph. 
 Cut from a newspaper sent to me in the year 1891. — 
 John Addington Symonds." 
 
 Horace L. Traubel. Camden'' s Compliment to Wcdt I!' hit- 
 man, May 31st, 1889. Notes, Addresses, Letters, 
 Telegrams. Philadelphia : David McKay. 1889. 
 
 Horace L. Traubel, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Thomas 
 B. Harned (Whitman's Literary Executors). In lie 
 Walt Whitman. Philadelphia : David McKay. 1893. 
 
 Oscar L. Triggs. Browning and Whitman : A Study in 
 
 Democracy. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 
 
 1893. 
 Henry Wallace. Walt Whitman, Seer: A Brief Study. 
 
 London : The Walter Scott Publishing Company. 
 
 1904. 
 
9G APPENDIX No. II. 
 
 ,'.■'. — Articles in Periodicals. 
 
 The Arena (Boston). December, 1895, "Emerson in his 
 Home," by F. B. Sanborn ; January, 1896, "Conver- 
 sations with Walt Whitman." by Horace L. Traubel; 
 July, 1902, " Whitman's Note of Democracy," by 
 Walter Leigh ton. 
 
 The Atlantic Monthly. February, 1892, " Reminiscences of 
 Walt Whitman," by John Townsend Trowbridge; 
 June, 1902, " A Dialogue in Hades : Omar Khayyam 
 and Walt Whitman," by Jean N. Mclhvraith; Novem- 
 ber, 1903, " Walt Whitman as an Editor," by Charles 
 M. Skinner ; November, 1903, " English Appreciation 
 of Walt Whitman " (the Contributors' Club) ; April, 
 1904, " An American Primer, by Walt Whitman," 
 contributed, with introductory paragraph, by Horace L. 
 Traubel. 
 
 Chambers's Encyclopedia. Article on " Whitman " (Edin- 
 burgh : W. & R. Chambers). 
 
 The Conservator (Philadelphia). Edited by Horace L. 
 Traubel. A most valuable magazine to all Whitman 
 students. Contains numerous articles and notes on 
 Whitman and Leaves of Grass. 
 
 The Contemporary Revieiv (London). December, 1875, 
 " Walt Whitman's Poems," by Peter Bayne. 
 
 The Encyclopaedia Britannica (Ninth Edition, 1875). 
 Article on " American Literature," by J. N. 
 
 The Goose Quill (Chicago). October, 1902, " Walt Whit- 
 man," by Clarence Darrow. 
 
 The Hibbert Journal (London). January, 1904, "The Gods 
 as Embodiments of the Race Memory," by Edward 
 Carpenter. 
 
 The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine. February, 1903, 
 " Walt Whitman's Drum Taps, and Notes of the 
 War," by Edward Eempe. 
 
 The North American Review. March, 1904, " Poetry and 
 Poets of America," by Churton Collins. 
 
 The Open Court (Chicago). January, 1900, " Review of 
 Mr. Salter's Two Addresses," by Paul Carus ; July, 
 
APPENDIX No. II. 97 
 
 1900, " The Open Court and Leaves of Grass," W. H. 
 Trimble. 
 The Outlook (New York). December, 1902, Review of the 
 Camden Edition of " Whitman's Writings "; Septem- 
 ber, 1903, " American Life in Whitman's Poetry," by 
 Hamilton W. Mabie. 
 
 The Pall Mall Budget (London). August 25th, 1891, 
 " Walt Whitman's Warning to America." 
 
 Papyrus (New York). July, 1904, " The Whitmanites," by 
 Michael Monahan. 
 
 The Philistine (East Aurora). November, 1901, "Old John 
 Burroughs," by Elbert Hubbard. 
 
 Punch (London). November 1st, 1890, " Give it to the 
 Bard." 
 
 The Theosophical Beview (London). August, 1903, " Walt 
 Whitman, a Poet of the Coming Race," by F. L. 
 Woodward. 
 
 The Times (London). March 28th, 1892, "Walt Whitman" 
 (Obituary Notice), 
 
 The Universal Eeview, Vol. VI. (?), No. 22. " Walt Whit- 
 man," by Gabriel Sarrazin (the original French). An 
 English version of this article — translated by Harrison 
 S. Morris — is given in In Re Walt Whitman. 
 
 3. — Essays, etc., in Books. 
 
 Robert Buchanan. " Walt Whitman," in David Gray, and 
 other Essays. London : Sampson Low & Co. " A 
 Look Around Literature," The American Socrates. 
 London : Ward & Downey. 
 
 John Burroughs. "The Flight of the Eagle," in Birds 
 and Poets. Edinburgh : David Douglas. 
 
 Edward Dowden, LL.D. " The Poetry of Democracy : 
 Walt Whitman," in Studies in Literature, 1789-1877. 
 London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner, & Co. 
 
