A File in the Online Version of the Kouroo Contexture (Approximately

1 “LET HELL BLAZE ALL IT CHOOSES”

One is grateful for [Whitman’s] carnality, after the frigidity and bloodlessness of Thoreau, Emerson, or even Hawthorne.

BORN

1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 DIED

1. Per Volume III, page 375 of Horace Traubel’s WITH WALT WHITMAN IN CAMDEN: “One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawlessness — his dissent — his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1761

For the next several years Elias Hicks would be hanging out with Walt Whitman’s grandfather Walter Whitman, age 13-17, on Long Island, going to dances, singing popular tunes, playing cards and gambling, hunting and fishing, riding horses in races at the Little Plains track in the summer, going on winter night sleigh rides and then “bundling” all night with girl Friends in their beds at home as was then the accepted practice even among Quakers, etc. On one occasion Hicks was thrown sixteen feet but was not badly injured.

ELIAS HICKS

“I never committed any sin but that I loved it better than my God.”

Carpenters and Testifyers and Surveyors

In his youth Friend Elias was trained as a surveyor, like the young Thoreau would be, and as a carpenter, like the young Whitman would be, two generations hence. But his main vocation was to be traveling around influencing people, which would also become the main vocation of Thoreau, and of Whitman, two generations hence. (Thoreau’s homemade surveying tools are now in the Concord Museum and are shown on the next page; Hicks had made equivalent homemade surveying tools.) Nevertheless, such linkages are obviously spurious and no serious historian would pay attention to any such linkages. –For they do not have the blessing of matching the presumptions of previous generations of historians.

In his adult years the spirit of Friend Elias would map onto what we know as the spirit of Henry Thoreau, spirit for spirit, attitude for attitude. But our historians know nothing of this, for they are forbidden by their discipline to enter such arenas of subjectivity. No spirit, no attitudes. That would be undisciplined. Facts: we deal in facts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN And when an unattached inconvenient fact shows up, a fact which does not match the story that is established to be told, that fact simply — goes away. For instance, the Concord Museum at one time had on display, next to Thoreau’s flute, the slipcover in which Thoreau kept his flute. That slipcover which used to be on display was made of gray flannel cloth, of the sort used by Quakers for dresses, and it had a drawstring at one end. It was made, the card in the case asserted, from a scrap of cloth from one of Friend Lucretia Mott’s old Quaker dresses. When questions were raised about this card in the display case, the museum simply removed the slipcover from public display. Then neither a personal visit to the museum, waiting in the vestibule for officials who never came out from their back rooms, nor a formal letter to these officials by name on letterhead stationery of the project, nor a formal follow-up letter to these officials by name on letterhead stationery of the project, enclosing the previous letter, elicited any response whatever. That inconvenient fact has disappeared. That fact had been a mistake, it had never existed. The flute slipcover made out of a piece of cloth from one of Friend Lucretia’s old dresses had never existed and had never been on display. Friend Lucretia never existed and her gray dresses never wore out and she went around naked. Thoreau, we should know, had contacts only with Unitarians, with humanists, with members of the same faith system as the historians who write about the Reverend Waldo Emerson, and other such important people, and this low-rent imitator of their RWE, Thoreau, of course was influenced only by RWE, and other such important people, never by such a person as Friend Lucretia, who was after all only a woman, and only a Quaker, and not even in very good standing among the Quakers. On the following page is a Newell Convers Wyeth painting which well depicts the official respective standings of Emerson and Thoreau, down to and including the funny hats (next screen): HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1779

September 23, Thursday evening and night: The defeat of HMS Serapis under Captain Person in a 3-hour battle in the North Sea off Flamborough Head, Yorkshire by the USS Bonhomme Richard under Captain John Paul Jones, 2 with the moon almost full (a manly action per LEAVES OF GRASS, “SONG OF MYSELF,” 35-36 pornography): AMERICAN REVOLUTION Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight? Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars? List to the yarn, as my grandmother’s father the sailor told it to me. Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,) His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be; Along the lower’d eve he came horribly raking us.

We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’d, My captain lash’d fast with his own hands. We had receiv’d some eighteen pound shots under the water, On our lower-gun-deck two large pieces had burst at the first fire, killing all around and blowing up overhead. Fighting at sun-down, fighting at dark, Ten o’clock at night, the full moon well up, our leaks on the gain, and five feet of water reported, The master-at-arms loosing the prisoners confined in the afterhold to give them a chance for themselves. The transit to and from the magazine is now stopt by the sentinels, They see so many strange faces they do not know whom to trust. Our frigate takes fire, The other asks if we demand quarter? If our colors are struck and the fighting done? Now I laugh content, for I hear the voice of my little captain, We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting. Only three guns are in use, One is directed by the captain himself against the enemy’s mainmast, Two well serv’d with grape and canister silence his musketry and clear his decks. The tops alone second the fire of this little battery, especially the main-top, They hold out bravely during the whole of the action. Not a moment’s cease, The leaks gain fast on the pumps, the fire eats toward the powder-magazine. One of the pumps has been shot away, it is generally thought we are sinking. Serene stands the little captain, He is not hurried, his voice is neither high nor low, His eyes give more light to us than our battle-lanterns. Toward twelve there in the beams of the moon they surrender to us. Stretch’d and still lies the midnight, Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we had conquer’d, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty, Formless stacks of bodies and bodies by themselves, dabs of flesh upon the masts and spars, Cut of cordage, dangle of rigging, light shock of the soothe of waves, Black and impassive guns, litter of powder-parcels, strong scent, A few large stars overhead, silent and mournful shining, 2. It seems Walt Whitman was exercising a wee bit of poetic license, as the moon would not be completely full until September 25th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Delicate sniffs of sea-breeze, smells of sedgy grass and fields by the shore, death-messages given in charge to survivors, The hiss of the surgeon’s knife, the gnawing teeth of his saw, Wheeze, cluck, swash of falling blood, short wild scream, and long, dull, tapering groan, These so, these irretrievable. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1795

Late in his life Walt Whitman would attempt to describe the way his mother grew up on Paumanok Long Island around the turn of the 19th Century, and the way he had then experienced this environment as a child and youth in the 1825-1840 period: “Specimen Days”

THE MATERNAL HOMESTEAD I went down from this ancient grave place eighty or ninety rods to the site of the Van Velsor homestead, where my mother was born (1795,) and where every spot had been familiar to me as a child and youth (1825-’40.) Then stood there a long rambling, dark-gray, shingle-sided house, with sheds, pens, a great barn, and much open road-space. Now of all those not a vestige left; all had been pull’d down, erased, and the plough and harrow pass’d over foundations, road-spaces and everything, for many summers; fenced in at present, and grain and clover growing like any other fine fields. Only a big hole from the cellar, with some little heaps of broken stone, green with grass and weeds, identified the place. Even the copious old brook and spring seem’d to have mostly dwindled away. The whole scene, with what it arous’d, memories [Page 694] of my young days there half a century ago, the vast kitchen and ample fireplace and the sitting-room adjoining, the plain furniture, the meals, the house full of merry people, my grandmother Amy’s sweet old face in its Quaker cap, my grandfather “the Major,” jovial, red, stout, with sonorous voice and characteristic physiognomy, with the actual sights themselves, made the most pronounc’d half-day’s experience of my whole jaunt. For there with all those wooded, hilly, healthy surroundings, my dearest mother, Louisa Van Velsor, grew up — (her mother, Amy Williams, of the Friends’ or Quakers’ denomination — the Williams family, seven sisters and one brother — the father and brother sailors, both of whom met their deaths at sea.) The Van Velsor people were noted for fine horses, which the men bred and train’d from blooded stock. My mother, as a young woman, was a daily and daring rider. As to the head of the family himself, the old race of the Netherlands, so deeply grafted on Manhattan island and in Kings and Queens counties, never yielded a more mark’d and full Americanized specimen than Major Cornelius Van Velsor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

SOURCES OF CHARACTER — RESULTS — 1860 To sum up the foregoing from the outset (and, of course, far, far more unrecorded,) I estimate three leading sources and formative stamps to my own character, now solidified for good or bad, and its subsequent literary and other outgrowth — the maternal nativity-stock brought hither from far-away Netherlands, for one, (doubtless the best) — the subterranean tenacity and central bony structure (obstinacy, wilfulness) which I get from my paternal English elements, for another [Page 706] — and the combination of my Long Island birth-spot, sea-shores, childhood’s scenes, absorptions, with teeming Brooklyn and New York — with, I suppose, my experiences afterward in the secession outbreak, for the third. For, in 1862, startled by news that my brother George, an officer in the 51st New York volunteers, had been seriously wounded (first Fredericksburg battle, December 13th,) I hurriedly went down to the field of war in Virginia. But I must go back a little. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1799

Late in his life Walt Whitman would attempt to describe his Dutch and English ancestors on Paumanok Long Island in the latter years of the 18th Century: “Specimen Days”

GENEALOGY — VAN VELSOR AND WHITMAN The later years of the last century found the Van Velsor family, my mother’s side, living on their own farm at Cold Spring, Long Island, New York State, near the eastern edge of Queens county, about a mile from the harbor.1 My father’s side — probably the fifth generation from the first English arrivals in New England — were at the same time farmers on their own land — (and a fine domain it was, 500 acres, all good soil, gently sloping east and south, about one-tenth woods, plenty of grand old trees,) two or three miles off, at West Hills, Suffolk county. The Whitman name in the Eastern States, and so branching West and South, starts undoubtedly from one John Whitman, born 1602, in Old England, where he grew up, married, and his eldest son was born in 1629. He came over in the “True Love” in 1640 to America, and lived in Weymouth MA, which place became the mother-hive of the New-Englanders of the name: he died in 1692. His brother, Rev. Zechariah Whitman, also came over in the “True Love,” either at that time or soon after, and lived at Milford, Conn. A son of this Zechariah, named Joseph, migrated to Huntington, Long Island, and permanently settled there. Savage’s “Genealogical Dictionary” (vol. iv, p. 524) gets the Whitman family establish’d at Huntington, per this Joseph, before 1664. It is quite certain that from that beginning, and from Joseph, the West Hill Whitmans, and all others in Suffolk county, have since radiated, myself among the number. John and Zechariah both went to England and [Page 692] back again divers times; they had large families, and several of their children were born in the old country. We hear of the father of John and Zechariah, Abijah Whitman, who goes over into the 1500’s, but we know little about him, except that he also was for some time in America.

1.Long Island was settled first on the west end by the Dutch, from Holland, then on the east end by the English — the dividing line of the two nationalities being a little west of Huntington, where my father’s folks lived, and where I was born. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

TWO OLD FAMILY INTERIORS Of the domestic and inside life of the middle of Long Island, at and just before that time, here are two samples: “The Whitmans, at the beginning of the present century, lived in a long story-and-a-half farm-house, hugely timber’d, which is still standing. A great smoke-canopied kitchen, with vast hearth and chimney, form’d one end of the house. The existence of slavery in New York at that time, and the possession by the family of some twelve or fifteen slaves, house and field servants, gave things quite a patriarchal look. The very young darkies could be seen, a swarm of them, toward sundown, in this kitchen, squatted in a circle on the floor, eating their supper of Indian pudding and milk. In the house, and in food and furniture, all was rude, but substantial. No carpets or stoves were known, and no coffee, and tea or sugar only for the women. Rousing wood fires gave both warmth and light on winter nights. Pork, poultry, beef, and all the ordinary vegetables and grains were plentiful. Cider was the men’s common drink, and used at meals. The clothes were mainly homespun. Journeys were made by both men and women on horseback. Both sexes labor’d with their [Page 695] own hands — the men on the farm — the women in the house and around it. Books were scarce. The annual copy of the almanac was a treat, and was pored over through the long winter evenings. I must not forget to mention that both these families were near enough to the sea to behold it from the high places, and to hear in still hours the roar of the surf; the latter, after a storm, giving a peculiar sound at night. Then all hands, male and female, went down frequently on beach and bathing parties, and the men on practical expeditions for cutting salt hay, and for clamming and fishing.” — John Burroughs’s NOTES. “The ancestors of Walt Whitman, on both the paternal and maternal sides, kept a good table, sustain’d the hospitalities, decorums, and an excellent social reputation in the county, and they were often of mark’d individuality. If space permitted, I should consider some of the men worthy special description; and still more some of the women. His great-grandmother on the paternal side, for instance, was a large swarthy woman, who lived to a very old age. She smoked tobacco, rode on horseback like a man, managed the most vicious horse, and, becoming a widow in later life, went forth every day over her farm-lands, frequently in the saddle, directing the labor of her slaves, with language in which, on exciting occasions, oaths were not spared. The two immediate grandmothers were, in the best sense, superior women. The maternal one (Amy Williams before marriage) was a Friend, or Quakeress, of sweet, sensible character, housewifely proclivities, and deeply intuitive and spiritual. The other, (Hannah Brush,) was an equally noble, perhaps stronger character, lived to be very old, had quite a family of sons, was a natural lady, was in early life a school-mistress, and had great solidity of mind. W. W. himself makes much of the women of his ancestry.” — The same. Out from these arrieres of persons and scenes, I was born May 31, 1819. And now to dwell awhile on the locality itself — as the successive growth stages of my infancy, childhood, youth and manhood were all pass’d on Long Island, which I sometimes feel as if I had incorporated. I roam’d, as boy and man, and have lived in nearly all parts, from Brooklyn to Montauk point. [Page 696] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1805

Friend Lucretia Coffin began her career (first as student, then as teacher) at the coeducational boarding school3 at Nine Partners northeast of Poughkeepsie, New York, Friend Elias being one of the partners and a frequent visiting speaker,

ELIAS HICKS

and Friend James Mott, Jr. being one of the teachers.

3. Even as late as 1857, even as libertarian a person as Walt Whitman would be using his editorial privileges at the Brooklyn Daily Times to urge the parents of daughters to “Educate them at home” rather than in such schools, in order to avoid the “thousand evil influences” to which girls are inherently so much more susceptible.

Our father Walt Whitman, despite his self- advertisements and the dogmatic insistences of our contemporary gays, seems to have embraced only himself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN At fourteen years of age I was placed with a younger sister, at the Friends’ Boarding-School, in Dutchess County, State of New York; and continued there for more than two years without returning home. At fifteen, one of the teachers was leaving the school, I was chosen as an assistant, in her place. Pleased with the promotion, I strove hard to give satisfaction, and was gratified, on leaving the school, to have an offer of a situation as teacher, if I was disposed to remain, and informed that my services should entitle another sister to her education without charge. My father was, at that time, in successful business in Boston; but with his views of the importance of training a woman to usefulness, he and my mother gave their consent to another year being devoted to that institution. LUCRETIA MOTT

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1819

May 31, Monday: New-York City announced a balance of $1850.34 in its Treasury. Its income over the previous year amounted to $682,829.51, Its total expenses were $671,319.83, or $5.60 per capita.

In a little frame house near Huntington in West Hills built by his father, on Paumanok Long Island4 near the Elias Hicks farm, Walt Whitman was born. Although at the moment merely an infant, he would, like his Quaker neighbor, grow up to be among other things a carpenter.5

One is grateful for [Whitman’s] carnality, after the frigidity and bloodlessness of Thoreau, Emerson, or even Hawthorne.

ELIAS HICKS

“When the mind becomes sensual, it is like the moon in eclipse.”

His father the housebuilder was Walter Whitman (1789-1855) and his mother, a lifelong illiterate, and Quaker, was Louisa Ven Velsor Whitman (1795-1873). His brothers and sisters would be: • Jesse Whitman (1818-1870) • Mary Whitman (1821-1899) • Hannah Whitman (1823-1908) • Andrew Jackson Whitman (1827-1863) • George Washington Whitman (1829-1901) • Thomas Jefferson Whitman (1833-1890)

4. It is now but yards from an expressway, Route 110. Walt was only in residence there for his first four years. You’ll only be there four minutes unless you have a consuming interest in peg carpentry and whiskey jugs. 5. The Whitman father was intensely political, and thus the three Whitman boys were named in honor of three American Founding Fathers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN • Edward Whitman (1835-1892)

“Memoranda”

Was born May 31, 1819, in my father’s farm-house, at West Hills, L.I., New York State. My parents’ folks mostly farmers and sailors — on my father’s side, of English — on my mother’s, (Van Velsor’s) from Hollandic immigration. There was, first and last, a large family of children; (I was the second.) We moved to Brooklyn while I was still a little one in frocks — and there in B. I grew up out of frocks — then as child and boy went to the public schools — then to work in a printing office. When only sixteen or seventeen years old, and for three years afterward, I went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” Then, returning to New York, work’d as printer and writer, (with an occasional shy at “poetry.”) [Page 1297]

No member of his immediate family would ever have a clue as to what Walt had been up to, either in regard to his sex life or in regard to his poetry. At his funeral, surviving family would be amazed at the interest that was being displayed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1822

In extreme old age, Walt Whitman would reminisce for one last time about this period, and his free ramblings during his childhood in Old Brooklyn: “Memoranda”

It must have been in 1822 or ’3 that I first came to live in Brooklyn. Lived first in Front street, not far from what was then call’d “the New Ferry,” wending the river from the foot of Catharine (or Main) street to New York City. I was a little child (was born in 1819,) but tramp’d freely about the neighborhood and town, even then; was often on the aforesaid New Ferry; remember how I was petted and deadheaded by the gatekeepers and deckhands (all such fellows are kind to little children,) and remember the horses that seem’d to me so queer as they trudg’d around in the central houses of the boats, making the water-power. (For it was just on the eve of the steam-engine, which was soon after introduced [Page 1283] on the ferries.) Edward Copeland (afterward Mayor) had a grocery store then at the corner of Front and Catharine streets. Presently we Whitmans all moved up to Tillary street, near Adams, where my father, who was a carpenter, built a house for himself and us all. It was from here I “assisted” the personal coming of Lafayette in 1824-5 to Brooklyn. He came over the Old Ferry, as the now Fulton Ferry (partly navigated quite up to that day by ‘horse boats,’ though the first steamer had begun to be used hereabouts) was then call’d, and was receiv’d at the foot of Fulton street. It was on that occasion that the corner-stone of the Apprentices’ Library, at the corner of Cranberry and Henry streets — since pull’d down — was laid by Lafayette’s own hands. 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, 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. Lafayette was at that time between sixty-five and seventy years of age, with a manly figure and a kind face.

THE FERRY AT BROOKLYN PIER, NEW-YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Late in life Walt Whitman would describe early experiences on Long Island: The eastern end of Long Island, the Peconic bay region, I knew quite well too — sail’d more than once around Shelter island, and down to Montauk — spent many an hour on Turtle hill by the old light-house, on the extreme point, looking out over the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1823

The Whitman family moved into Brooklyn, where they would remain for approximately a decade during Walt Whitman’s early youth.

“Specimen Days”

PAUMANOK, AND MY LIFE ON IT AS CHILD AND YOUNG MAN Worth fully and particularly investigating indeed this Paumanok, (to give the spot its aboriginal name,1 stretching east through Kings, Queens and Suffolk counties, 120 miles altogether — on the north Long Island sound, a beautiful, varied and picturesque series of inlets, “necks” and sea-like expansions, for a hundred miles to Orient point. On the ocean side the great south bay dotted with countless hummocks, mostly small, some quite large, occasionally long bars of sand out two hundred rods to a mile-and-a-half from the shore. While now and then, as at Rockaway and far east along the Hamptons, the beach makes right on the island, the sea dashing up without intervention. Several light-houses on the shores east; a long history of wrecks tragedies, some even of late years. As a youngster, I was in the atmosphere and traditions of many of these wrecks — of one or two almost an observer. Off Hempstead beach for example, was the loss of the ship “Mexico” in 1840, (alluded to in “the Sleepers” in L. of G.) And at Hampton, some years later, the destruction of the brig “Elizabeth,” a fearful affair, in one of the worst winter gales, where Margaret Fuller went down, with her husband and child. Inside the outer bars or beach this south bay is everywhere comparatively shallow; of cold winters all thick ice on the surface. As a boy I often went forth with a chum or two, on those frozen fields, with hand-sled, axe and eel-spear, after messes of eels. We would cut holes in the ice, sometimes striking quite an eel-bonanza, and filling our baskets with great, fat, sweet, white-meated fellows. The scenes, the ice, drawing the hand-sled, cutting holes, spearing the eels, &c., [Page 697] were of course just such fun as is dearest to boyhood. The shores of this bay, winter and summer, and my doings there in early life, are woven all through L. of G. One sport I was very fond of was to go on a bay-party in summer to gather sea- gull’s eggs. (The gulls lay two or three eggs, more than half the size of hen’s eggs, right on the sand, and leave the sun’s heat to hatch them.) The eastern end of Long Island, the Peconic bay region, I knew quite well too — sail’d more than once around Shelter island, and down to Montauk — spent many an hour on Turtle hill by the old light-house, on the extreme point, looking out over the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers.