 Havelock Ellis. "Whitman," in The New Spirit. 
 London : Walter Scott. 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson. " Whitman," in Contem- 
 poraries. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 
 
 H 
 
98 APPENDIX No. II. 
 
 Elbkrt Hubbard. " Whitman," in Little Journeys to the 
 
 Homes of American Authors. New York: G. P. 
 
 Putnam's Sons. 
 James D. Law. " Walt Whitman," in Here and 'There in 
 
 Tim Hemispheres. Lancaster (Pennsylvania) : Home 
 
 Publishing Company. 
 
 William Michael Rossetti. Prefatory Notice to Poems by 
 Walt Whitman. London : Chatto & Winclus. 
 
 Ernest Rhys. " Introduction " to Selections from Leaves 
 of Grass (Canterbury Poets). London : Walter Scott 
 
 George Selwyn. "Walt Whitman," in American Authors 
 at Home. New York : Cassell & Co. 
 
 Edmund Clarence Stedman. " Walt Whitman," in Poets, 
 of America. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. " Walt Whitman," in Familiar 
 Studies of Men and Books. London : Chatto & 
 Windus. 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne. " To Walt Whitman in 
 America," in Songs Before Sunrise: " Whitmania," in 
 Studies in I 'rose and Poetry. London : Chatto & 
 Windus. 
 
 Leslie A. Tore, M.A. "Walt Whitman," in 1'rophets of 
 the Century. London : Ward, Lock, & Co. 
 
 Oscar Lovell Triggs, Ph.D. " Introduction," to Selec- 
 tions from the Prose a>id Poetry of Walt Whitman. 
 Boston : Small, Maynard, & Co. 
 
 4. — Incidental Discussion. 
 
 Sir Edwin Arnold, K.C.I.E. Seas and Lands. London : 
 Longmans & Co. 
 
 John Burroughs. " Nature and the Poets," in Vepacton. 
 Edinburgh : David Douglas. 
 
 George F. Butler, M.D. Lore and its Affinities. Chicago: 
 G. P. Engelhard & Co. 
 
 Edward Carpenter. Towards Democracy. London: Swan 
 Sonnenschein & Co. Angels' Wings, London : Swan 
 Sonnenschein & Co. 
 
APPENDIX No. II. 99 
 
 Basil Champeneys. Memoirs and Correspondence of Coven- 
 try Pat mure. 
 
 Moncure D. Conway. Life of Thomas Paine. New York: 
 G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
 
 Will H. Dircks. Essays and Other Writings of Henry 
 Thoreau. London : Walter Scott. 
 
 Ha velock Ellis. Psychology of Sex. London: University 
 
 Press. 
 Edward Waldo Emerson. Emerson in Concord. 
 
 Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist. Anne Gilchrist: Her 
 Life and Writings. London : T. Fisher Unwin. 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson. " Sidney Lanier," in 
 Contemporaries. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 
 
 W. H. Howells. Literary Friends and Acquaintances. 
 
 New York : Harper & Brothers. 
 Harriet Jay. Robert Buchanan. London: T. Fisher 
 
 Unwin. 
 
 Aylmer Maude. Tolstoi and J lis Problems. 
 
 Mimnermus. " The Poets and Rationalism," in The, 
 Agnostic Annual. London. 1903. 
 
 A. B. de Mille, B.A. Literature in the Century. Toronto: 
 Linscott Publishing Company. 
 
 John Nichol, LL.D. American Literature. Edinburgh: 
 A. & C. Black. 
 
 Charles Noble. Studies in American Literature. New 
 York : The MacMillan Company. 
 
 J. B. Pond. Eccentricities of (-renins. London: Chatto 
 & Windus. 
 
 H. M. Posnett. Comparative Literature. London: Kegan 
 Paul & Co. 
 
 C. F. Richardson. American Literature: 1607 to 1885. 
 New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 
 
 W. M. Rossetti. Ruskin: Rossetti; Pre-Raphaelite Papers. 
 
 London : George Allen. 
 
 H. S. Salt. Life of Henry David Thoreau. London: 
 Walter Scott. 
 
100 APPENDIX No. II. 
 
 C. E. Speight, B.A. The Temple ll<a<Lr. London: H. 
 Marshall it Sons. 
 
 E. C. Stedman. The Nature and Elements of I'netry. 
 
 Boston : Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. The American 
 
 Anthology. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 
 R. L. Stevenson. "Henry David Thoreau," in Familiar 
 
 Studies of Men and Hunks. London : Chatto & 
 
 YVindus. 
 A. L. Stronach. Simple History of English Literature. 
 
 London : T. Nelson & Sons. 
 
 W. L. Tomlins. The Laurel Sony Book. Boston: C. C. 
 Birchard & Co.. 
 
 W. P. Trent, M.A., LL.D. A History of American Litera- 
 ture. London: William Heinemann. 
 
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