1.“Paumanok, (or Paumanake, or Paumanack, the Indian name of Long Island,) over a hundred miles long; shaped like a fish — plenty of sea shore, sandy, stormy, uninviting, the horizon boundless, the air too strong for invalids, the bays a wonderful resort for aquatic birds, the south- side meadows cover’d with salt hay, the soil of the island generally tough, but good for the locust-tree, the apple orchard, and the blackberry, and with numberless springs of the sweetest water in the world. Years ago, among the bay-men — a strong, wild race, now extinct, or rather entirely changed — a native of Long Island was called a Paumanacker, or Creole-Paumanacker.” — John Burroughs. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

PAUMANOK, AND MY LIFE ON IT AS CHILD AND YOUNG MAN [CONCLUDED] Sometimes, along Montauk peninsula, (it is some 15 miles long, and good grazing,) met the strange, unkempt, half-barbarous herdsmen, at that time living there entirely aloof from society or civilization, in charge, on those rich pasturages, of vast droves of horses, kine or sheep, own’d by farmers of the eastern towns. Sometimes, too, the few remaining Indians, or half-breeds, at that period left on Montauk peninsula, but now I believe altogether extinct. More in the middle of the island were the spreading Hempstead plains, then (1830- ’40) quite prairie-like, open, uninhabited, rather sterile, cover’d with kill-calf and huckleberry bushes, yet plenty of fair pasture for the cattle, mostly milch- cows, who fed there by hundreds, even thousands, and at evening, (the plains too were own’d by the towns, and this was the use of them in common,) might be seen taking their way home, branching off regularly in the right places. I have often been out on the edges of these plains toward sundown, and can yet recall in fancy the interminable cow-processions, and hear the music of the tin or copper bells clanking far or near, and breathe the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic evening air, and note the sunset. Through the same region of the island, but further east, extended wide central tracts of pine and scrub-oak, (charcoal was largely made here,) monotonous and sterile. But many a good day or half-day did I have, wandering through those solitary cross-roads, inhaling the peculiar and wild aroma. [Page 698] Here, and all along the island and its shores, I spent intervals many years, all seasons, sometimes riding, sometimes boating, but generally afoot, (I was always then a good walker,) absorbing fields, shores, marine incidents, characters, the bay-men, farmers, pilots — always had a plentiful acquaintance with the latter, and with fishermen — went every summer on sailing trips — always liked the bare sea-beach, south side, and have some of my happiest hours on it to this day. As I write, the whole experience comes back to me after the lapse of forty and more years — the soothing rustle of the waves, and the saline smell — boyhood’s times, the clam-digging, barefoot, and with trowsers roll’d up — hauling down the creek — the perfume of the sedge-meadows — the hay-boat, and the chowder and fishing excursions; — or, of later years, little voyages down and out New York bay, in the pilot boats. Those same later years, also, while living in Brooklyn, (1836-’50) I went regularly every week in the mild seasons down to Coney island, at that time a long, bare unfrequented shore, which I had all to myself, and where I loved, after bathing, to race up and down the hard sand, and declaim Homer or Shakspere to the surf and sea-gulls by the hour. But I am getting ahead too rapidly, and must keep more in my traces. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1824

Karl Theodor Christian Friedrich Follen’s brother August Adolf Ludwig Follen (1794-1855) had been leading radical student political groups at Giessen and Heidelberg, and after having been imprisoned at Berlin for agitation (1819-1821) had taught in Aarau, Switzerland (1821-1827) and become a member of the Grand Council at Zürich. His politically active brother’s works included the song Freye Stimmen frischer Jugend (1819), the novel MALAGYS UND VIVIAN (1829), the poem Harfen-Grüsse aus Deutschland und der Schweiz (1823), and the epic poem Tristans Eltern (1857). Karl, when the assassination of Kotzebue placed him and his friend Karl Sand under suspicion in the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, had been twice arrested and tried for conspiracy in that murder. He had fled first to France and then to the canton of Basel in Switzerland, and from there during this year he continued on to New-York, where he chose to be known as Charles Follen. Aided by letters of introduction from the Marquis de Lafayette, he would establish himself in Massachusetts society. He would become headmaster of the Round Hill School in Northampton, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Massachusetts, and would get married with a daughter of one Boston’s most prominent families, Eliza Lee Cabot.

While teaching French and miniature painting to the boys at the Round Hill Academy, Nicholas Marcellus Hentz got married with a 24-year-old lady, Caroline Lee Whiting. In this year, publication of his A MANUAL OF FRENCH PHRASES, AND FRENCH CONVERSATIONS: ADAPTED TO WANOSTROCHT’S GRAMMAR ... (Boston: Richardson and Lord, J.H.A. Frost, Printer).

In extreme old age, Walt Whitman would reminisce for one last time about this period, and that alleged manly kiss from Lafayette: “Memoranda”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 2, Thursday: The Marquis de Lafayette breakfasted in Newburyport on yet another rainy day, and William Lloyd Garrison was among the hundreds of townspeople who obtained his handshake at the Tracy mansion on State Street (a building which now houses the town’s public library) prior to his departure for Concord.

When the illustrious citoyen reached Concord, Squire Samuel Hoar, on behalf of all, rose to deliver the welcome.

Lafayette, nous sommes ici!

—General “Black Jack” Pershing, arriving with US troops in France at the very end of the WWI trench warfare.

Unfortunately, Squire Hoar did this in a manner which would begin a long and bitter controversy with Lexington over which town’s militia had been the first to fire upon the colonial army in America, by pointing out in his speech of welcome that it had been at the Old North Bridge over the Concord River rather than during the prior slaughter on the green in Lexington town that “the first forcible resistance” had been offered by the militia to the army. Before this visit by the marquis, there had in fact been very little note taken either in Concord or in Lexington of the anniversary of the April 19th dustup between the militia and the army. This invidious discrimination between two outbreaks of smallarms fire would produce a “storm of protest” from indignant Lexingtonians. Major Elias Phinney of Lexington would begin to pull together the depositions of survivors, none of whom had forgotten any details of the “battle” and some of whom were finding that they were able to recall details that hadn’t actually happened.

When Mary Moody Emerson was introduced to the general, she coquettishly told him that since she had been at the time a newborn infant, she also could lay claims to having been “‘in arms’ at the Concord fight.”6

John Shepard Keyes would later preserve a dim memory of having been pulled by a sister out of the way of the horses that drew Lafayette through Concord, and of the pageantry of that very special day.

Elizabeth Hallett Prichard, daughter of Moses Prichard and Jane Tompson Hallet Prichard, would all her long life remember being picked up by this geriatric general and kissed, before she reached her 3d birthday.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn would later allege that Henry Thoreau had been able to summon a childhood memory of this event, which would have occurred subsequent to his 7th birthday, but Thoreau’s memory of the event would have been rather more like the trace memory of Keynes (John Shepard Keyes) and nothing like Walt Whitman’s — for Walt’s memory much later (a memory produced for the amazement of his friend 6. I don’t know whether this presentation of Mary Moody Emerson to Lafayette occurred earlier during this day, in Newburyport, or later, in Concord. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN John Burroughs), was that somehow he had obtained for himself a manly kiss:

On the visit of General Lafayette to this country, in 1824, he came over to Brooklyn in state, and rode through the city. The children of the schools turn’d out to join in the welcome. An edifice for a free public library for youths was just then commencing, and Lafayette consented to stop on his way and lay the corner-stone. Numerous children arriving on the ground, where a huge irregular excavation for the building was already dug, surrounded with heaps of rough stone, several gentlemen assisted in lifting the children to safe or convenient spots to see the ceremony. Among the rest, Lafayette, also helping the children, took up the five-year-old Walt Whitman, and pressing the child a moment to his breast, and giving him a kiss, handed him down to a safe spot in the excavation. — John Burroughs.

Abba Alcott would love to recount, in her old age, how her aunt Dorothy Sewall Quincy met the marquis at the ball held in his honor. We may be able to judge the nature of the reception and ball at which Dorothy Sewall Quincy “met her marquis” –presumably in Boston rather than in Concord where there would not have been an adequate infrastructure of edifices, servants, and the paraphernalia of privilege– by considering that the visit of this distinguished “friend of America,” who had been declared a guest of the nation by President James Monroe and by the federal Congress, was our nation’s chief social excitement of this year.

In Philadelphia, for instance, the celebrations had occupied several days, with the good general Lafayette bowing with grace of manner and greeting each lady and gentleman presented to him with “How do you do?” in very careful English, and the following account subsequently appeared in Niles’ Weekly Register: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

THE NATION’S GUEST On Monday morning, the 4th inst., about three hundred children of both sexes, from the different schools in Philadelphia, were arranged in the State House yard to receive General La Fayette: the spectacle was most beautiful and highly interesting. In the evening he attended a grand ball at the theatre: the lobby of which was converted into a magnificent saloon, adorned with beautiful rose, orange and lemon trees, in full bearing, and a profusion of shrubbery, pictures, busts, banners with classical inscriptions, etc., all illuminated with a multitude of lamps. For the dancers there were two compartments, the house and the stage; the upper part of the former was hung with scarlet drapery, studded with golden stars, while the great chandelier, with two additional ones, and a row of wax tapers, arranged over the canopy, shed down a blaze of light. The first and second tiers of boxes were crowded with ladies in the richest apparel, as spectators of the dazzling array. Beyond the proscenium the stage division wore the appearance of an Eastern pavilion in a garden, terminating with a view of an extended sea and landscape, irradiated by the setting sun, and meant to typify the Western world. The company began to assemble soon after seven o’clock, and consisted of two thousand or more persons, of whom 600 or 700 were invited strangers. Twenty-two hundred tickets had been issued. No disorder occurred in the streets, with the arrival and departure of the carriages, which formed a line along the adjoining squares. General La Fayette appeared at nine o’clock and was received at the door by the managers of the ball. He was conducted the whole length of the apartments through an avenue formed by the ladies to the bottom of the stage, where Mrs. Morris, Governor Shulze, and the Mayer waited to greet him in form: the full band playing an appropriate air during his progress. As soon as he was seated, the dancers were called, and at least four hundred were immediately on the floor. The dancing did not cease until near five o’clock, though the company began to retire about three. At twelve, one of the managers, from an upper box, proclaimed a toast “to the nation’s guest,” which was hailed with enthusiasm and accompanied by the descent of a banner from the ceiling. Behind this was suddenly displayed a portrait of the general, with allegorical figures. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A short while later, churning this topic, Niles’ Weekly Register offered information about the sexual overtones of toasts which had been offered at a similar upscale bash in Baltimore, and the manner in which such gallantries had been offered and received:

When the music for the dancing ceased, the military band of the first rifle regiment played the most pleasing and fashionable airs.... Just before the ladies of the first tables retired, General La Fayette requested permission to give the following toast, which was received in a manner that reflected credit on the fair objects of it: “The Baltimore ladies — the old gratitude of a young soldier mingles with the respectful sense of new obligation conferred on a veteran.” The ladies rose and saluted the general, and the sensation and effect is not to be described; when he sat down there was a burst of applause from all the gentlemen present.

Need we explore the overtones of this toast? The old French general is relying upon the national stereotypes according to which Frenchmen in tights are “gallant,” and is reminiscing about when he and his fellows were young and horny, traveling around in magnificent uniforms diddling the lovely young colonial maidens. He is saying to these ladies at the banquet “Maybe it was you I swived with when you were much younger, and you will remember but not I, or consider that maybe it was your mama,” and he was saying to their husbands as well, “Maybe it was your wife I swived with when we were so much younger, and she will remember but not I and she will most certainly not tell you about it, or maybe it was your mama, or your wife’s mama.” He remembers youthful delights and is grateful. Lafayette says all this in the most careful innuendo, “and the sensation and effect is not to be described.” What could the American males do but applaud wildly? –They couldn’t very well rush the main table and shove this codger’s head into his soup, could they?

In Newport, Rhode Island Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day Morng - called a little while at Jos Anthonys, then came on board the Packet & got home in about five hours - This little jant [jaunt] to Providence has been attended with depression on account of the inconvenience of leaving home when I have considerable of my own to attend too, & my outward circumstances require my attention - yet I have (I trust) humbly to acknowledge an evidence of divine favour & even an enlargement of my views & exercises which is worth sacrifice & even suffering for & as to my spiritual condition I have returned refreshed & enlivened, with renew’d desires for myself & the society of which I am a member, that I may grow in grace, & there by become increasingly usefull to the latter RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1825

From this year into 1830, Walt Whitman would be attending the public schools of Brooklyn.

This was Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island:

When Newport began to provide free schools, this generated strong opposition, which would eventuate in a petition to the general assembly from former senator Christopher G. Champlin and 150 other signers, seeking that such activity be prevented. In response the state assembly would limit the town’s expenditures for public education by instructing the town that in no event were its expenditures for the free education of “white children” to exceed $800. PUBLIC EDUCATION

Our national birthday, Monday the 4th of July:7 In Washington DC, taking part in a 4th-of-July parade that included a stage representing 24 states, mounted on wheels, President John Quincy Adams marched from the White House to the Capitol building.

In Boston, members of the military shared breakfast at the Exchange Coffee House (which must be what war is all about, unless you have a need to offer some alternate explanation).

Construction began on Connecticut’s Farmington Canal, from Massachusetts to Paumanok Long Island Sound, along the Connecticut River.

New York governor De Witt Clinton and Ohio governor Jeremiah Morrow presided at the groundbreaking for the Ohio and Erie Canal at Licking Summit, Ohio.

The geriatric general Lafayette came to Brooklyn to lay the cornerstone for the Apprentices’ Library, and 6- year-old Walt Whitman was present along with other children. Some of the children were lifted to spots where they could see, and 36 years later Whitman would reminisce that it had been the general himself who had lifted him: “It is one of the dearest of the boyish memories of the writer, that he now only saw, but was touched by the hands, and taken a moment to the breast of the immortal old Frenchman.” Young Whitman was so 7. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 21st birthday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN impressed by this event that he would write it up a total of three times (on one occasion he produced this memory of a manly kiss for the amazement of his buddy John Burroughs). No story such as this loses anything in the retelling, and by the time he would get to the 3d version he would not be merely handled at that 4th-of-July dedication long ago — but bussed as well:

CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY So who cares what actually happened?

Walt would be learning his letters in a Quaker school in Brooklyn which taught according to the system pioneered in England by Friend Joseph Lancaster. The class size was a hundred and the children were seated at desks in groups of ten. Some of the older children were assigned as monitors and gave instruction, while the room was supervised by a single adult. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1826

On the road to Stonewall,8 In America as in England, social conceptions of sodomy began to change in the late eighteenth century. Anti-sodomitical discourses gradually began the transference, similar to the English process, that moved sodomy from sin toward crime and onward into the realm of unspeakable acts and socially and medically aberrant behavior. This social anxiety and the homophobia it produced was already very much part of the history of proscriptive discourse as early as 1810, when in a case prosecuting an assault for attempted sodomy the offense is described as “that most horrible and detestable crime (among Christians not to be named), called sodomy.” At a later appeal of the sentence, one of the judges observed that “the crime of sodomy is too well known to be misunderstood and too disgusting to be defined.” Mid-nineteenth-century American texts began to inscribe sodomitical acts within a sphere that allowed an association of emotional context with the act, making the anxious leap from notions about the individual sodomite to speculations about a species marked by effeminacy and mental instability. Just as dubious commentary about intense male-male friendships played a part in social and literary discussion in England, so in America in the first half of the nineteenth century understanding of just what erotic implications were inscribed within literary portrayals of passionate male-male friendship was very much in crisis. Such portrayals —in the novels of Herman Melville or the poetry of Walt Whitman— could be but were not necessarily read as a definitive site of homoeroticism. It is important therefore, as Robert K. Martin says, to establish just what was “normal” for writers and for society in the mid-nineteenth century. Male-male friendships had to exist against a background that included the homophobia evident in legal proscription of sodomitical acts —though the death penalty was repealed in many states by mid-century— and against the often hysterical and certainly prohibitive discussion growing out of the moral purity movement that stressed especially the perceived evils of masturbation and its association with sexual perversion and “degeneracy” and increasingly and specifically with effeminacy and homosexuality. In an 1826 letter recovered by Martin Duberman, male-male intimacy is clouded by suspicion of perversion and also by what seems to be a curious dichotomy between the imperatives of intimacy and a somewhat uncertain though troubled sense of just what such intimacy might imply. In the letter Jeff (Thomas Jefferson Withers) writes to his friend Jim (James H. Hammond) —both men are in their twenties— wondering “whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole — the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling.” 8. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969. Bear in mind that the concept of perversion would not formally enter out medical terminology for some sixteen years yet, when it would be defined in Dunglison’s MEDICAL LEXICON in 1842 as one of the four modifications of function in disease, the other three modifications of function being augmentation, diminution, and abolition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN In the history of the politics of homosexuality, this was an important year, for in this year in England, the law of the capital crime of sodomy (whatever it was — presumably it was, ordinarily, anal penetration of one male by another, but perhaps it might include, on occasion, anal penetration of a female) was tightened, despite the fact that the death penalty was being abolished for over a hundred other crimes, by removal of the need to prove emission of seed as well as penetration, and the death penalty re-enacted. According to Jeffrey Weeks’s COMING OUT: HOMOSEXUAL POLITICS IN BRITAIN FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT (revised edition, Quartet Books 1990): England: Pages 11-12: Before 1885 the only legislation which directly affected homosexual acts was that referring to sodomy or buggery.... The 1533 Act of Henry VIII, which first brought sodomy within the scope of statute law, superseding ecclesiastical law, adopted the same criterion as the Church: all acts of sodomy were equally condemned as being “against nature,” whether between man and woman, man and beast, or man and man. The penalty for the “Abominable Vice of Buggary” was death. The keynote Act, re-enacted in 1563, was the basis for all homosexual convictions up to 1885. Page 13: As part of his consolidation of the English criminal law, Sir Robert Peel actually tightened up the law on sodomy in 1826. The need to prove emission of seed as well as penetration was removed, and the death penalty re-enacted. This was particularly striking at a period when the death penalty was abolished for over a hundred other crimes.... When Lord John Russell attempted to removed “unnatural offences” from the list of capital crimes in 1841, he was forced to withdraw through lack of parliamentary support. Pages 13-15: The death penalty for buggery, tacitly abandoned after 1836, was finally abolished in England and Wales in 1861 (in Scotland in 1889) to be replaced by penal servitude of between ten years and life. It was to remain thus for homosexual activities until 1967. But this was a prelude not to a liberalization of the law but to a tightening of its grip. By section 11 (the “Labouchere Amendment”) of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, all male homosexual acts short of buggery, whether committed in public or private, were made illegal.... And thirteen years later, the Vagrancy Act of 1898 clamped down on homosexual “soliciting.” These two enactments represented a singular hardening of the legal situation and were a crucial factor in the determination of modern attitudes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1829

November 15, Sunday: Friend Elias Hicks’s farewell sermon was attended by a young and impressionable boy named Walt Whitman.

This is something that Whitman would recall much later, in 1888 while he was ill and was supposing that he was dying. He recalled that he had been fortunate enough to have been taken by his parents, who had been involved with Quakers,9 to hear Friend Elias at his farewell sermon in a

handsome ball-room, on Brooklyn Heights, overlooking New York, and in full sight of that great city, and its North and East Rivers fill’d with ships— ... the second floor of “Morrison’s Hotel,” used for the most genteel concerts, balls, and assemblies— a large, cheerful, gay-color’d room, with glass chandeliers bearing myriads of sparkling pendants, plenty of settees and chairs, and a sort of velvet divan running all round the side-walls.

Hicks had worshiped and preached at the Hester Street Friends Meeting that First Day afternoon, and the meeting in the ballroom in the evening was what Quakers term an “appointed meeting.” It marked the culmination of his latest trip in which he had covered 1,500 miles in five months. His health failing, everyone including Friend Elias knew that the meeting also marked the completion of his years of minuted ministry. “Many, very many, were in tears.”

ELIAS HICKS

The topic on which he spoke that night was, characteristically, “What is the chief end of man?” Whitman later commented that Friend Elias’s presentation was one of “pleading, tender, nearly agonizing conviction” and that of the Society of Friends “Elias Hicks has so far prov’d to be the most mark’d individual result.”10 One 9. The involvement of Whitman’s parents with the Quakers is not to be overemphasized: it was more on his father’s part than on his mother’s yet did little to protect his father from a substance dependency upon ethanol. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN of the things this uneducated old Raskolnik farmer had been trying to accomplish was a boycott of all products created by the forced and unremunerated labors of enslaved peoples. He demonstrated during meetings for worship that the old as well as the young can resort to guerrilla theater, informing one Quaker elder for instance that he admired his ignorance. The use of tobacco, as a product of slave labor and by no means a necessity of life, was so obviously, he argued, a far greater sin than thinking mistaken thoughts about Jesus Christ –who was quite capable of taking care of himself, thank you– that it was evident that the Religious Society of Friends, in being primarily concerned over the content of its creedal statement, had its head screwed on backward. Taking as his motto “a work well begun is half done,” Hicks insisted that our religious faith should be as simple as a child’s. Religion is “righteousness, justice, and mercy,” and has little or nothing to do with believing the truth.

Carpenters and Testifyers and Surveyors

Henry Thoreau and Elias Hicks were both surveyors not only in that they shared a learned skill and in that they

10. Whitman 1244. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN had both constructed the simple instruments they utilized in this skill (Thoreau’s are shown on the next page)

but also in the fine sense of William Cowper’s “Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk, during 11 his solitary abode on the Island of Juan Fernandez, 1782” which Thoreau quotes in Chapter 2 of WALDEN: “I am monarch of all I survey, My right there is none to dispute.”

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 15th of 11 M / In the Afternoon our Fr Wm Almy attended our meeting & was much engaged for wellfare - & his preaching at this house stands high in my mind & I am ofter thankful that we have so able an advocate for the Truth as it is in Jesus Christ. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

11. Cowper, William. THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM COWPER. New York: Thomas Crowell, no date, page 425. But note that John Brown was also a surveyor, or rather pretended to be one. Is there that much difference between being a surveyor and pretending to be one? –You betcha, it’s every bit as big a difference as being in the cause of God and justifying oneself as being in the cause of God! HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

NOTE: Recently it has been reported that we have, on an archival radio tape from the 1950s, a DJ alleging that he was playing a wax cylinder of Whitman reading his poem “America” at a recital in 1890a few years before the old poet died. It would be nice to get that sound bite and use it in conjunction with this multimedia textbase, especially in regard to the possibility that since Walt heard Friend Elias deliver his farewell address, his poetic style of delivery may have been influenced by Quaker preaching cadence. For although this is a sorry fact, we no longer have a sense of what that “Quaker singsong” had been like. “Specimen Days”

From 1824 to ’28 our family lived in Brooklyn in Front, Cranberry and Johnson streets. In the latter my father built a nice house for a home, and afterwards another in Tillary street. We occupied them, one after the other, but they were mortgaged, and we lost them. I yet remember Lafayette’s visit.1 Most of these years I went to the public schools. It must have been about 1829 or ’30 that I went with my father [Page 699] and mother to hear Elias Hicks preach in a ball-room on Brooklyn heights. At about the same time employ’d as a boy in an office, lawyers’, father and two sons, Clarke’s, Fulton Street, near Orange. I had a nice desk and window-nook to myself; Edward C. kindly help’d me at my handwriting and composition, and, (the signal event of my life up to that time,) subscribed for me to a big circulating library. For a time I now revel’d in romance-reading of all kinds; first, the “Arabian Nights,” all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, with sorties in very many other directions, took in Walter Scott’s novels, one after another, and his poetry, (and continue to enjoy novels and poetry to this day.)

1.“On the visit of General Lafayette to this country, in 1824, he came over to Brooklyn in state, and rode through the city. The children of the schools turn’d out to join in the welcome. An edifice for a free public library for youths was just then commencing, and Lafayette consented to stop on his way and lay the corner-stone. Numerous children arriving on the ground, where a huge irregular excavation for the building was already dug, surrounded with heaps of rough stone, several gentlemen assisted in lifting the children to safe or convenient spots to see the ceremony. Among the rest, Lafayette, also helping the children, took up the five-year-old Walt Whitman, and pressing the child a moment to his breast, and giving him a kiss, handed him down to a safe spot in the excavation.” — John Burroughs.

“Specimen Days”

REMINISCENCE OF ELIAS HICKS To-day a letter from Mrs. E. S. L., Detroit, accompanied in a little post-office roll by a rare old engraved head of Elias Hicks, (from a portrait in oil by Henry Inman, painted for J. V. S., must have been 60 years or more ago, in [Page 880] New York) — among the rest the following excerpt about E. H. in the letter: “I have listen’d to his preaching so often when a child, and sat with my mother at social gatherings where he was the centre, and every one so pleas’d and stirr’d by his conversation. I hear that you contemplate writing or speaking about him, and I wonder’d whether you had a picture of him. As I am the owner of two, I send you one.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1830

Caroline Downes Brooks was away from Concord during the decade of the 1830s, being properly schooled.

Walt Whitman left off public schooling in Brooklyn to become the office boy of a lawyer. Later he would be the office boy for a doctor. On the side he would be doing apprentice work in the printing trade, in various shops. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 5, Friday: At the Tower of London, limelight was tested before a group of scientists against several other designs.

Johann Nepomuk Hummel arrived in Paris on his current tour. It was his 2d trip to the French capital.

According to the Niles Weekly Register of April 10, page 124, an Italian artist who had asked to make a plaster casting of the face of the body of Elias Hicks before its burial, but had been rebuffed, hired ghouls from New- York to dig up his body to make the desired death mask.12 The Hicks family in the morning discovered various bits of plaster in the grass around the gravesite. The gang had gotten into a fight over how the moneys were to be distributed among themselves and in the fight they had shattered the plaster cast — but it would be possible to piece it back together and the sculptor would be able to make a number of busts which he would hawk through the streets of New-York. Walt Whitman bought one of these busts and it would be standing in his home, in 1856, when Henry Thoreau came to visit.13

ELIAS HICKS

William Lloyd Garrison was just about to leave off being the co-editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation: “The circulation of [David Walker’s AN APPEAL ... TO THE COLORED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD....] has proven one thing conclusively — that the boasted security of the slave States ... is mere affectation, or something worse.”

12. I have also seen a claim that the person responsible for the death mask at the Swarthmore College library was Whitman’s boss Samuel E. Clement. 13. Richard Field had been allowed to make a silhouette of Friend Elias Hicks in 1829 and, without his knowledge, Harry Ketchum had painted a portrait. It was from these sources, rather than from this gang’s shattered plaster death mask or this Italian’s sculpture, that Henry Inman would in 1838 derive the portrait which appears here and from which William Ordway Partridge would create the bust which now stands in Friends Historical Library in Swarthmore College. We have lost track of the whereabouts of the bust which was viewed in the Whitman family home by Henry Thoreau in 1856, for, clearly, the biographers of Whitman, such as the author of the “embraced only himself” snippet which I quote in one of the blind text boxes (Harold Bloom, in his recent THE AMERICAN RELIGION: THE EMERGENCE OF THE POST-CHRISTIAN NATION), and the author of the “grateful for his carnality” snippet which I quote in another blind text box (Robert K. Martin in his THE HOMOSEXUAL TRADITION IN A MERICAN POETRY), have not regarded such items as of significance in their understanding of their literary light/sexual hero. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1831

A Hicksite Quaker, Friend Samuel E. Clements, hired 12-year-old Walt Whitman, the son of one of his subscribers, as a printer’s apprentice (printer’s devil) at the Long Island Patriot. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1832

Three reminisces pertaining to this year, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

STARTING NEWSPAPERS I commenced when I was but a boy of eleven or twelve writing sentimental bits for the old “Long Island Patriot,” in Brooklyn; this was about 1832. Soon after, I had a piece or two in George P. Morris’s then celebrated and fashionable “Mirror,” of New York city. I remember with what half-suppress’d excitement I used to watch for the big, fat, red-faced, slow-moving, very old English carrier who distributed the “Mirror” in Brooklyn; and when I got one, opening and cutting the leaves with trembling fingers. How it made my heart double-beat to see my piece on the pretty white paper, in nice type.

On another occasion he reminisced about this period: “Specimen Days”

PRINTING OFFICE. — OLD BROOKLYN After about two years went to work in a weekly newspaper and printing office, to learn the trade. The paper was the “Long Island Patriot,” owned by S. E. Clements, who was also postmaster. An old printer in the office, William Harts-horne, a revolutionary character, who had seen Washington, was a special friend of mine, and I had many a talk with him about long past times. The apprentices, including myself, boarded with his grand-daughter. I used occasionally to go out riding with the boss, who was very kind to us boys; Sundays he took us all to a great old rough, fortress-looking stone church, on Joralemon street, near where the Brooklyn city hall now is — (at that time broad fields and country roads everywhere around.1 Afterward I work’d on the “Long Island [Page 700] Star,” Alden Spooner’s paper. My father all these years pursuing his trade as carpenter and builder, with varying fortune. There was a growing family of children — eight of us — my brother Jesse the oldest, myself the second, my dear sisters Mary and Hannah Louisa, my brothers Andrew, George, Thomas Jefferson, and then my youngest brother, Edward, born 1835, and always badly crippled, as I am myself of late years.

1.Of the Brooklyn of that time (1830-40) hardly anything remains, except the lines of the old streets. The population was then between ten and twelve thousand. For a mile Fulton street was lined with magnificent elm trees. The character of the place was thoroughly rural. As a sample of comparative values, it may be mention’d that twenty-five acres in what is now the most costly part of the city, bounded by Flatbush and Fulton avenues, were then bought by Mr. Parmentier, a French emigré, for $4000. Who remembers the old places as they were? Who remembers the old citizens of that time? Among the former were Smith & Wood’s, Coe Downing’s, and other public houses at the ferry, the old Ferry itself, Love lane, the Heights as then, the Wallabout with the wooden bridge, and the road out beyond Fulton street to the old toll-gate. Among the latter were the majestic and genial General Jeremiah Johnson, with others, Gabriel Furman, Rev. E. M. Johnson, Alden Spooner, Mr. Pierrepont, Mr. Joralemon, Samuel Willoughby, Jonathan Trotter, George Hall, Cyrus P. Smith, N. B. Morse, John Dikeman, Adrian Hegeman, William Udall, and old Mr. Duflon, with his military garden. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Also in about this year, he sighted a J.J. Aster and wrote it down in his book of odd American birds: “Specimen Days”

BROADWAY SIGHTS Besides Fulton ferry, off and on for years, I knew and frequented Broadway — that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. Here I saw, during those times, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Clay, William Henry Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Lajos Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents. I remember seeing James Fenimore Cooper in a court-room in Chambers street, back of the city hall, where he was carrying on a law case — (I think it was a charge of libel he had brought against some one.) I also remember seeing Edgar A. Poe, and having a short interview with him, (it must have been in 1845 or ’6,) in his office, second story of a corner building, (Duane or Pearl street.) He was editor and owner or part owner of “the Broadway Journal.” [Page 702] The visit was about a piece of mine he had publish’d. Poe was very cordial, in a quiet way, appear’d well in person, dress, &c. I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner and matter; very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded. For another of my reminiscences, here on the west side, just below Houston street, I once saw (it must have been about 1832, of a sharp, bright January day) a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs, for a ride. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw. (You needn’t think all the best animals are brought up nowadays; never was such horseflesh as fifty years ago on Long Island, or south, or in New York city; folks look’d for spirit and mettle in a nag, not tame speed merely.) Well, I, a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, stopp’d and gazed long at the spectacle of that fur- swathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants, and the careful seating of him in the sleigh. I remember the spirited, champing horses, the driver with his whip, and a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. The old man, the subject of so much attention, I can almost see now. It was John Jacob Astor. 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1834

The Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem MA, which had been organized as a segregated (black) association, was reorganizing to allow the participation of white women. ABOLITIONISM

In the face of all these moral dilemmas, the young white man Walt Whitman knew exactly what was needed. We, the very righteous Northerners, needed to stand up in a manly way, and take control of the situation, and resist being dominated by all those dastardly Southerners.

[WHITMAN’S FIRST PUBLISHED POEM APPEARS ON THE NEXT SCREEN] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN DOUGH-FACE SONG

— Like dough; soft; yielding to pressure; pale. — Webster’s Dictionary. We are all docile dough-faces, And what if children, growing up, They knead us with the fist, In future seasons read They, the dashing southern lords, The thing we do? and heart and tongue We labor as they list; Accurse us for the deed? For them we speak — or hold our tongues, The future cannot touch us; For them we turn and twist. The present gain we heed. We join them in their howl against Then, all together, dough-faces! Free soil and “abolition,” Let’s stop the exciting clatter, That firebrand — that assassin knife — And pacify slave-breeding wrath Which risk our land’s condition, By yielding all the matter; And leave no peace of life to any For otherwise, as sure as guns, Dough-faced politician. The Union it will shatter. To put down “agitation,” now, Besides, to tell the honest truth We think the most judicious; (For us an innovation,) To damn all “northern fanatics,” Keeping in with the slave power Those “traitors” black and vicious; Is our personal salvation; The “reg’lar party usages” We’ve very little to expect For us, and no “new issues.” From t’ other part of the nation. Things have come to a pretty pass, Besides it’s plain at Washington When a trifle small as this, Who likeliest wins the race, Moving and bartering nigger slaves, What earthly chance has “free soil” Can open an abyss, For any good fat place? With jaws a-gape for “the two great parties”; While many a daw has feather’d his nest, A pretty thought, I wis! [Page 1077] By his creamy and meek dough-face. [Page 1078] Principle — freedom! — fiddlesticks! Take heart, then, sweet companions, We know not where they’re found. Be steady, Scripture Dick! Rights of the masses — progress! — bah! Webster, Cooper, Walker, Words that tickle and sound; To your allegiance stick! But claiming to rule o’er “practical men” With Brooks, and Briggs and Phoenix, Is very different ground. Stand up through thin and thick! Beyond all such we know a term We do not ask a bold brave front; Charming to ears and eyes, We never try that game; With it we’ll stab young Freedom, ’Twould bring the storm upon our heads, And do it in disguise; A huge mad storm of shame; Speak soft, ye wily dough-faces — Evade it, brothers — “compromise” That term is “compromise.” Will answer just the same.

ABOLITIONISM HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A reminisce pertaining to himself in this period, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances. 1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper in my native town, Huntington NY. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1835

A reminisce pertaining to this period, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1836

Manufacture of Samuel Colt’s revolvers began in Paterson, New Jersey, but the “Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company” would need to suspend operations for a period due to the complexity of the machining of the parts.

Walt Whitman would until 1841 be teaching in several schools on Paumanok Long Island — schools in Norwich, Hempstead, Babylon, Long Swamp, Smithtown, Woodbury, Dix Hills, Whitestone, and Southold. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Here are a couple of Whitman’s later-life reminisces pertaining to this epoch of his life: “Specimen Days”

GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances. 1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper in my native town, Huntington. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.”

“Specimen Days”

MY PASSION FOR FERRIES Living in Brooklyn or New York city from this time forward, 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 picturesqueness. Almost daily, [Page 701] later, (’50 to ’60,) I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath — the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day — the hurrying, splashing sea-tides — the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes, often a string of big ones outward bound to distant ports — the myriads of white-sail’d schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the marvelously beautiful yachts — the majestic sound boats as they rounded the Battery and came along towards 5, afternoon, eastward bound — the prospect off towards Staten island, or down the Narrows, or the other way up the Hudson — what refreshment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me years ago (and many a time since.) My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere — how well I remember them all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 6, Sunday: In a predawn assault after an 11-day battle the garrison at the Alamo –an unfinished old Franciscan mission complex outside the pueblo of San Antonio in the “Texas” district of Mexico that had not been in use as a mission for a good deal of time and had been recycled as a fort of sorts– was eliminated by a Mexican army of 4,000 under General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.14 Davy Crockett, William Travis, Colonel James Bowie, and 143 other United States citizens and their slaves, led by William Travis, had through some inexplicable obtuseness stuck around to get killed.

James Bowie

Davy Crockett

A teacher on Long Island, Walt Whitman, himself not among the fallen, nevertheless found the Eastern

14. By this point the old mission of the Franciscans in the Mejican province of Tejas, the mission which had been founded under the name San Antonio de Valero, was being generally characterized as “the Alamo.” It had picked up this nickname because of a Spanish cavalry unit that had been using it as a headquarters, that having been the designation for this cavalry unit. (“Remember La Mission San Antonio de Valero!!” — well, it wouldn’t have worked very well as an Anglo-Saxon battle chant, would it?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN newspaper reports of this defeat to be of considerable interest (SONG OF MYSELF, 34):

REMEMBERING THE ALAMO ...I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,... HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1 At that time the fee for teaching an older child was usually about a shilling or 12 /2 cents and teaching, for a male teacher, usually brought in an income of about $200.00 per year.15 Whitman was supplementing this teaching income by writing for various New-York papers: “Specimen Days”

15. To read a story of a teacher/student sex scandal which may or may not have had Walt Whitman as its principal, see Reynolds, David, WALT WHITMAN’S AMERICA (Knopf):

That I could forget the mockers and insults! That I could forget the trickling tears and the blows of the bludgeons and hammers! HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 6th of 3M 1836 / Our meeting this morning was indeed a very solid good one — tho’ mostly in Silence - it Seemed to me there was scarcely an Idle or irreverend mind present - Father had a short testimony to bear - soon after which the Meeting closed. — Good meeting again in the Afternoon & Father had a little to say — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

March 27, Palm Sunday: Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 1st day 27th of 3 M / Our Meetings were silent, but solid good seasons. Father yet confined with a very havy cold & lame back — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

In Kirtland, Ohio, the 1st Mormon temple began to be dedicated (this would be a drawn-out process).

At Fort Defiance (Presidio La Bahia) in the town of Goliad, General Jose de Urrea, acting reluctantly under repeated direct orders of President of Mexico Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who considered these foreigners to have the same legal standing as pirates, had 303 Texian prisoners of war marched out in three columns in three different directions, and then gunned down. Of the 40 who had been unable to walk, 39 were killed inside the fort. The commanding officer, Colonel James W. Fannin, was the last to be executed, and asked the firing squad to shoot him in the heart rather than in the face — so of course they shot him in the face. Of the 303 men in the three columns, 28 were able to feign death and escape.16 Now I tell what I know in Texas in my early youth, (I tell not the fall of Alamo, Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,) ’Tis the tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men. Retreating they had form’d in a hollow square with their baggage for breastworks, Nine hundred lives out of the surrounding enemy’s, nine times their number, was the price they took in advance, Their colonel was wounded and their ammunition gone, They treated for an honorable capitulation, receiv’d writing and seal, gave up their arms and march’d back prisoners of war. They were the glory of the race of rangers, Matchless with horse, rifle, song, supper, courtship, Large, turbulent, generous, handsome, proud, and affectionate, Bearded, sunburnt, drest in the free costume of hunters, Not a single one over thirty years of age. The second First-day morning they were brought out in squads and massacred, it was beautiful early summer, The work commenced about five o’clock and was over by eight.

None obey’d the command to kneel, Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight, A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together, The maim’d and mangled dug in the dirt, the new-comers saw them there, Some half-kill’d attempted to crawl away, 16. Some 100 others were also executed (by the way, at this point Halley’s Comet was finally fading from being visible to the naked eye). SKY EVENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN These were despatch’d with bayonets or batter’d with the blunts of muskets. A youth not seventeen years old seiz’d his assassin till two more came to release him, The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood. At eleven o’clock began the burning of the bodies; That is the tale of the murder of the four hundred and twelve young men.

— Walt Whitman, SONG OF MYSELF, 34 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1837

A reminisce pertaining in part to this year, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances. 1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper in my native town, Huntington. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1838

If you can find a copy of the Long Islander journal of Huntington, New York for this year of the next, don’t show it to anyone until after you have negotiated, because it’s worth real money: all copies are lost and we no longer have any idea what sort of material Walt Whitman was producing in those early days.

Mary Rotch, who had a summer house “The Glen” on the outskirts of Newport, Rhode Island, erected a New Bedford home for herself and her companion Mary Gifford at the northwest corner of South 6th Street and Cherry Street (Margaret Fuller would be there with her for awhile; the building would in the 1890s become the Unitarian parsonage).

At some point during this year Margaret wrote in her journal “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man.”

On the road to Stonewall,17 Henry David Thoreau defined friendship erotically in an 1838 poem titled “Friendship.” Love is the “connecting link between heaven and earth,” and lovers are “kindred shapes” possessing a “kindred nature.” Indeed, they are intended “to be mates, / Exposed to equal fates / Eternally.” Lovers are like “two sturdy oaks” whose “roots are intertwined insep’rably,” anticipating also Walt Whitman’s choice of the oak as a symbol of manly love. Thoreau argues wittily that “love cannot speak ... without the help of Greek, / or any other tongue” (Read Henry Thoreau’s Journal for 1838 (æt. 20-21), 1:40-43) Plato’s SYMPOSIUM originates the imagery of kindred lovers, and Greek, as the only tongue in which such love can speak, locates the passion within the homoerotic traditions associated with Greece.

17. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1839

A reminisce pertaining in part to this year, by Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances. 1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper in my native town, Huntington. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN At Montréal, Thomas Clotworthy, 17 years of age, and Henry Cole, 11 years of age, found sharing a bed, were persecuted in a court of law.

In his journal for this year, on the road to Stonewall,18 Henry Thoreau would write “The first I conceive of true friendship when some rare specimen of manhood presents itself.” Speculations about eroticized friendship appear also in journal entries Thoreau was making in 1839, wherein he meditates on the relation between love and friendship. His “rare specimens” are described horticulturally —like Waldo Emerson’s and Walt Whitman’s leaves— as “young buds of manhood.” “By what degrees of consanguinity,” he inquires, “is this succulent and rank growing slip of manhood related to me?” The “degrees of consanguinity” of course suggest those limits within which marriage is allowed or disallowed. The sanctified relationships he imagines with these rare specimens of manhood are indeed holy, for in them he can “worship moral beauty” manifest in manly flesh. He is touched by transcendental ecstasy when he sees them, for “they are some fresher wind that blows, some new fragrance that breathes.” Nearly divinities, Thoreau's young men create the world he lives in: “they make the landscape and sky for us” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108). Thoreau's metaphors protest the separation of and work to conflate friendship and homoerotic passion: “commonly we degrade Love and Friendship by presenting them under a trivial dualism” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108). The friendship tradition as practiced by the vast majority of heterosexual writers participated in that dualism by imposing on friendship a misread Platonism and by firmly separating it from the presumed sole legitimate arena of sexual experience, the heterosexual. Such texts expressed capitalized Friendship in terms of male friendships only, as Emerson clearly does in his essay on the subject. This of course could also be a complicit action, for it thus gave writers the chance to engage in extravagant protestations of male-male friendship, which could pass without any imputation of impropriety —either physically or emotionally— though such impropriety may indeed have been implied, intended, or even desired. But Thoreau is willing to theorize a dualism between manly love and other —heterosexual— love: “the rules of other intercourse are all inapplicable to this.” “This” intercourse —specifically made different in his text from the “other intercourse”— has special laws and a special site, a divine realm he calls a “parcel of heaven.” When we are separated from that “parcel of heaven we call our friend,” that separation is “source enough for all the elegies that ever were written” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 107-108).

18. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1840

Walt Whitman, age 21, was “stumping” through Long Island for the Van Buren presidential campaign. A reminisce pertaining in part to this year: “Specimen Days”

GROWTH — HEALTH — WORK I develop’d (1833-4-5) into a healthy, strong youth (grew too fast, though, was nearly as big as a man at 15 or 16.) Our family at this period moved back to the country, my dear mother very ill for a long time, but recover’d. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour’d everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could — sometimes witnessing fine performances. 1836-7, work’d as compositor in printing offices in New York city. Then, when little more than eighteen, and for a while afterwards, went to teaching country schools down in Queens and Suffolk counties, Long Island, and “boarded round.” (This latter I consider one of my best experiences and deepest lessons in human nature behind the scenes, and in the masses.) In ’39, ’40, I started and publish’d a weekly paper in my native town, Huntington, New York. Then returning to New York city and Brooklyn, work’d on as printer and writer, mostly prose, but an occasional shy at “poetry.”

During this year and the following one Walt Whitman’s letters to Abraham Paul Leech reveal him to have been a bored, frustrated country schoolteacher who was able to express a graceless contempt not only for the parents of his charges, but for his charges themselves. (It ain’t a pretty picture.)

During this decade Walt was striding the sands of Coney Island declaiming “Homer and Shakspeare to the surf and seagulls.” There were a few resort hotels in the area at which more well-heeled gents such as Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun might hang out but there was no amusement park as yet — and would be none until subsequent to the US Civil War. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Spring: The steamboat Herald which had sunk in the Merrimack River and been refitted as a side-wheel excursion steamer capable of taking 500 passengers on an outing was carried overland down and around Pawtucket Falls, and when the water rose in the spring it was floated down to Newburyport and sailed to New-York harbor — where it became a ferry.19

THE FERRY AT BROOKLYN PIER IN 1840

19. We may wonder whether it was one of the ferries that Walt Whitman rode between Manhattan and Brooklyn: “Specimen Days”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Steamboat service was established between Norwich CT and New-York harbor. At Norwich the steamboatSTEAMBOAT passengers would be able to connect with the Worcester-Norwich RR, and at Worcester with the Boston-Worcester RR. –But the river ice would prove not to be manageable this far upstream.

When the Cunard Steamship Line selected Boston as its North American terminus, Boston became a major US port for immigrants during the decade of the 1840s.20

When Herman Melville’s brother’s business, which was his source of employment, went bankrupt in this year,

20. Until, that is, lack of good rail connections to the interior caused it to lose out to other ports. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN he would be traveling to Illinois to seek opportunities there, part of the way on a Mississippi steamboat.

The Fort Snelling surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, was at his own request and for the benefit of his health transferred from the Minnesota Territory to a post in Florida — where a war upon the Seminole natives HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN was at the moment taking place. (Dr. Emerson would find Florida also to be bad for his health. He had a delicate constitution, seemingly fitted only for travel from post to post.)

November 28, Saturday: Giles Waldo indicated in a letter written on this date, a letter still extant, that local schoolmaster Walt Whitman had fallen under suspicion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A painting apparently has on its back the inscription “Walt Whitman’s School at Southold 1840,” attributed to the Long Island artist William Sidney Mount, although this title only appeared by X-ray and although “Smithtown” has been written over “Southold.” For some time this school was referred to as “the Sodom School,” and evidently there was some talk of holding a tarring and feathering party. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1841

Walt Whitman began submitting prose and verse to New-York magazines and newspapers. From this year into 1847 he would function in various journalistic capacities, as print compositor, as reporter, as fiction writer, as editor, for a number of newspapers in the New-York area, such as the New World, the Aurora, the Tattler, and the Long Island Star. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 3, Sunday: It was most likely on this day that the Reverend Ralph Smith of the Presbyterian church of Southhold (a town on the north fork of Paumanok Long Island) denounced from the pulpit a 22-year-old schoolmaster, Walt Whitman. Although the subject matter of said denunciation has been removed from the church record, we know that there was talk locally of organizing a tar-and-feathers party and that the school at which Whitman had been teaching would for approximately the next century be referred to locally as “the Sodom school.” A painting attributed to the Long Island artist William Sidney Mount apparently has on its back the inscription “Walt Whitman’s School at Southold 1840,” although this title only appears by X-ray and although the word “Southold” has been written over with “Smithtown.”

The Acushnet, and Herman Melville, “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.”

HERMAN MELVILLE

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld gave birth to Theodore Grimké Weld. THEODORE DWIGHT WELD HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August: The schoolteacher Walt Whitman’s story, “Death In The School-room (A Fact),” about a schoolmaster who had beaten a pupil to death, was published in John L. O’Sullivan’s The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

October 26, Tuesday: Joseph Leidy matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania, under the instruction of Dr. Paul B. Goddard, then Demonstrator of Anatomy and Professor Horner’s prosector (in conjunction with Mr. Robert Cornelius, Dr. Goddard would be the 1st in Philadelphia to create a Daguerreotype).

Lieutenant Eyre would report21 that “General Sale started in the direction of Gundamuk, Captain Macgregor having half-frightened, half-cajoled the refractory Giljye chiefs into what proved to have been a most hollow truce.” Meanwhile, the 37th native infantry, three companies of the Shah’s sappers under Captain Walsh, and three guns of the mountain train under Lieutenant Green were retreating without much opposition to the relative safety of the metropolitan capital of Afghanistan.

In anticipation of the campaigns for the 1842 elections, Isaac Van Anden and Henry Cruse Murphy began printing The Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, dedicating this new paper to what they termed the Democratic belief in equal rights (presumably, they meant by this what prominent Democrat Nathaniel Hawthorne would mean by it, the equal right of all white men to own as many black slaves as they could afford to purchase). Initially this would be a morning paper (it would be appearing for the next 114 years without skipping a beat). Among its editors would be the infamous Walt Whitman, who would be getting his not-equal- rights-enough ass kicked out after only a couple of years. This is the newspaper that would absorb every other Brooklyn daily paper with the exception of the Brooklyn Citizen. At one point it would become our nation’s most widely read afternoon newspaper.

21. Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). THE MILITARY OPERATIONS AT CABUL: WHICH ENDED IN THE RETREAT AND DESTRUCTION OF THE BRITISH ARMY, JANUARY 1842, WITH A JOURNAL OF IMPRISONMENT IN AFFGHANISTAN. Philadelphia PA: Carey and Hart, 1843; London: J. Murray, 1843 (three editions); Lieut. V. Eyre (Sir Vincent Eyre, 1811-1881). PRISON SKETCHES: COMPRISING PORTRAITS OF THE CABUL PRISONERS AND OTHER SUBJECTS; ADAPTED FOR BINDING UP WITH THE JOURNALS OF LIEUT. V. EYRE, AND LADY SALE; LITHOGRAPHED BY LOWES DICKINSON. London: Dickinson and Son, [1843?] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Those of us who take an interest in this sort of thing will be interested to glance at the Long Island train schedule as published in this gazette, most especially as the fuzzy woodcut they used by way of illustration would have represented a local contemporary train recognizable to its current riders: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1842

Waldo Emerson explained in the published version of his lecture “THE TRANSCENDENTALIST” that transcendentalism was being referred to in New England as new views:

what are called new views here in New England

but of course he mentioned this idiom only to contradict it, and insist that such thoughts were

not new, but the very oldest....

Emerson asserted that Transcendentalism got its title from the constructs of Herr Professor Immanuel Kant (a philosopher whom, demonstrably, he never took the trouble to understand — if he even went to the trouble of reading him at all): although our sensory experience was a mere illusion in presenting to us an image of a material universe, nevertheless through an act of conscious imagination we could see, through this transparent illusion of materiality, to a real ideal realm. He thus cumbered the Transcendentalist movement with a misunderstood Continental legitimation which amounted to excess baggage. (Thoreau, by way of radical contrast with this cheap stuff, nowhere discussed such topics on their merits except to quip in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS that “the universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions.”)

WALDEN: The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Walt Whitman was writing a temperance novella entitled FRANKLIN EVANS, OR THE INEBRIATE. It was in this year that Whitman became acquainted with the essays of Waldo Emerson:

I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 2, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson resided at the Globe Hotel on Broadway while delivering his six lectures at the Library Society. Walt Whitman editorialized about the antics of Horace Greeley at the lectures (“he would flounce about like a fish out of water, or a tickled girl — look around, to see those behind him and at his side; all of which plainly told to those both far and near, that he knew a thing or two more about these matter than other men”) and concluded that “We should not be surprised if [Emerson] made a good many converts in Gotham.” In fact, Emerson had made at least one news-maven convert:

I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.

While in New-York, Emerson visited Henry James, Sr. (and his one infant son, William James’s, the future philosopher and psychologist, with Henry James, Jr., the future novelist, not being yet even a twinkle in his father’s eye) at his new home on the east side of Washington Square.22

Henry Thoreau wrote to Mrs. Lucy Jackson Brown from Concord: Concord March 2nd 1842. Dear Friend, I believe I have nothing new to tell you, for what was news you have learned from other sources. I am much the same person that I was, who should be so much better; yet when I realize what has transpired, and the greatness of the part I am unconsciously acting, I am thrilled, and it seems as if there were none in history to match it. Soon after John's death I listened to a music-box, and, if, at any time, that event had seemed inconsistent with the beauty and harmony of the universe, it was then gently constrained into the placid course of nature by those steady notes, in mild and unoffended tone echoing far and wide under the heavens. But I find these things more strange than sad to me. What right have I to grieve, who have not ceased to wonder? We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recom- pense for all. That is, if we are faithful;— for a just grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin on Arabian trees.— Only nature has a right to grieve perpet- ually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not. We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones— There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light. I do not wish to see John ever again— I mean him who is dead— but that other whom only he would have wished to see, or to be, of whom he was the imperfect representative. For we are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being. 22.The history books don’t mention anyone else in the home, or suggest where this two-month-old infant had come from, so perhaps we can infer that the home had a cabbage patch out back, or perhaps we can infer that there was someone or other of the female persuasion in the environs, a Mrs. James, who simply wasn’t of any importance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN As for Waldo, he died as the mist rises from the brook, which the sun will soon dart his rays through. Do not the flowers die every autumn? He had not even taken root here. I was not startled to hear that he was dead;— it seemed the most natural event that could happen. His fine organisation demanded it, and nature gently yielded its request. It would have been strange if he had lived. Neither will nature manifest any sorrow at his death, but soon the note of the lark will be heard down in the meadow, and fresh dandelions will spring from the old stocks where he plucked them last summer. I have been living ill of late, but am now doing better. How do you live in that Plymouth world, now-a-days?— Please remember me to Mary Russell.— You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds, for I remain Your Friend, Henry D. Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1843

Publication of Walt Whitman’s FRANKLIN EVANS, OR THE INEBRIATE, a temperance tract in novel form.

The 1st prohibitionist cure for the evils of ethanol ingestion was enacted, in the territory of Oregon (but 5 years later this would be repealed). April: In the face of all the moral dilemmas of an America founded upon slavery, the young Walt Whitman knew exactly what was needed. We, the very righteous, needed to depart from our cowardly ways, and take control of the situation, and, sweet Christ at our side, refuse to be dominated by all those dastardly Southerners: WOUNDED IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS

”And one shall say unto him, ‘What are these wounds in thy hands?’ Then he shall answer, ‘These with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’” — Zechariah, xiii.6

If thou art balk’d, O Freedom, The victory is not to thy manlier foes; From the house of friends comes the death stab. Virginia, mother of greatness, Blush not for being also mother of slaves; You might have borne deeper slaves — Doughfaces, crawlers, lice of humanity — Terrific screamers of freedom, Who roar and bawl, and get hot i’ the face, But were they not incapable of august crime, Would quench the hopes of ages for a drink — Muck-worms, creeping flat to the ground, A dollar dearer to them than Christ’s blessing; All loves, all hopes, less than the thought of gain, In life walking in that as in a shroud; Men whom the throes of heroes, Great deeds at which the gods might stand appal’d, The shriek of the drown’d, the appeal of women, The exulting laugh of untied empires, Would touch them never in the heart, But only in the pocket. Hot-headed Carolina, Well may you curl your lip; With all your bondsmen, bless the destiny Which brings you no such breed as this. Arise, young North! Our elder blood flows in the veins of cowards: The gray-hair’d sneak, the blanch’d poltroon, The feign’d or real shiverer at tongues That nursing babes need hardly cry the less for — Are they to be our tokens always? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN During this month a negrero under the Portuguese flag, the Graciosa Vengativa, master M.F. Reis, on one of its six known Middle Passage voyages, was arriving at the port of Bahia, Brazil from Onim in Africa with a cargo of 102 enslaved people. THE MIDDLE PASSAGE HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1845

During a visit to Providence, Rhode Island, Edgar Allan Poe, always a man with an eye for the ladies despite the fact that he was already married, laid an eye upon Friend Sarah Helen Power Whitman. At this time she

was unaware of the attention, and he was unaware that she was a widow possessed of funds. Poe’s “The Raven” appeared, first in the New-York Evening Mirror and then in Wiley and Putnam’s THE RAVEN AND OTHER POEMS, and its author was made the lead reviewer of the Broadway Journal and purchased that journal HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN on credit. It was possibly in this year that Walt Whitman met him: “Specimen Days”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1846

Walt Whitman read Margaret Fuller’s newspaper essay “American Literature” and it made a lasting impression upon him. He would refer to it several times, quoting a portion of it from memory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A portrait of Margaret was painted by Thomas Hicks: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 13, Tuesday: The 1st legislation to provide for separate treatment of people with mental retardation was introduced in the New York State Senate by E. F. Backus. Backus introduced a resolution calling for purchase of land and construction of buildings. It was not until 1851 that an experimental school was established in Albany. It proved so successful that a permanent state facility was established in 1854.23 PSYCHOLOGY

The U.S. formally declared war on Mexico. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

President James Knox Polk had secretly ordered General Zachary Scott to “defend American soil” by occupying contested territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande River, right up to the town limits of Matamoros.

WAR ON MEXICO

President Polk would duplicitously inform Congress that the war was because Mexico “had invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil.” That of course was a fraud. Why, really, were we declaring war on Mexico? –Consider what Glenn W. Price had to offer on page 18 of his ORIGINS OF THE WAR WITH MEXICO: THE POLK-STOCKTON INTRIGUE (Austin TX: U of Texas P, 1967): In 1829 slavery was abolished in Mexico, but the remonstrance in Texas was so vigorous that the province was excepted from the decree. The threat of the loss of their “chattel property” thenceforth hung over the heads of the Americans in Texas. Historians, intent upon disentangling themselves from the thesis of a conspiracy of the slaveocracy in the Texas affair, have muted this note as a factor in the Texas Revolution; but there is no question whatsoever but that it played a part. The Concord Freeman would report that the battles fought by Zachary Taylor on the Rio Grande in Mexico were “among the most gallant” that have “anywhere ever” been fought. That’s not hard to believe, if you think about it, but the local paper also opinioned that the American Army was covered with gore — oops, that’s a typo, they said glory.

23. Street, W.R. A CHRONOLOGY OF NOTEWORTHY EVENTS IN AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY. Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1994 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN “[A nation is] a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” — E. Renan, QU’EST-CE QU’UNE NATION? March 11, 1882

Salmon Portland Chase would favor the idea of our going to war with Mexico. He would regard this as a good chance for us to extend the southern boundary of the United States of America all the way down “to the Isthmus.” In other words, for him this was, pure and simple, not any matter of “defending American soil,” but instead a straightforward a war of conquest.

The Harbinger, published at Brook Farm, would declare that the war against Mexico, although due to the basest of motives, needed to be understood as an act of Providence. By this iniquitous means, Providence was moving under the covers to extend the

intelligence of advanced civilized nations

WAR ON MEXICO and break down

barriers to the future progress of knowledge.

Properly understood, the war represented a

great subversive movement towards unity among nations.

The problem arose, how to keep women from enlisting in the US military, and how to keep men of mixed race from enlisting. Sometimes the rules about requiring each recruit to strip for examination were not carefully followed, and in fact several women were discovered during the course of the war against Mexico, serving in men’s clothing as common soldiers. You can consult, for instance, THE FEMALE VOLUNTEER; OR, THE LIFE AND WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF MISS ELIZA ALLEN, A YOUNG LADY OF EASTPORT, MAINE.

It was easy enough to keep full-blooded non-Caucasoids out of the army, from general appearance, but there was a perceived need, a perceived need strongly felt, to exclude also any man who had any degree of contamination in his blood. In a manual of instruction for the medical examination of army recruits, we find the army surgeon being cautioned to be diligent in this area, for “soldiers would not tolerate the mixed breeds as comrades.”24 When in doubt, throw the bastard out. The surgeon was advised to be alert to other racial characteristic, over and above mere skin color. Thus the surgeon was to be alert not only for hair that suggested

24. Henderson, Thomas. HINTS ON THE MEDICAL EXAMINATION OF RECRUITS FOR THE ARMY AND ON THE DISCHARGE OF SOLDIERS FROM THE SERVICE ON SURGEON’S CERTIFICATE. Philadelphia PA: J.B. Lippincott, 1840, revised edition 1856. Page 32. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN kinkiness, but also to the shape of the skull itself, and was to reject any applicant whose skull shape seemed in any way negroid. At Fort Monroe VA, in regard to one applicant during the first year of the war, the surgeon was suspicious but in consultation with the commanding officer decided to allow a man to enlist as a white man, and then

Some weeks after, a person of respectable standing called on the officer, and claimed the man as his slave and his son. Not a doubt could be entertained of the credibility of the gentleman who applied for the youth, who was his son by a bright mulatto woman, his slave.

If you want to see what a white man’s army looks like, consult EYEWITNESS TO WAR: PRINTS AND DAGUERREOTYPES OF THE MEXICAN WAR, 1846-1848. The screwball thing about this race consciousness thing is, that unless someone mentions that these are pictures of a racial army, this matter would never come to anyone’s consciousness.

While you’re looking at the pictures, notice the black-powder clouds hanging in the air, obscuring the view after each volley. In this year of 1846, guncotton had just been invented by Schönbein and its use was not yet widespread.

The question has been raised, why were there so many atrocities perpetrated by US soldiers against Mexican civilians during the US’s invasion of Mexico? Some psychological studies of atrocities committed in our more recent wars have indicated that a disproportionate number of the soldiers committing atrocities had had an older brother killed in the war, prior to their commission of their crime. But this thirst for vengeance would not be an explanation in the case of our invasion of Mexico, for a large percentage of the invading troops were FOBs, fresh off the boat, that is, were recent immigrants to the US from Europe, and were soldiering merely to have employment and a paycheck. The US Army went from a low of 7,400 before the war to a peak of 112,000, but a popular explanation at the time, that the atrocities were being committed by the large numbers of undisciplined volunteer troops who had not been subjected to rigorous military discipline, as had the small cadre of Regular Army soldiers, does not now seem to have been an accurate assessment. Because of these difficulties, an explanation now favored is that the war was really not very exciting day by day. During eighteen months of campaigning there were only about a dozen general battles, and none of these soldiers were draftees who were there against their will. They had gone to Mexico in order to be able to kill someone and get away with it, they had gone for fun and games, and this was just not matching up to their expectations.

If I Dye in the war with mexico I donte want you to say he was perswaded into it but that he volenteered of his own accord and died in defending the riches of his cuntry.

WAR ON MEXICO

A large proportion of the US soldiers were stuck in filthy support camps and had never been given an opportunity to express their rage by the killing of Mexican soldiers in combat — therefore they naturally took out this rage on those Mexicans who were within their reach and at their mercy, that is, on the local populations of defenseless civilians living in the vicinity of these filthy support camps.25

25. Which is not to suggest that the US atrocities in Mexico ever approached the organized level of the atrocities committed, say, by the Japanese army after the capture of the Chinese capital, Nanking, during the 2d World War. The worst of the atrocities committed by our whites-only army in Mexico were more on the order of the sweep of the village of My Lai during the Vietnam adventure, and the incidents in the vicinity of Concord during “King Phillip’s War”, and the white riots in New-York during the Civil War. The sort of thing of which I am speaking would be exemplified by the bombardment of the city of Veracruz from March 22 to 27, 1847, during which the relevant people in the US army were not troubled by the fact that half of the people they were killing, by the tactic of indiscriminate city-busting that they chose and the weapons they decided to employ, were helpless Mexican civilians. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN The primary cause of the atrocities now seems to have been the pervasive, compelling atmosphere in the US army, shared equally by officers of every rank as well as by the regular soldiers and the volunteer soldiers, and frankly encouraged from the top, an attitude of the most utter contempt toward everything Mexican, of contempt toward everything that could be marked, by skin tone, or speech accent, or cultural origin, as un- American, lazy, stupid, profligate, backward or otherwise weak. That is, this level of atrocity is about what is to be expected of an army that is so constituted as to be “racially pure,” when it goes off to a foreign land away from the restraining and moderating influences of loved ones at home, of church and of society, to fight against the racial other and the racially mixed or impure. The articles of war in effect at that time made a distinction between military activities at home and military activities abroad, and a number of things that would have been considered to be violations of the military code of conduct at home were simply not violations, not proscribed, when committed against the citizens of a foreign country. Also, the US would not permit any US citizen to be tried in a Mexican court, so it was quite unnecessary for the soldiers to honor any Mexican law in their dealings with Mexican civilians. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A reminisce by Walt Whitman deals in part with this year: “Specimen Days”

BROADWAY SIGHTS Besides Fulton ferry, off and on for years, I knew and frequented Broadway — that noted avenue of New York’s crowded and mixed humanity, and of so many notables. Here I saw, during those times, Andrew Jackson, Webster, Clay, William Henry Seward, Martin Van Buren, filibuster Walker, Kossuth, Fitz Greene Halleck, William Cullen Bryant, the Prince of Wales, Charles Dickens, the first Japanese ambassadors, and lots of other celebrities of the time. Always something novel or inspiriting; yet mostly to me the hurrying and vast amplitude of those never-ending human currents. I remember seeing James Fenimore Cooper in a court-room in Chambers street, back of the city hall, where he was carrying on a law case — (I think it was a charge of libel he had brought against some one.) I also remember seeing Edgar A. Poe, and having a short interview with him, (it must have been in 1845 or ’6,) in his office, second story of a corner building, (Duane or Pearl street.) He was editor and owner or part owner of “the Broadway Journal.” [Page 702] The visit was about a piece of mine he had publish’d. Poe was very cordial, in a quiet way, appear’d well in person, dress, &c. I have a distinct and pleasing remembrance of his looks, voice, manner and matter; very kindly and human, but subdued, perhaps a little jaded. For another of my reminiscences, here on the west side, just below Houston street, I once saw (it must have been about 1832, of a sharp, bright January day) a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great ermine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost carried, down the steps of his high front stoop (a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck’d in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop’d in other furs, for a ride. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of horses as I ever saw. (You needn’t think all the best animals are brought up nowadays; never was such horseflesh as fifty years ago on Long Island, or south, or in New York city; folks look’d for spirit and mettle in a nag, not tame speed merely.) Well, I, a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, stopp’d and gazed long at the spectacle of that fur-swathed old man, surrounded by friends and servants, and the careful seating of him in the sleigh. I remember the spirited, champing horses, the driver with his whip, and a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. The old man, the subject of so much attention, I can almost see now. It was John Jacob Astor. 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.

In his jingoist editorials for making war on Mexico, Whitman was explaining that it was the divine duty of the US to seize Mexican territory because Mexican “superstition,” a “burlesque upon freedom” amounted to “actual tyranny by the few over the many” and did not provide the sort of opportunity to “increase human happiness and liberty” that was present in the United States of America. He demanded rhetorically what Mexico had “to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?” The popular image of the Mexican in this period of United States history was of a person who was happy if “animal” needs had been satisfied. For Henry Thoreau to adventure toward contentment was for him to disassociate himself entirely from “Anglo-Saxon stock” and lump himself together with dirty Mexicans, savage Indians, and lazy Negroes, as a member of the inferior races which needed to be pushed aside. In a distinctly Orwellian manner, people were declaring during this period that “raising the Texian standard” as a slave state would constitute an extension of the borders of human freedom since this would mean that, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN in the words of Senator Robert J. Walker,26

our kindred race, predominated over that fair country, instead of the colored mongrel race, and barbarous tyranny, and superstitions of Mexico.

During this period, we note now in observations written by Mexican ambassadors in Washington DC to their offices in Mexico City, it was extremely difficult to deal with the officials of the US government, such as Secretary of State James Buchanan (who used the adjective “mixed” to describe the USA, but the adjective “mongrel” to describe Mexico), because these officials were making no attempt whatever to dissimulate the racial contempt in which they held their guests. –It must have been like Jewish diplomats attempting to negotiate with SS officers. “[A nation is] a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.” — E. Renan, QU’EST-CE QU’UNE NATION? March 11, 1882

26. In the Orwellian world of American proslavery rhetoric, during this period, slavery was freedom: if the federal government were to attempt to deny to a citizen the freedom to dispose of his moneys in the purchase of slaves, the government would be interfering with the citizen’s freedom — which would be very wrong. America is about freedom, that’s why we had slavery.

In the Orwellian world of Reconstruction which was to come after our Civil War, of course, we corrected this era: during the Reconstruction period, the period of the “Jim Crow” Black Code in the South, black Americans were sharecroppers, and instead of slavery being freedom, freedom would become slavery. America is about freedom, that’s why we had the Ku Klux Klan.

(I find that I simply cannot resist reminding you of a standard joke of the Stalinist USSR: “In capitalist countries, it’s dog eat dog — here in the Worker’s Paradise, of course, it’s quite the other way around.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Nevertheless, despite the social cost and the stigma, Thoreau, sitting in the door of his cabin on the pond, was adventuring toward a “Mexican” contentment which we can compare not with Walt Whitman but with Friedrich Nietzsche’s later experience of Gelassenheit, in his poem “Sils-Maria”:

Hier sass ich wartend, wartend, –doch auf nichts, jenseits von Gut und Böse, bald des Lichts geniessend, bald des Schattens, ganz nur Spiel, ganz See, ganz Mittag, ganz Zeit ohne Ziel. Here I sat waiting, waiting — yet for nothing, beyond good and evil, sometimes enjoying light, sometimes shadow, completely only play, completely lake, completely noon, completely time without goal.

It is indeed instructive that, at such a watershed, we find Thoreau and Whitman taking their stances upon quite opposite sides.

Published author Josiah Gregg was hired as a news correspondent and interpreter during the war. In this capacity, he would travel through Chihuahua.

At some point, in order to protect white laborers from “the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor,” David Wilmot authored the “Wilmot Proviso” that slavery was not to be permitted on any territory acquired from Mexico. WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN The Blundering Generation Revisited27

WAR ON MEXICO Michael F. Holt needs no introduction to historians of the United States. He has been the scholar probably most responsible for the emergence of what some critics call a neo-revisionist interpretation of the origins of the Civil War. The historians who write in this vein echo a central theme of the work of revisionist historians Avery Crandall and J.G. Randall: they emphasize the degree to which the Civil War could have and perhaps should have been averted. Vigorously defending this position, Holt has long criticized historians who contend “that sectional conflict over slavery and slavery extension caused the Civil War.”28 Instead, he has argued in a series of influential 27. A review for H-CivWar by Graham A. Peck, Department of History and Political Science, Saint Xavier University. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN books and articles that contingent political factors played the predominant role in stimulating disunion. Holt’s latest book,29 retracing much the same ground in greatly abbreviated fashion, does not break from the mold. “To locate the most direct causes of the American Civil War,” he contends in the preface, “one must look at the actions of governmental officeholders in the decades before that horrific conflict” (page xiii). His purpose, therefore, in writing THE FATE OF THEIR COUNTRY was not to “recant” his prior interpretations, but rather to attract new, non-specialist readers (page xiii). If so, the book already rates as a magnificent success. It comes in at a breezy 127 pages, and also includes a 30-page appendix of 8 valuable primary source political documents (7 excerpted), ranging from Lewis Cass’ 1847 “Nicholson letter” to William Seward’s “Irrepressible Conflict” speech in October 1858. In conjunction with the primary source documents, Holt’s brevity makes the book ideal for course adoption, and moreover will be no small relief to those who have read his small-print, 1,248- page magnum opus on the American Whig Party. One can only imagine the gratitude of his editors. The book is structured very simply, with an opening chapter titled “Pandora’s Box,” and three subsequent chapters titled “The Wilmot Proviso,” “The Compromise of 1850,” and “The Kansas- Nebraska Act.” The book’s structure, length, and subject of study are reminiscent of Don E. Fehrenbacher’s THE SOUTH AND THREE SECTIONAL CRISES (1980), although Holt provides a stronger historical narrative, linking his chapters together and presents an altogether contrasting argument. Whereas Fehrenbacher emphasized the long-standing resistance of Southerners to antislavery politics and hence the core problem of slavery in antebellum politics, including secession, Holt contends that political decisions made from 1846 to 1858 played a critical role in intensifying sectional hostility prior to secession and the Civil War. The “long-accumulated mistrust, fear, and loathing” that led Southerners and Northerners to massive bloodletting sprang neither from “whole cloth,” nor were they “simply products of the undeniable differences between the social systems of the North and the South and the contrasting value systems those different societies spawned.” Rather, Holt maintains, those hatreds “had intensified” in response to politicians’ actions on slavery-related issues (page 126). Holt’s argument is notably similar to Craven and Randall in two respects. First, he observes that “attempts to resolve the secession crisis foundered on the question of slavery’s future expansion into southwestern territories, where it did not exist, rather than on its guaranteed perpetuity in the southern states, where it already did” (page 4). By this logic, the Civil War was precipitated by an abstraction rather than by a tangible problem. Although he does not explicitly say so, one cannot help feeling that he does not consider this largely abstract and apparently “intractable” issue as sufficient justification for a great Civil War (page 4). Hence his criticism of politicians who broached the issue of slavery’s extension into the West; it was they who opened the Pandora’s Box. Holt’s censuring of the reckless politicians who repeatedly 28. Michael F. Holt, POLITICAL PARTIES AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT FROM THE AGE OF JACKSON TO THE AGE OF LINCOLN (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992), page 11. 29. Michael F. Holt.THE FATE OF THEIR COUNTRY: POLITICIANS, SLAVERY EXTENSION, AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR. NY: Hill and Wang, 2005 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN brought abstract arguments about slavery’s expansion into public debate is the second way in which his work echoes the revisionists. He perhaps could forgive the politicians had their actions followed from constituent demands, but he believes that all too frequently the politicians were just working the angles. As he put it, party politicians often made “shortsighted calculations of partisan advantage” rather than considering the broader national interest, a problem that was especially pronounced in regards to slavery extension (page 9). Undeniably, the consequences of public debate over slavery were portentous. For this reason, probably the single greatest villain in Holt’s story is President James Knox Polk, an unrepentant nationalist and expansionist. According to Holt, Polk unscrupulously circumvented northern Democrats’ opposition to proslavery aspects of the joint resolution that authorized the annexation of Texas in 1845. Having acquired the votes of northern Democratic senators for the resolution by promising that he would renegotiate the terms of annexation after its passage, he promptly broke his word. To make matters worse, he then unilaterally endorsed Texas’s inflated claims to Mexican territory and sent U.S. troops into the disputed territory in order to provoke Mexico into a war. After Mexican troops attacked the invading Americans, Polk deliberately deceived Congress and the public by claiming that Mexico had precipitated war by shedding American blood on American soil. It was a bravura performance from the standpoint of unrestrained national expansion, yielding a bountiful crop of approximately half of Mexico, but Holt is utterly condemnatory. Polk “used his power as commander in chief to deploy troops to pursue his personal agenda,” never seeking “the prior approval of Congress.” In the process he created a “nightmare” for northern Democrats like New York’s Martin Van Buren, beginning a war that northern Whigs “could ‘charge with plausibility if not truth’ that Democrats ‘waged for the extension of slavery’” (page 18). In the end, the nightmare would be a national one, not merely a northern Democratic one, because there was no easy way for politicians to resolve the slavery extension problem once the United States had acquired vast tracts of Mexican land. Hence, from Holt’s perspective, this was a selfish, mendacious, and breathtakingly foolhardy beginning to what would become a remorseless sectional struggle over slavery’s expansion. In like manner Holt is critical of many other politicians or political groups whose actions contributed to sectional strife over slavery extension. For instance, in his chapter on the Wilmot Proviso, he observes that the 1848 effort of Free Soilers to oppose slavery’s expansion, “regardless of attempts to settle that issue, is one reason why that vexatious and increasingly dangerous question defied permanent settlement” (page 44). Meanwhile, in his chapter on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he criticizes New York’s Hardshell Hunker Democrats for exploiting the slavery extension issue in order to punish intra-party rivals. The Hards demanded that all Democratic Party appointees seeking confirmation by the Senate in 1854 acknowledge that the popular sovereignty provisions of the Compromise of 1850 “applied to all federal territories” and not just to land taken from Mexico. Appointees who did not endorse this novel, proslavery reading of the 1850 compromise measures would be denied confirmation and replaced by trusty Hards (page 98). Holt HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN is equally critical of the F Street Mess, a handful of powerful southern senators who refused to support the organization of Nebraska Territory unless Congress explicitly repealed the antislavery provisions of the Missouri Compromise. Their obduracy doubtless influenced Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s fateful decision in 1854 to cooperate in the repeal of the provisions, which enraged antislavery northerners and precipitated the organization of the Republican Party. Yet Douglas also comes in for blame. Holt maintains that Douglas’s desire to rekindle partisan rivalries through the Kansas- Nebraska Act sacrificed the nation’s interest to that of the Democratic Party (pages 99-100). Last, but not least, Holt does not spare the freesoil activists who condemned Douglas’s Nebraska bill in the incendiary January 1854 “Appeal of the Independent Democrats.” Holt claims that their ill-conceived assault pre-empted more moderate objections from northern and southern Whigs, the latter of whom especially might have prevented passage of the bill. As he put it, the freesoil protesters, like Douglas, pursued “their own partisan purposes,” which in this case was to “perpetuate their party and their own political careers” in the face of declining northern interest in the slavery issue after the Compromise of 1850 (page 107). One can only imagine the withering rebuke Holt would have administered to the secessionists had his narrative culminated with the outbreak of war. There is clearly much blame to go around. Yet his central argument is undermined by his frequent acknowledgments that many politicians attempted to resolve the slavery extension problem in order to preserve their party, the Union, or both. In 1848, for instance, Whigs, worried about the effect of the slavery extension issue on their party’s prospects to win the presidency, proposed letting the federal judiciary decide the legality of slavery in the territories taken from Mexico. This compromise legislation passed the Senate but was tabled in the House of Representatives. Holt explains that congressmen “from both sections were too uncertain about what might happen” if they left the issue for judges to decide (page 46). In other words, both sides cared so deeply about a favorable outcome that they refused to take the risk of not getting one. Later that year, Stephen A. Douglas proposed to admit all of the Mexican Cession territory as the state of California to avoid debate and rancor over territorial slavery. However, as Holt recounts, southern senators “buried Douglas’s proposal in a hostile committee” because they feared that California would enter the Union as a free state (page 53). In 1849, Southern Whigs introduced a similar bill in the House. Concerned that a failure to resolve the slavery extension issue would destroy their party, they presumed northern Whig colleagues would support the bill. Instead, northern Whigs insisted that slavery be barred from the territory prior to the meeting of a state constitutional convention. “In this amended form,” Holt acknowledges, the “bill failed to receive a single favorable vote” (page 56). In 1850, President Zachary Taylor proposed to admit California and New Mexico as states, skipping the controversial territorial phase. Only northern Whigs strongly supported this initiative, which consequently had no chance of success (pages 56-67). Nevertheless, despite this string of failures, compromisers led by Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN ultimately triumphed in 1850, albeit against some strong resistance. So it can hardly be said that there were not strong, powerful, and persistent politicians vying for the preservation of the Union. Even more troubling for Holt’s argument is that the line between compromisers and reckless partisans sometimes seems quite blurry. For instance, while Douglas did indeed help push the inflammatory Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress, he strongly promoted compromises on slavery prior to 1854 and during the secession crisis. Likewise, Georgia Whig Robert Toombs supported the California statehood bill in February 1849, despite his acknowledgment that it would lead to a free state; yet “within a year [he] would vow to lead a secession movement in the South should Congress itself try to bar slavery from California” (pages 55, 64-65). Meanwhile, southern Whigs contributed handsomely to the 1850 compromise, yet in 1854 provided critical votes in the House of Representatives for passage of the Kansas- Nebraska Act. These political shifts do not fit neatly into Holt’s argument, especially considering that these politicians probably did not consider themselves to be inconsistent. For instance, Douglas believed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act would ultimately strengthen the country by permanently ending congressional debate over slavery’s expansion. As he repeatedly declared in 1854, the doctrine of popular sovereignty solved the thorny problem of territorial slavery; after all, if settlers decided the fate of slavery in national territories, it would forever remove that abstract, intractable problem from Congress. Although the historian may be excused for wondering if Douglas later privately regretted sponsoring the Kansas-Nebraska Act, in 1854 he expected to achieve a political triumph that would benefit his party and the Union. Once popular sovereignty was the nation’s settled policy for territorial slavery, the Democratic Party could continue to promote national expansion without fear of disunion. Had he not believed this, he would neither have sponsored the bill nor have modified it to suit the demands of Southerners, no matter what pressures southern congressmen placed upon him. Hence one question unavoidably arises: if there were at least as many responsible compromisers as there were reckless partisans, and if it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between them, what explains the Civil War? After all, in his prior scholarship Holt freely acknowledges and indeed celebrates the competitiveness of the Second Party System. Whigs and Democrats battled fairly evenly for almost a decade in the 1840s, leading to a robust party system throughout the nation. Yet none of this robust competition, a product of rampant partisanship, led to civil war. Sometime Democrats won, and sometimes Whigs, but either way the country managed to hold together. Likewise, after the Civil War, rampant partisanship and the two-party system have produced stability rather than war. So what was different about the 1850s? A very good explanation peeps through the text repeatedly. In the course of his narrative, if not in his thesis, Holt often recognizes that politicians did in fact respond to public pressure. A major case in point is the Wilmot Proviso. Since the proviso produced a slavery extension controversy par excellence, Holt seeks to explain the behavior of northern Democratic and southern Whig congressmen, whose votes produced a sectional HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN rather than partisan divide. Northern Democrats previously had joined southern Democrats to support the annexation of Texas, while southern Whigs had leagued with northern Whigs to oppose it, yet many northern Democrats strongly and persistently supported the Wilmot Proviso in concert with northern Whigs, while southern Whigs and southern Democrats bitterly opposed it. Holt argues that the northern Democrats “initial support for the proviso” flowed from their anger at Polk’s duplicity over Texas, but that “northern and southern public opinion best explains the continuing sectional polarization over it” (pages 22-23, 26). As he put it, the “longer and more fractious congressional debate over the Wilmot Proviso became, the more intense sectional animosity in the population at large grew, which in turn unquestionably aggravated politicians’ disagreement over that issue” (page 26). To be sure, Holt frames “public opinion” adroitly in this instance, locating its origins in congressional debate. Nevertheless, what follows the quote is considerably more significant: eight pages dedicated to explaining why Northerners and Southerners held contrasting opinions on slavery’s expansion. While some scholars may quibble with his explanation of southern proslavery attitudes, the fact is Holt unhesitatingly acknowledges Northerners’ strong opposition to slavery’s expansion and Southerners’ strong support for it, including the incredible emotional vehemence Southerners invested in the issue. Holt’s thesis notwithstanding, the significance of these bedrock sectional attitudes shows repeatedly in the rest of the text. An excellent illustration of the power of public opinion on antebellum politicians is the consequential proslavery shift of southern Whigs in 1849. While a number of southern Whigs had supported the prospect of California statehood early in 1849, they were not remotely as conciliatory after leaving Congress and speaking with their constituents. As Robert Toombs wrote later that year to a colleague, “public feeling in the South is much stronger than many of us supposed” and “passage of the Wilmot Proviso would lead to civil war.” He reported that Southerners would respond to the admission of California as a free state with “bitterness of feeling” (pages 64-65). His fear must have been palpable given the triumphs of Southern Democrats in the Mississippi and Georgia elections that year, which resulted in stridently proslavery public declarations by Democratic politicians. In Georgia, for instance, the state legislature passed resolutions instructing the governor “to call a secession convention immediately if the new Congress enacted the proviso, admitted California as a free state, or failed to pass a new, more rigorous fugitive-slave act” (page 65). This was strong medicine for southern Whigs, and they can hardly be blamed thereafter for refusing to support President Taylor’s plan to quickly admit New Mexico and California as states. All of this suggests the profound significance of the slavery issue after all. Given the underlying proslavery attitudes in the South, conciliatory southern Whigs faced a difficult challenge: either keep slavery out of public debate or face immolation at the polls. After all, like angry hornets, southern voters swarmed out to defend perceived threats to slavery. Yet Southerners were certain to perceive such threats--which were hardly illusory--given public attitudes in the North. After all, antislavery politicians, not southern Democrats, bore primary HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN responsibility for stirring up the hornets. A northern Democrat, for instance, proposed the Wilmot Proviso. Moreover, as Kenneth Stampp argued years ago, historians cannot reasonably consider northern antislavery values as some sort of aberration or the product of misguided agitation. Those values were fundamental to a free society, even if not universally embraced in the North. Hence the southern Whigs’ situation alone suggests that, contra Holt, a crop of selfish and incompetent politicians in 1840s and 1850s was not the critical factor in precipitating civil war. Slavery was the foundation of the southern social system, the basis of its wealth and culture, and threats to it necessarily produced great volatility in American politics. Ironically, given this fact, Holt’s thesis can probably be turned on its head for the period following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act: after 1854, a political rupture was likely to occur eventually without an unusually skillful conciliation by concerned politicians, which itself was unlikely without an outpouring of conciliatory sentiments from most people in both the North and South. Needless to say, the conciliation never came. Yet to deny that politicians were the critical factor is not to say that they were insignificant--far from it. In fact, Holt’s book underscores a truth that is worth reiterating. “What politicians do in elective office matters, often profoundly,” he contended, “to the lives of ordinary Americans” (page xi). There can be no doubt about that, nor about the value of studying politicians, whose decisions have indeed done so much to shape the country’s history. For this reason alone I would willingly assign this book to undergraduates. On the significance of politics to the Civil War, historians who are on the other side of the aisle, so to speak, about the origins of the war should be in complete agreement. And this area of agreement suggests that the contemporary rival schools of Civil War causation might not be as far apart as is sometimes thought. Just as Holt acknowledges, to a degree, the powerful interplay between politicians and public attitudes toward slavery, historians who emphasize the slavery issue must explain how contingent factors, including political ones, influenced the coming of the war. In the end, the real test of historical explanation is showing through creative reconstruction how a wide variety of relevant political, social, economic, and cultural factors produce change over time. Focusing on high politics, Michael Holt does not attempt a history on that scale. However, he does carefully examine an important historical issue and his argument invites debate over the relative influence of structural and contingent factors in bringing on the Civil War. As for the debate, at the risk of being as shortsighted and reckless as some politicians, I say, “bring it on.” Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Reviews editorial staff: [email protected].

Our Perennial Quest to Do Harm So Good Will Come

Extermination of the Pequot Tribe 1634-1637 “King Phillip’s” Race War 1675-1676 Secession from Britain 1776-1783 The War of 1812 1812-1815 The Revolution of the Texians 1835-1836 War on Mejico 1846-1848 Race War in the Wild West 1862-1863 Secession from the Union 1862-1865 War to End War 1916-1919 Stopping Hitler 1940-1945 The Korean Police Action 1950-1953 Helping South Vietnam be Free 1959-1975 Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 yada xxxx yada yada xxxx yada yada yada xxxx HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“To be active, well, happy, implies rare courage. To be ready to fight in a duel or a battle implies desperation, or that you hold your life cheap.” — Henry Thoreau HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March: Walt Whitman would be editing the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. He would be fired after less than two years, in January 1848. BROOKLYN EAGLE

“The modern man’s daily prayer is reading the daily newspaper.” — G.W.F. Hegel

April: In the face of all the moral dilemmas of an America founded upon slavery, the young Walt Whitman knew exactly what was needed. We, the very righteous, needed to depart from our cowardly ways, and take control of the situation, and, sweet Christ at our side, refuse to be dominated by all those dastardly Southerners: WOUNDED IN THE HOUSE OF FRIENDS

”And one shall say unto him, ‘What are these wounds in thy hands?’ Then he shall answer, ‘These with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’” — ZECHARIAH XIII.6

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1847

February 23, Tuesday: At Buena Vista, in Coahuila de Zaragoza near Saltillo, US troops under General Zachary Taylor held out against a Mexican attack. About 2,250 were killed or wounded, among them 28 Kentuckians. Among the fallen was a soldier identified as Private Yves J. Thoreau of Company “I” of the 2d Kentucky Volunteers. The corpses would be recovered from the battlefield and transported home in cast iron coffins, along with 14 other Kentucky fatalities. In 2004, upon digging up this coffin at the cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky (the coffin itself weighed 7.52 kilograms, and was without handles or viewing window), the corpse was discovered to have unusually short leg bones leading to a speculation that Private Thoreau may have enlisted by lying about his age. WAR ON MEXICO

WALDEN: What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise PEOPLE OF and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. WALDEN I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed that they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England north-east snow storm, and I behold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE THE GREAT SNOW HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Colonel Jefferson Davis was wounded while leading his 1st Mississippi Regiment during its initial engagement in the Battle of Buena Vista (refer to General Zachary Taylor’s report, in which this colonel and his regiment would be praised). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 24, Wednesday: When the US troops awake at Buena Vista on this morning, they discovered that during the night the opposing army had withdrawn.30

WAR ON MEXICO

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

— Ambrose G. Bierce US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

30. This is approximately the correct timeframe into which to interject an anecdote dating it would seem to early in this year. General of the Line Zachary Taylor was priding himself on having picked up some of the Spanish language. When a Mexican citizen came to the general’s tent with a complaint about US soldiers stealing from him, General Taylor shouted “¡Huevos! ¡Huevos! ¡Huevos!” –giving the man a lesson in Spanish. As Walt Whitman had pointed out in the Brooklyn Eagle,

Mexico, though contemptible in many respects, is an enemy deserving a vigorous “lesson.”

(The Illinois state historical record that has preserved this incident alleges that, actually, the Spanish term for which the general had been groping had been “¡Vamos!” :-) WAR ON MEXICO HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1848

Walt Whitman visited New Orleans and came to “possess to some extent a personal and saunterer’s knowledge of St. Charles street”: [NEXT SCREEN]

[NEXT SCREEN] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

THROUGH EIGHT YEARS In 1848, ’49, I was occupied as editor of the “daily Eagle” newspaper, in Brooklyn. The latter year went off on a leisurely journey and working expedition (my brother Jeff with me) through all the middle States, and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Lived awhile in New Orleans, and work’d there on the editorial staff of “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; traveling altogether probably 8000 miles this trip, to and fro. ’51, ’53, occupied in house-building in Brooklyn. (For a little of the first part of that time in printing a daily and weekly paper, “the Freeman.”) ’55, lost my dear father this year by death. Commenced putting LEAVES OF GRASS to press for good, at the job printing office of my friends, the brothers Rome, in Brooklyn, after many MS. doings and undoings — (I had great trouble in leaving out the stock “poetical” touches, but succeeded at last.) I am now (1856-’7) passing through my 37th year.

SAILING THE MISSISSIPPI AT MIDNIGHT Vast and starless, the pall of heaven Laps on the trailing pall below; And forward, forward, in solemn darkness, As if to the sea of the lost we go. Now drawn nigh the edge of the river, Weird-like creatures suddenly rise; Shapes that fade, dissolving outlines Baffle the gazer’s straining eyes. Towering upward and bending forward, Wild and wide their arms are thrown, Ready to pierce with forked fingers Him who touches their realm upon. Tide of youth, thus thickly planted, While in the eddies onward you swim, Thus on the shore stands a phantom army, Lining forever the channel’s rim. Steady, helmsman! you guide the immortal; Many a wreck is beneath you piled, Many a brave yet unwary sailor Over these waters has been beguiled. Nor is it the storm or the scowling midnight, Cold, or sickness, or fire’s dismay — Nor is it the reef, or treacherous quicksand, Will peril you most on your twisted way. But when there comes a voluptuous languor, Soft the sunshine, silent the air, Bewitching your craft with safety and sweetness, Then, young pilot of life, beware. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

January: Walt Whitman was fired as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. BROOKLYN EAGLE HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February: Walt Whitman, fired from his editing position at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, left town with his brother Jeff (Thomas Jefferson Whitman) to travel to New Orleans to edit there a new paper to be named the Crescent. This newspaper attempt would last only a few months. BROOKLYN EAGLE

In the period between February and April, a Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson would be made. It is likely that this happened in that of the Springfield, Massachusetts gallery of Otis H. Cooley, and it is possible that, subsequent to the failure of his medical practice there, the plate was exposed by Josiah Gilbert Holland.

During this year Holland would depart for a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia (and then later in Vicksburg, Mississippi). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN For the rest of her life, Emily would be writing long letters to Mr. and Mrs. Holland.

June 15, Thursday: Waldo Emerson delivered the 5th of his 6-lecture series “The Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century” at the Marylebone Literary and Scientific Institution in London, with his friend Thomas Carlyle still stuck in the audience. This one was on “Poetry and Eloquence” (he was in favor of both poetry and eloquence) and, as it was merely a reworked earlier lecture rather than containing new materials, it wasn’t too bad. At about the midpoint of the month Walt Whitman arrived back in Brooklyn, his newspaper work in New Orleans having been abandoned. He would, until 1854, be doing newspaper work in Brooklyn and on Manhattan. He would also be doing carpentering jobs, building houses, selling stationery, and attempting some freelance writing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1849

May: Walt Whitman was a peripatetic attender of sermons during the late 1840s while jotting down ideas for LEAVES OF GRASS, and admired in particular the millennialist sermons of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. At some point during this year Whitman attended a revival Beecher was conducting at the new Congregationalist Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights on Paumanok “Long Island.”

In this month, during construction work on the church congregation’s new edifice (now known as the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims) in Brooklyn Heights, a lead box was placed inside its wall. When the box was discovered during the edifice’s sesquicentennial renovation in 1997, it proved to contain mostly uninteresting newspapers and pamphlets of which we have copies via less extraordinary avenues of preservation. The church is presently planning a new time capsule, this one to include a locally produced CD-ROM.

July: Walt Whitman, who had for 3 years been clipping and underlining articles about phrenology, articles such as the series by Orson Squires Fowler in the American Phrenological Journal on “Progress,” “Human Progress,” and “Progression, A Law of Nature,” had his head read at the Nassau Street “practical phrenology” office of Fowler and Wells on Manhattan Island.

Walt’s head was examined by Lorenzo Niles Fowler himself, the head man. Fowler awarded Whitman a close- to-perfect score in his 35 categories such as “adhesiveness,” “amativeness,” and “combativeness.”

Whitman, vastly impressed with himself and vastly impressed with such phrenology, would later donate his brain to the American Anthropometric Society in Philadelphia — which would of course drop it on the floor.

July 12, Thursday: Moncure Daniel Conway graduated from Dickinson College.

For your interest, here is what this college has to say, in its little collage about their alum Conway, that they maintain today on the Internet (you’ll note instantly that they quite omit to mention that their guy had known Thoreau): Moncure Daniel Conway was born on March 17, 1832 in Stafford County, Virginia, the son of Walker Peyton and Margaret Daniel Conway. Walker was a justice in the county court, a trustee of Dickinson College from 1848-1865, and a prominent slaveholder HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN in the county. However, Mrs. Conway’s views on slavery differed a great deal from those of her husband’s, and young Moncure’s first contact with abolitionist views came from his mother. At the age of 15 Conway was sent north to attend Dickinson College and graduated with the class of 1849. While at Dickinson, he firmly allied himself with the abolitionist cause and turned his energy toward emancipation. Having encountered religious doubts in his young life, Conway became a circuit-riding Methodist minister in 1851. However, he refused to give up his love of art, the theater, and the works of Emerson, so he left the rigors of Methodism for Unitarianism a year after being ordained. Conway moved to Boston, spent time among prominent intellectuals of the period, began a life-long friendship with his mentor, Emerson, and graduated from Harvard University in 1854. His first job as a minister in Washington, D.C. was short-lived because his abolitionist views clashed with those of his congregation. He did, however, find considerable favor amongst the members of the Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, Ohio, his next post as minister.

In 1858, Conway met and married Ellen Dana, the well-educated daughter of a prominent businessman. Together they would have three children: two sons, Eustace (1859) and Dana (1865), and a daughter, Mildred (1868), who would later marry the accomplished architect Phillip Sawyer. Unfortunately, the early 1860s would bring hard times for Conway and his growing family. He and Ellen, along with many of their congregation, became increasingly disillusioned with the Unitarian Church and in 1862, they left the church completely. The outbreak of the US Civil War caused another painful rift in Conway’s life: being Virginians, his two brothers had joined the Confederate army. Faced with familial and religious alienation, Conway settled temporarily in London in 1863. His advocation for a peaceful division of the states caused him to lose credibility with fellow abolitionists following an embarrassing encounter with James Murray Mason, the Confederate envoy in London. Feeling completely alienated, he HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN sent for his wife and sons, having virtually no ties left to the United States. England afforded Conway the intellectual and spiritual freedom for which he had always yearned. He became increasingly involved in the intellectual, artistic, non-conformist, and free- thinking social circles of London, discovering the South Place Ethical Society, an institution founded on the very ideals of personal spiritual fulfillment that Conway held most dear. In 1866, he was asked to take the position of minister, becoming a scholar of world religions and philosophies. He eventually began to regain some credibility with his fellow abolitionists, and was able to return to the United States in 1884 after the death of his father. During the next few years, Conway pursued writing, and greatly improved his reputation as a scholar. In 1892, Moncure and Ellen reluctantly returned to London for a short time so he could resume his position at the South Place Society. His wife died in New York on Christmas Day, 1897. After his wife's death, Conway spoke in the United States on topics such as the Spanish-American War, free religion, and voting rights. Again becoming disillusioned with politics in his home country, he left in 1898, this time to France where he devoted much of the rest of his life to the peace movement and writing. Conway’s intriguing life ended on November 15, 1907, alone in his Paris apartment. His long list of published work includes THE EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE (1870), THE SACRED ANTHOLOGY (1874), DEMONOLOGY AND DEVIL LORE (1879), EMERSON: AT HOME AND ABROAD (1882), LIFE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1890), THE LIFE OF THOMAS PAINE (1892), and a variety of pamphlets and articles on numerous subjects. His intellectual life had acquainted him with such notables as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Annie Besant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Andrew Carnegie, who donated money to Dickinson College to construct a building in honor of Conway. Conway Hall was used as the preparatory school until 1917 and then served as a freshman residence hall.

Now, for your interest, here is part of what John Holladay Latané would write in the year of Conway’s death in the early 20th Century, about young Moncure at the point of his graduation from Dickinson College, and we may note with great interest that the racist theories of Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard University are already on the scene (albeit not well understood by young Moncure, who was taking them in a direction of which the professor would most definitely not have approved): After graduation he returned to Virginia and began to read law at Warrenton. These were the days when the great compromise on slavery was being debated in and out of Congress. Although a large slave-holder, his father was not an advocate of the institution, and when Moncure was made secretary of a meeting called to form a Southern Rights Association, his father quietly remarked: “Don’t be the fool of those people! Slavery is a doomed institution.” The son, however, coming across a theory of Agassiz that the races of mankind are not sprung from a single pair, advanced the view before a debating society at Warrenton that the negro was not a man within the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, but that if human, he was entitled to liberty. This eccentricity stirred up quite a religious tempest in the community. Six months later young Conway underwent a second conversion, and in December, 1850, announced in a letter to his father his determination to abandon the law and to apply for admission to the Baltimore Methodist Conference HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN as a minister. Strange to say this resolution was inspired by the study of Emerson’s essays, but he had read only the first and second series, and had not gone far enough to discover that Emerson’s philosophy was inconsistent with any form of orthodoxy. WALDO EMERSON JOHN HOLLADAY LATANÉ HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1850

Samuel G. Arnold, Walt Whitman’s replacement, reduced the name of the Brooklyn Eagle from The Brooklyn Eagle, and Kings County Democrat to The Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

“The modern man’s daily prayer is reading the daily newspaper.” — G.W.F. Hegel

In an antislavery address, the Reverend Theodore Parker characterized democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”31

During this decade Abraham Lincoln would begin to exploit the conflicting uses of the Declaration of Independence and, by the time of his debates with Stephen Douglas, would have come to see the document’s statements on equality and rights, according to Pauline Maier, “as setting a standard for the future, one that demanded the gradual extinction of conflicting practices” (AMERICAN SCRIPTURE: MAKING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, page 205).

June 21, Friday: Walt Whitman’s poem of tribute to the martyred revolutionaries of Europe, titled initially “Resurgemus” (which means “We will rise again”), was published by Horace Greeley in the New-York Tribune. This would become the 1st poem Whitman would select for inclusion in his 1855 LEAVES OF GRASS. According to page 126 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), “Both the preface to the 1855 LEAVES and many of the poems of later editions reflect Whitman’s conception of himself as ‘the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over. And although the last editions of LEAVES OF GRASS became more religious and less political, more serene and less angry, Whitman nevertheless remained loyal to his early sentiments, and he retained ‘Resurgemus,’ retitled ‘Europe, in the 72nd and 73d Years of These States,’ as a part of his book from the first edition to the last.” Its subject matter, sentiments, and imagery match those in Fuller’s last letters, and its purpose seems the same: to cheer up the oppressed and to horrify their oppressors.

31. It is not clear that Abraham Lincoln ever learned of this. The alliteration is of course an obvious one. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 21st The flowers of the white pine are now in their prime but I see none of their pollen on the pond. This piece of rural pantomime–this bucolic–is enacted before me every day–far over the hills on that fair hillside. I look into the pastoral age. {One-eighth page missing} HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1851

Samuel G. Arnold added steam power to the Brooklyn Eagle’s press, the first such engine in this Brooklyn printing office.

Walt Whitman began to work irregularly for other newspapers, and began LEAVES OF GRASS. “Specimen Days”

STARTING NEWSPAPERS I next went to the “Aurora” daily in New York city — a sort of free lance. Also wrote regularly for the “Tattler,” an evening paper. With these and a little outside work I was occupied off and on, until I went to edit the “Brooklyn Eagle,” where for two years I had one of the pleasantest sits of my life — a good owner, good pay, and easy work and hours. The troubles in the Democratic party broke forth about those times (1848-’49) and I split off with the radicals, which led to rows with the boss and “the party,” and I lost my place.

“Specimen Days”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 6, Saturday: The group of about 100 armed white men under the leadership of Lieutenant Thomas Sweeny, who had been besieged in their Camp Independence since November 12th, at this point made their move out of the native American controlled territory and back to the white settlements.

In Concord, Henry Thoreau was surveying a 6-acre woodlot near Annursnack Hill for Samuel Barrett and did not make an entry in his journal. This woodlot had belonged to the Lorings and was being sold to George Brooks. The bill for the survey was $3.00. Neighbors mentioned on the survey papers are Prescott, Barrett, Billings,32 and Easterbrook.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/5.htm

32. I imagine this is not Boston’s illustrator and architect Hammatt Billings, but perhaps the home of Nathaniel and John Billings on Old Concord Road? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Meanwhile, in New-York, Walt Whitman was witnessing the landing of Lajos Kossuth, with cannon salutes, a grand parade down Broadway, a banquet for 400 at the Irving House, and a torchlit procession. This great white advocate of liberty was here in our great whitman land of liberty at last! Whitman wished courage “To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire.”

Incidentally, note the “Kossuth hat.” Although it doesn’t show in this particular illustration, such a hat sported an ostrich plume. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN This is what Broadway Avenue would look like, nine years later:

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a ceremony of an entirely different order was being transacted. William Parker’s 3 white neighbors, as well as all black men that armed posses could hunt “like partridges upon the mountain” (as one person described the event), that is, culprits who had been singled out merely by their availability and the color of their pelt regardless of whether they were anywhere near that home on that night in September, were being arraigned for treason against the United States of America, on the allegation that refusal to assist Gorsuch and his marshall, equally with resisting the marshall, amounted to making war. It seems that the no- nos the nation derived from this incident were not “what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world” but “something has gone seriously awry when white men refuse to side with their own race,” and not “resist not evil” but “we can’t let niggers know how to use guns.” Friend Lucretia Mott and her associates were in the courtroom “knitting furiously.” Each man wore a red, white, and blue knitted scarf around his neck.

This charge of conspiring to make war could of course not be sustained, but Judge John Kane made a remark about “itinerant female agitators” that indicated he would have found the defendants guilty if there had been HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN any way to do so. This case became central in the ongoing debate within the antislavery movement over resort to violence in the face of injustice. Friend Lucretia Mott summed up her position with the thought that we all know, of course, that good is of God, and therefore we must be mistaken if we ever suppose it can come from our doing evil. I am bringing this incident to your attention because it bears on the issue of whether Thoreau was a nonviolenter. Mott holds unimpeached credentials as a nonviolenter, and Thoreau’s credentials as a nonviolenter have been attacked by his biographer Richardson on the basis of his reaction to the Harper’s Ferry raid of 1859, and yet it is clear that had the black activist William Parker been captured and put on trial for the murder of this white master, Mott would have reacted in exactly the same way Thoreau reacted to John Brown’s conduct. In fact Mott’s deportment and words in the case of this charge of treason in the “Christiana riot” in 1851 exactly parallel Thoreau’s deportment and words in the case of John Brown. We note especially the words that Thoreau would have read about John Brown as a moral hero in the presence of the widow Brown, over the grave at North Elba on July 4, 1860: John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history. If any person, in a lecture or conversation at that time, cited any ancient example of heroism, such as Cato or Tell or Winkelried, passing over the recent deeds and words of Brown, it was felt by any intelligent audience of Northern men to be tame and inexcusably far-fetched. For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent. It appeared strange to me that the “little dipper” should be still diving quietly in the river, as of yore; and it suggested that this bird might continue to dive here when Concord should be no more. I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South, were beside themselves. Our thoughts could not revert to any greater or wiser or better man with whom to contrast him, for he, then and there, was above them all. The man this country was about to hang appeared the greatest and best in it. Years were not required for a revolution of public opinion; days, nay hours, produced marked changes in this case. Fifty who were ready to say, on going into our meeting in honor of him in Concord, that he ought to be hung, would not say it when they came out. They heard his words read; they saw the earnest faces of the congregation; and perhaps they joined at last in singing the hymn in his praise. The order of instructors was reversed. I heard that one preacher, who at first was shocked and stood aloof, felt obliged at last, after he was hung, to make him the subject of a sermon, in which, to some extent, he eulogized the man, but said that his act was a failure. An influential class-teacher thought it necessary, after the services, to tell his grown-up pupils that at first he thought as the preacher did then, but now he thought that John Brown was right. But it was understood that his pupils were as much ahead of the teacher as he was ahead of the priest; and I know for a certainty that very little boys at home had HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN already asked their parents, in a tone of surprise, why God did not interfere to save him. In each case, the constituted teachers were only half conscious that they were not leading, but being dragged, with some loss of time and power. The more conscientious preachers, the Bible men, they who talk about principle, and doing to others as you would that they should do unto you — how could they fail to recognize him, by far the greatest preacher of them all, with the Bible in his life and in his acts, the embodiment of principle, who actually carried out the golden rule? All whose moral sense had been aroused, who had a calling from on high to preach, sided with him. What confessions he extracted from the cold and conservative! It is remarkable, but on the whole it is well, that it did not prove the occasion for a new sect of Brownites being formed in our midst. They, whether within the Church or out of it, who adhere to the spirit and let go the letter, and are accordingly called infidel, were as usual foremost to recognize him. Men have been hung in the South before for attempting to rescue slaves, and the North was not much stirred by it. Whence, then, this wonderful difference? We were not so sure of their devotion to principle. We made a subtle distinction, forgot human laws, and did homage to an idea. The North, I mean the living North, was suddenly all transcendental. It went behind the human law, it went behind the apparent failure, and recognized eternal justice and glory. Commonly, men live according to a formula, and are satisfied if the order of law is observed, but in this instance they, to some extent, returned to original perceptions, and there was a slight revival of old religion. They saw that what was called order was confusion, what was called justice, injustice, and that the best was deemed the worst. This attitude suggested a more intelligent and generous spirit than that which actuated our forefathers, and the possibility, in the course of ages, of a revolution in behalf of another and an oppressed people. Most Northern men, and a few Southern ones, were wonderfully stirred by Brown’s behavior and words. They saw and felt that they were heroic and noble, and that there had been nothing quite equal to them in their kind in this country, or in the recent history of the world. But the minority were unmoved by them. They were only surprised and provoked by the attitude of their neighbors. They saw that Brown was brave, and that he believed that he had done right, but they did not detect any further peculiarity in him. Not being accustomed to make fine distinctions, or to appreciate magnanimity, they read his letters and speeches as if they read them not. They were not aware when they approached a heroic statement, — they did not know when they burned. They did not feel that he spoke with authority, and hence they only remembered that the law must be executed. They remembered the old formula, but did not hear the new revelation. The man who does not recognize in Brown’s words a wisdom and nobleness, and therefore an authority, superior to our laws, is a modern Democrat. This is the test by which to discover him. He is not willfully but constitutionally blind on this side, and he is consistent with himself. Such has been his past life; no doubt of it. In like manner he has read history and his Bible, and he accepts, or seems to accept, the last only HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN as an established formula, and not because he has been convicted by it. You will not find kindred sentiments in his commonplace book, if he has one. When a noble deed is done, who is likely to appreciate it? They who are noble themselves. I was not surprised that certain of my neighbors spoke of John Brown as an ordinary felon, for who are they? They have either much flesh, or much office, or much coarseness of some kind. They are not ethereal natures in any sense. The dark qualities predominate in them. Several of them are decidedly pachydermatous. I say it in sorrow, not in anger. How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light? They are true to their right, but when they look this way they see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He’ll be as dumb as if his lips were stone. It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a freeman, even. Editors persevered for a good while in saying that Brown was crazy; but at last they said only that it was “a crazy scheme,” and the only evidence brought to prove it was that it cost him his life. I have no doubt that if he had gone with five thousand men, liberated a thousand slaves, killed a hundred or two slaveholders, and had as many more killed on his own side, but not lost his own life, these same editors would have called it by a more respectable name. Yet he has been far more successful than that. He has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and-South. They seem to have known nothing about living or dying for a principle. They all called him crazy then; who calls him crazy now? All through the excitement occasioned by his remarkable attempt and subsequent behavior the Massachusetts Legislature, not taking any steps for the defense of her citizens who were likely to be carried to Virginia as witnesses and exposed to the violence of a slaveholding mob, was wholly absorbed in a liquor- agency question, and indulging in poor jokes on the word “extension.” Bad spirits occupied their thoughts. I am sure that no statesman up to the occasion could have attended to that question at all at that time — a very vulgar question to attend to at any time! When I looked into a liturgy of the Church of England, printed near the end of the last century, in order to find a service applicable to the case of Brown, I found that the only martyr recognized and provided for by it was King Charles the First, an eminent scamp. Of all the inhabitants of England and of the world, he was the only one, according to this authority, whom that church had made a martyr and saint of; and for more than a century it had celebrated his martyrdom, so called, by an annual service. What a satire on the Church is that! Look not to legislatures and churches for your guidance, nor to HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN any soulless incorporated bodies, but to inspirited or inspired ones. What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see what a work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles- lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history. What a variety of themes he touched on in that short space! There are words in that letter to his wife, respecting the education of his daughters, which deserve to be framed and hung over every mantelpiece in the land. Compare this earnest wisdom with that of Poor Richard. The death of [Washington] Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors. Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them. This unlettered man’s speaking and writing are standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American; such as “It will pay.” It suggests that the one great rule of composition –and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this– is, to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not. This demands earnestness and manhood chiefly. We seem to have forgotten that the expression, a liberal education, originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely was considered worthy of slaves only. But taking a hint from the word, I would go a step further, and say that it is not the man of wealth and leisure simply, though devoted to art, or science, or literature, who, in a true sense, is liberally educated, but only the earnest and free man. In a slaveholding country like this, there can be no such thing as a liberal education tolerated by the State; and those scholars of Austria and France who, however learned they may be, are contented under their tyrannies have received only a servile education. Nothing could his enemies do but it redounded to his infinite advantage — that is, to the advantage of his cause. They did not hang him at once, but reserved him to preach to them. And then there was another great blunder. They did not hang his four followers with him; that scene was still postponed; and so his victory was prolonged and completed. No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN We soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharps’ rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit — the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also. “He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene, Nor called the gods with vulgar spite, To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down as upon a bed.” What a transit was that of his horizontal body alone, but just cut down from the gallows-tree! We read, that at such a time it passed through Philadelphia, and by Saturday night had reached New York. Thus like a meteor it shot through the Union from the Southern regions toward the North! No such freight had the cars borne since they carried him Southward alive. On the day of his translation, I heard, to be sure, that he was hung, but I did not know what that meant; I felt no sorrow on that account; but not for a day or two did I even hear that he was dead, and not after any number of days shall I believe it. Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died. I never hear of a man named Brown now –and I hear of them pretty often– I never hear of any particularly brave and earnest man, but my first thought is of John Brown, and what relation he may be to him. I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN And it is also worthy of note that on October 25-26, 1860 (published November 3) Friend Lucretia Mott, the foremost spokesperson for nonviolence in the abolitionist movement in America, brought forward the position she had originally taken in regard to the “Christiana riot” near Philadelphia in 1851 by declaring

It is not John Brown the soldier we praise, it is John Brown the moral hero.

We might be tempted to declare that Thoreau was the most belligerent nonresistor of evil the world had yet seen, but in fact that description had already been awarded to someone. It was awarded by Robert Purvis to Friend Lucretia, and (despite what was said in the heat of the Civil War by Horace Greeley’s newspaper in New-York, in mockery of her) there is no shadow of a doubt that Friend Lucretia was for the totality of her life a convinced disbeliever in all violence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1852

In his journal for this year, on the road to Stonewall,33 Henry Thoreau would reveal some of his erotics:

33. Refer to Bryne R.S. Fone’s A ROAD TO STONEWALL: MALE HOMOSEXUALITY AND HOMOPHOBIA IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1750-1969. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

While homoeroticizing friendship, Henry Thoreau’s text also defines some of the proscriptions levied against such eroticization. In an 1852 journal entry he comments about this: “Boys bathing at Hubbard’s bend, playing with a boat (I at the willows). The color of their bodies in the sun at a distance is pleasing, the not often seen flesh- color. I hear the sound of their sport borne over the water.... What a singular fact that ... men were forbidden to expose their bodies under severest penalty.” It is, of course, not the exposition [sic] of nakedness that results in the “severest penalty” —death must surely be that penalty— but the desire that accompanies that exposition [sic]. Thoreau associates nakedness with desire, and his desire is directed at naked men. Thoreau’s seeming overstatement is accurate: sexual desire for men is punishable by death. Thus hiding in the willows by the banks of the stream, voicing his lament that the flesh is “not often seen,” Thoreau watches young buds of manhood at their naked sport. He is safe because he is a watcher only; at a distance and voyeuristically he absorbs a scene in which he is fearful to participate, knowing full well what the “awful results” may be. Thoreau’s bathing boys scene also looks ahead to a similar scene Walt Whitman will construct in section 11 of “Song of Myself,” where 28 young men bath [sic] in an ocean of homoerotic implication, and it also forecasts an entire generation of homoerotic texts, mostly English, like Frederick Rolfe’s “Ballade of Boys Bathing,” in which bathing boys become the focus for desire. In an entry written in 1840 Thoreau complains how “mean relations and prejudices intervene to shut out the sky and we never see a man as simple and distinct” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 144). The distance he keeps from bathing boys is marked and measured by such “mean relations and prejudice,” for it is no longer “simple and distinct” when it becomes hedged about with threats of “severest penalties.” Thoreau’s yearning sexual mythmaking was written in private and in isolation, in what may well have been, in part at least, a self-imposed sexual exile. Thoreau sought, finally, instead of caresses, the chaste solitude of Walden. In his journal in 1839 Thoreau lamented that “the nearest approach to a community of love in these days” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 115) —a community he identifies as made up of lovers like the Greek Damon and Pythias and Orestes and Pylades— “is like the distant breaking of waves on the seashore” (JOURNAL, 1906, 1: 115). Thoreau was not alone in searching for a kind of friendship that “once certainly existed” both in literature and society. Waldo Emerson in 1841, feeling an absence, demanded “spermatic, prophesying, man-making words.” While Emerson and Thoreau speculated in the privacy of their journals, Whitman more publicly in the letter to Emerson in 1856 complained about the absence in print of manly friendship, “Everywhere observed in The States,” and Bayard Taylor in a letter to Whitman in 1866 finds in LEAVES OF GRASS what he “finds nowhere else in literature” —that is, “that tender and noble love of man for man which once certainly existed but now almost seems to have gone out of the experience of the race.” Whitman was to elaborate that “noble love” in the CALAMUS poems of 1860. While these poems were certainly the most important and extensive nineteenth-century American texts to explore questions about homosexual identities, other American texts cautiously considered some of the implications of the experience of the “tender and noble love of man for man.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Homoerotics this may be, or homosociality, but none of this was obvious at the time. During this year John Albee visited the Emerson home and there encountered Thoreau leaning over the fire with a fair girl on each side — and for sure nothing of the sort was apparent to him:

Thoreau was already there [at the Emerson house]. I think he had ended his experiment at Walden Pond some years before. Thoreau was dressed, I remember, in a plain, neat suit of dark clothes, not quite black. He had a healthy, out-of-door appearance, and looked like a respectable husbandman. He was rather silent; when he spoke, it was in either a critical or a witty vein. I did not know who or what he was; and I find in my old diary of the day that I spelled his rare name phonetically, and heard afterward that he was a man who had been a hermit. I observed that he was much at home with Emerson; and as he remained through the afternoon and evening, and I left him still at the fireside, he appeared to me to belong in some way to the household. I observed also that Emerson continually deferred to him and seemed to anticipate his view, preparing himself obviously for a quiet laugh at Thoreau’s negative and biting criticisms, especially in regard to education and educational institutions. He was clearly fond of Thoreau; but whether in a human way, or as an amusement, I could not then make out. Dear, indeed, as I have since learned, was Thoreau to that household, where his memory is kept green, where Emerson’s children still speak of him as their elder brother. In the evening Thoreau devoted himself wholly to the children and the parching of corn by the open fire. I think he made himself very entertaining to them. Emerson was talking to me, and I was only conscious of Thoreau’s presence as we are of those about us but not engaged with us. A very pretty picture remains in my memory of Thoreau leaning over the fire with a fair girl on either side, which somehow did not comport with the subsequent story I heard of his being a hermit.... As soon as I could I introduced the problem I came to propound — what course a young man must take to get the best kind of education. Emerson pleaded always for the college; said he himself entered at fourteen. This aroused the wrath of Thoreau, who would not allow any good to the college course. And here it seemed to me Emerson said things on purpose to draw Thoreau’s fire and to amuse himself. When the curriculum at Cambridge was alluded to, and Emerson casually remarked that most of the branches were taught there, Thoreau seized one of his opportunities and replied: “Yes, indeed, all the branches and none of the roots.” At this Emerson laughed heartily. So without conclusions, or more light than the assertions of two representative men can give, I heard agitated for an hour my momentous question.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

He [Emerson] said we needed some great poets, orators. He was always looking out for them, and was sure the new generation of young men would contain some. Thoreau here remarked he had found one, in the woods, but it had feathers and had not been to Harvard College. Still it had a voice and an aerial inclination, which was pretty much all that was needed. “Let us cage it,” said Emerson. “That is just the way the world always spoils its poets,” responded Thoreau. Then Thoreau, as usual, had the last word; there was a laugh, in which for the first time he joined heartily, as the perquisite of the victor.

HENRY THOREAU WALDO EMERSON JOHN ALBEE

May 7, Friday: Lajos Kossuth was visiting Concord with great fanfare a whole lot of advance publicity and Henry Thoreau, very pointedly, with no fanfare or advance publicity at all, absented himself from Concord to the woods — where he heard the first drumming of the ruffed grouse.

John Shepard Keyes would report: As selectman I had to welcome Kossuth on his visit to Concord on a pleasant day in May 52 His visit was put off by some engagement and came on us with short notice at last. But we were equal to the emergency. He was met in a carriage at the line and escorted by the artillery he came to my house where he rested and wrote out or arranged his speech. The artillery formed a guard of honor about the yard to keep off too ardent admirers and after a substantial lunch at which he eat buttered radishes he went to the Town Hall and was welcomed by Mr Emerson. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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On a plain block of granite at Greenwood Cemetery is now inscribed: ISAAC T. HOPPER, BORN, DECEMBER 3D, 1771, ENDED HIS PILGRIMAGE, MAY 7TH, 1852. “Thou henceforth shalt have a good man’s calm, A great man’s happiness; thy zeal shall find Repose at length, firm Friend of human kind.”

May 7, Friday: 4:30 A.M. – To Cliffs. Has been a dew, which wets the feet, and I see a very thin fog over the low ground, the first fog, which must be owing to the warm weather. Heard a robin singing powerfully an hour ago, and song sparrows, and the cocks. No peeping frogs in the morning, or rarely. The toads sing (?), but not as at evening. I walk half a mile (to Hubbard’s Pool in the road), before I reach those I heard, — only two or three. The sound is uttered so low and over water; still it is wonderful that it should be heard so far. The traveller rarely perceives when he comes near the source of it, nor when he is farthest away from it. Like the will-o’-the-wisp, it will lead one a long chase over the fields and meadows to find one. They dream more or less at all hours now. I see the relation to the frogs in the throat of many a man. The full throat has relation to the distended paunch. I would fain see the sun as a moon, more weird. The sun now rises in a rosaceous amber. Methinks the birds sing more some mornings than others, when I cannot see the reason. I smell the damp path, and derive vigor from the earthy scent between Potter’s and Hayden’s. Beginning, I may say, with robins [American Robin Turdus migratorius], song sparrows [Melospiza melodia], chip-birds, bluebirds [Eastern Bluebird Sialia sialus], etc., I walked through larks [Eastern Meadowlark Sturnella magna], pewees [Wood Pewee Contopus virens], pigeon woodpeckers [Yellow-shafted Flicker Colaptes auratus], chickadee [Black-capped Chicadee Parus Atricapillus] tull-a-lulls, to towhees, huckleberry-birds, wood thrushes [Catharus mustelina], brown thrasher [Brown Thrasher Toxostroma rufum], jay [Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata], catbird [Gray Catbird Dumetella carolinensis], etc., etc. Entered a cool stratum of air beyond Hayden’s after the warmth of yesterday. The Viola pedata still in bud only, and the other (q.v.). Hear the first partridge [Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge)] drum. The first oven-bird [Seiurus Aurocapillus]. A wood thrush which I thought a dozen rods off was only two or three, to my surprise, and betrayed himself by moving, like a large sparrow with ruffled feathers, and quirking his tail like a pewee, on a low branch. [The 1906 journal editor notes here that probably the bird was a hermit thrush, this motion of the tail being almost a proof positive, adding that probably, too, all the “wood thrushes” seen by Thoreau in April (see ante) were hermits.] Blackbirds [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] are seen going over the woods with a chattering bound to some meadow. A rich bluish mist now divides the vales in the eastern horizon mile after mile. (I am ascending Fair Haven.) An oval-leaved pyrola (evergreen) in Brown’s pines on Fair Haven. Cliffs. — This is the gray morning; the sun risen; a very thin mist on the landscape; the falling water smooth. Far below, a screaming jay seen flying, against the bare stems of the pines. The young oaks on the plain, the pines standing here and there, the walls in Conantum pastures seen in the sun, the little groves on the opposite side of the river lit up by it while I am [in] shade, these are memorable and belong to the hour. Here at this hour the brown thrasher [Brown Thrasher Toxostroma rufum] often drowns the other birds. The towhee [Rufous-Sided Towhee Pipilo Erythrophthalmus] has been a main bird for regular morning singing in the woods for a little while. The creeper [Pine Warbler Dendroica pinus or Brown Creeper Certhia americana or Black-and-white Warbler Mniotilta varia] is regularly heard, too. Found the first strawberry blossoms (Fragaria Virginiana) on Fair Haven. The sedge grass blossom is now quite large and showy on the dry hillside where the wood has recently been cut off. I think that birds vary their notes considerably with the seasons. When I hear a bird singing, I cannot think of any words that will imitate it. What word can stand in place of a bird’s note? You would have to bury (?) it or surround it with a chevaux de frise of accents, and exhaust the art of the musical composer besides with your different bars, to represent it, and finally get a bird to sing it, to perform it. It has so little relation to words. The wood thrush [Catharus mustelina] says ah-tully-tally for one strain. There appear to be one or more little warblers in the woods this morning which are new to the season, about which I am in doubt, myrtle-birds [Yellow-rumped Warbler Dendroica coronata] among them. For now, before the leaves, they begin to people the trees in this warm weather. The first wave of summer from the south. The purple finch (sober- colored) [Purple Finch Carpodacus purpureus] is a rich singer. As I said the other day, something like the warbling vireo [Warbling Vireo Vireo gilvus], only louder, clearer, mellower, and more various. Bank swallows at Hayden’s. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN I fear that the dream of the toads will not sound so musical now that I know whence it proceeds. But I will not fear to know. They will awaken new and more glorious music for me as I advance, still farther in the horizon, not to be traced to toads and frogs in slimy pools.

P.M. –To Nawshawtuct. The vireo comes with warm weather, midwife to the leaves of the elm.... The first small pewee [Wood Pewee Contopus virens] sings now che-vet, or rather chirrups chevet, tche-vet – a rather delicate bird with a large head and two white wing bars. The first summer yellowbirds [Yellow Warbler Dendroica petechia] on the willow causeway. The birds I have lately mentioned come not singly, as the earliest, but all at once, i.e. many yellowbirds all over town. Now I remember the yellowbird comes when the willows begin to leave out. (And the small pewee [Wood Pewee Contopus virens] on the willows also.) So yellow. They bring summer with them and the sun, tche-tche-tche-tcha-tcha-tchar. Also they haunt the oaks, white and swamp white, where are not leaves. On the hill I sit hi the shadow of the locust trunks and branches, for want of other shade. Thus is a mistake in Nature, to make shade necessary before she has expanded the leaves. The catnep is now up, with a lustrous purple tinge to the under side of its leaves. (Why should so many leaves be so painted on the under side, concealed from men’s eye –only not from the insects– as much as the sculptures on the tops of columns?) There is something in its fragrance as soothing as balm to a sick man. It advances me ever to the autumn and beyond it. [low full of reminiscence is any fragrance! If it were not for virtuous, brave, generous actions, could there be any sweet fragrance? “Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.” Now you may say the trees generally are beginning to leave out, excepting the oaks, celtis, late water willow, etc., etc. But only the willows and the balm-of-gileads make any show in our landscape yet, — of native or wild trees, — the latter where they grow in clumps. Its catkins are five inches long. Top of hill. —The haze is remarkably thick to-day as if all the distant western woods were on fire. (The wind west and what coolness in it most grateful.) The haze makes the western view, quite rich, so many edges of woodland ridges where you see the pine tops against, the white mist of the vale beyond. I count five or six such ridges rising partly above the mist, but successively more indistinct, the first only a quarter of a mile off. Of course there are no mountains. It belongs to this warm weather. The lower part of the sky is white, like a fog; only in the zenith do I see any blue. It makes the outlines of the blue water on the meadow eastward agreeably indistinct, being more nearly the color of the water itself than the land. A maple swamp in bloom, westward from this hill, is a rich sight, even like a rosy orchard in bloom. The dust flies. I am not sure whether my first violet was the cucullata or ovata, [“I am not sure whether” and “cucullata or” have been crossed out in pencil] or the same with that minute one which I found prepared to blossom by the Spring Path this morning. A fern, one of the osmundas, beyond the celtis, one foot high, covered with reddish wool, unfolding its blossom (?) as it rises. The wool used for birds’ nests. Might be used for other purposes? It is such weather as in summer we expect a thunder-shower after. Is this smoke-like haze produced by the warm west wind meeting the still cool earth? Or is it smoke? The ground under the walnuts is richly strewn with nutshells, broken and gnawed by squirrels, like an unswept dining-hall in early times. That little early violet close to the ground in dry fields and hillsides, which only children’s eyes detect, with buds showing purple but lying so low, as if stooping to rise, or rather its stems actually bent to hide its head amid the leaves, quite unpretending. The gnaphalium, though without scent, is now a pure, dry, enduring flower and bears inspection. The first peetweet [Spotted Sandpiper Actitis macularia]; myrtle birds [Yellow-rumped Warbler Dendroica coronata] numerous. The catbird [Gray Catbird Dumetella carolinensis] does not make the corn-planting sounds. The toads dream loudly these first warm clays. A yellow- throated green frog in the river, by the hemlocks, — bright silk-green the fore part of the body, tiger-striped legs. The eyes of toads and frogs are remarkably bright and handsome, — oval pupils (?) or blacks and golden or coppery irides. The hop-hornbeam is almost in bloom. The red-wing’s [Agelaius phoeniceus] shoulder, seen in a favorable light, throws all epaulets into the shade. It is General Abercrombie. methinks, when they wheel partly with the red to me. The crow blackbirds [Common Grackle Quiscalus quiscula] make a noise like crows [American Crow Corvus Brachyrhynchos], and also a singular and rarely heard scream or screech. They fly with lark-like wings. We require just so much acid as the cranberries afford in the spring. The first bumblebee, that prince of hummers, — bombyle, [sic], looking now over the ground as if he could find something. He follows after flowers. To have your existence depend on flowers, like the bees and hummingbirds! The willow twigs now may make wreaths so pretty and graceful with their expanding leaves. They afford the only chaplets yet, fit to crown the fairest. The horse-chestnuts in the yards have opened their parasol-like leaves to-day, reminding me of tropical palms; and the rock maples’ large buds are almost open. Such a haze as this makes a dark night. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Kossuth, who had arrived in New-York in the previous December and would tour the US for two more months pressing the flesh and accepting donations for his “Independent Hungarian Government” ragged band of revolutionaries on the make, was of course making this pilgrimage to Concord because it was the symbolic bloody birth ground of US political independence from the British empire. Waldo Emerson delivered his appropriate “Address to Kossuth” –which has been aptly characterized by Larry J. Reynolds as “complimentary, vacuous, and vague”34– and invited the hero to enter the Emerson home. According to pages 145 and 158-9 of Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), here is how Kossuth’s trip had gone: When Kossuth began his famous tour of the United States, which lasted from December 1851 to July 1852, Whitman saw him. During his visit to Brooklyn, Kossuth was escorted to the armory and to Plymouth Church by a troop of horse guards, and there he spoke to large crowds. In the opinion of Joseph Jay Rubin, “Whitman gave his sympathy ... to the living symbol of freedom, crushed by emperors and czars, when Kossuth came to America that December in search of means to reverse the calamity in Hungary.” In his notebook, Walt Whitman merely recorded that “I saw him make his entree in NY latter part of 1851 riding up Broadway.” Rubin is probably right, though, for indeed Kossuth as symbol would have stimulated Whitman’s growing sympathy for revolutionary heroes and martyrs.... Sympathy for intervention on behalf of republicanism in Europe was greatest in the frontier states, where the expansionist spirit flourished, and there —in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri— Kossuth was warmly received. In Springfield IL, Abraham Lincoln, although against intervention, drafted resolutions expressing sympathy for Kossuth, “the most worthy and distinguished representative of the cause of civil and religious liberty on the continent of Europe,” and in Columbus OH, a 15-year-old William Dean Howells listened with rapt attention as Kossuth spoke on the steps of the statehouse. At age eighty, Howells recalled, “I hung on the words of the picturesque black-bearded, black-haired, black-eyed man, in the braided coat of the Magyars, and the hat with an ostrich plume up the side which set a fashion among us, and I believed with all my soul that in a certain event we might find the despotisms of the Old World banded against us, and ‘would yet see Cossacks,’ as I thrilled to hear Kossuth say.” Howells, like so many of his countrymen, bought himself a Kossuth hat, complete with the ostrich plume, to demonstrate his sympathy. Meanwhile, Kossuth marches, Kossuth dances, Kossuth oysters, Kossuth restaurants, Kossuth buttons, flags, and photographs became signs of the times. As Donald S. Spencer has found, even a manufacturer of rat poison capitalized on the revolutionary’s popularity: Kossuth’s coming, so they say; He’s a lion in his way And made tyranny his prey; But for bugs and such as they Our old Lyon is O.K. Rats and mice, too, he can slay. After making his way through the Midwest and the South (where he was coolly received), Kossuth visited a number of cities and towns in New England, where the people were eager to see him. The major writers in the region of course noticed his presence.

34. Emerson commented that Kossuth had gotten his “story told in every palace, and log hut, and prairie camp throughout the continent.” Refer to “Address to Kossuth,” in EMERSON’S COMPLETE WORKS, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1929), 3:401. Also refer to Donald S. Spencer’s LOUIS KOSSUTH AND YOUNG AMERICA: A STUDY OF SECTIONALISM AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1848-1852 (Columbia MO: U of Missouri P, 1977). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Annoyed at having been in general, and especially in this cradle of revolutionary spirit, shunted aside with mere words when he had come to fetch big bucks for a new military campaign, the Hungarian hero responded to the American sage that “the doors and shutters of oppression” were not to be opened by mere “example” or by mere “moral influence” but “must be opened by bayonets.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, as ever too easily impressed by political rhetoric, commented to Emerson that he had “said the only word that has yet been worthily spoken to Kossuth.” Thoreau confided to his journal merely “P.M.–Kossuth here.” (He then wrote that “The best men that I know … flatter and study effect, only more finely than the rest…. I accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity.”) Within precisely this timeframe, Hawthorne found himself reflecting upon the sort of purpose which was represented by such a purposive, argumentative, self-legitimating confidence artist of revolution as Kossuth, and upon how an excess of this ingredient might warp a person’s soul, and how a deficit of it, as represented for instance in himself, and in his persona Miles Coverdale, could do harm to a person’s soul, and found him modifying the conclusion of his all-but-completed “Hollingsworth” manuscript accordingly:

As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very same ingredient, the want of which, I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet, were there any cause, in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man’s dying for, and which my death would benefit, then —provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble— methinks I might be bold to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for example, would pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his man, for one brave rush upon the levelled bayonets. Farther than that, I should be loth to pledge myself.

Walt Whitman would reminisce about this period from 1852 to 1854, in the Camden Post for April 16, 1891: “Memoranda”

Occupied in house-building in Brooklyn. (For a little while of the first part of that time in printing a daily and weekly paper.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June Early in the month the contralto Marietta Alboni arrived in New-York. She would offer about a dozen recitals there and in Boston, Philadelphia, and Saratoga Springs during June, September, and October. Perpetuating a current joke about her name, that she was “all fatty” rather than “all bony,” Gary Schmidgall has commented on page 35 of his WALT WHITMAN: A GAY LIFE (Dutton, 1997) that: “Prima donnas of ample physique are peculiarly susceptible to vulgar quips.... Alboni was no exception, thanks notably to Rossini’s heartless but eminently repeatable remark about her swallowing a nightingale.” Walt Whitman, who was enthralled with her

but never enraptured by the female flesh, emphatically did not agree: “Alboni is a fully developed woman, with perfect-shaped feet, arms, and hands. — Some thought her fat — we always thought her beautiful. — Her face is regular and pleasant — her forehead low — plentiful black hair, cut short, like a boy’s — a slow and graceful style of walk — attitudes of inimitable beauty, and large black eyes.”

She would be in the United States until sometime in the following year. Whitman would be in the audience each time she sang in his vicinity. “She roused whirlwinds of feeling within me.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 29, Wednesday: Henry Thoreau accessed, by way of the library of the Society of Natural History in Boston, Thaddeus A. Culbertson’s “Journal of an Expedition to the Mauvais Terres and the Upper Missouri, 1850,” on page 84-145 of the SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 5TH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF REGENTS (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1851).

THADDEUS A. CULBERTSON (Thoreau would make notes on this reading in his Indian Notebook #6 and in his Fact Book.)

A Spiritualist convention began in New-York’s Masonic Temple. Jonathan Buffum of Lynn, Massachusetts would serve as this convention’s chairman, Mr. Haywood of Milford, Alfred Bingham of New-York, and the Reverend Mr. Loveland of Charlestown would be their Vice Presidents, and Messrs. C.H. White and S.C. Hewitt would serve as their Secretaries. A newspaper reporter was present and taking notes, and would soon file a report full of mockery and diatribe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Marietta Alboni would be appearing on this evening and the following one, in Cenerentola at the Broadway Theater. Soon she would be appearing in Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment and then in Bellini’s Sonnambula and Norma (all this would be witnessed by Walt Whitman). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1853

During this year or the next, Walt Whitman would visit Dr. Henry Abbott’s museum of Egyptian antiquities in New-York and there acquire a general interest in the whole topic.

In an effort to overcome segregation by Masonic lodges, Martin Robison Delany presented his THE ORIGIN AND OBJECTS OF ANCIENT FREEMASONRY. This was an attempt to reconstruct the history of freemasonry as out of “Ethiopia, Egypt, and Assyria — all settled and peopled by the children of Ham.” He seems to have claimed also that Euclid was a black man, since he was out of Egypt, “a colony from Ethiopia”:

(And, Moses was a fugitive slave, etc.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN John Mercer Langston graduated from the seminary associated with Oberlin College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN As Walt Whitman would report in the Camden Post for April 16, 1891, he was at this point still occupied in the house-building which he had been at since 1852 and which would continue into 1854: “Memoranda”

Occupied in house-building in Brooklyn. (For a little while of the first part of that time in printing a daily and weekly paper.)

But, of course, house-building wasn’t all Walt was up to in the Big Apple. He was also doing such things as frequenting the Great Exposition which had “open’d”: “Memoranda”

I went a long time (nearly a year) — days and nights — especially the latter — as it was finely lighted, and had a very large and copious exhibition gallery of paintings (shown at best at night, I tho’t) — hundreds of pictures from Europe, many masterpieces — all an exhaustless study — and, scatter’d thro’ the building, sculptures, single figures or groups — among the rest, Thorwaldsen’s “Apostles,” colossal in size — and very many fine bronzes, pieces of plate from English silversmiths, and curios from everywhere abroad — with woods from all lands of the earth — all sorts of fabrics and products and handiwork from the workers of all nations.

Visitors to the fair could watch Elisha Graves Otis, the man who in 1845 had invented the railroad safety brake, having himself hauled up into the air on a platform on a rope. Nearer, my God, to Thee– Then they could watch as an assistant hacked at the rope with an ax while Mr. Otis stood on his platform, with perfect confidence that his newly patented safety brake (a steel wagon spring that meshed with a ratchet) would check his fall within a few inches.

Then, if the visitors walked across the street to Latting’s Observatory and Ice Cream Parlor, they could themselves ride in a little room called an “elevator,” under steam power, to the top of a pointy tower, and look out across the treetops of the tangled Seneca Village area that would someday become Central Park. Perhaps these were Walt Whitman activities? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN New-York was authorized by the State legislature to purchase land for the public park that will eventually become Manhattan Island’s Central Park, and the site was secretly selected. The plan was, they would gentrify the disgusting black Seneca Village higher up on the island. Plots adjoining the lands seized for this beautification project could of course be anticipated to be increasing radically in value, because of their views over the new park. Those in the know, such as Mayor Fernando Wood, began to buy up such house lots in order to benefit from what would prove during their lifetimes to be a 50-fold increase in valuation.

New-York would host in this year two temperance conventions, the one for those male temperance delegates who could accommodate themselves to the presence of female temperance delegates and the other for those male temperance delegates who could not accommodate themselves to such a novelty. This came about when the World Temperance Convention refused to seat Lucy Stone on the platform, and the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson led delegates in a walkout and helped form a more righteous Whole World’s Temperance Convention. The city of New-York would during this year also host a woman’s rights convention, an anti-slavery convention, and its first world’s fair, erecting on Reservoir Square35 a copy of London’s Crystal Palace that they chose to denominate their “Crystal Palace of Industry.”

So, what’s this thingie, “temperance” and why’s it so important? Here is an advertisement for an establishment that was known as a “temperance restaurant,” in Boston in this year:

35. This is the present site of William Cullen Bryant Park east of the Avenue of the Americas between 41st and 42d Street, since the “Crystal Palace of Industry” structure burned in 1858. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 8, Thursday: An anonymous article on “The Egyptian Museum” in Life Illustrated magazine had been, we are practically certain, written by Walt Whitman. December 23-24, Friday and Saturday: The steamer San Francisco was wrecked 300 miles out of New-York harbor, but its passengers were rescued: TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS I understand the large hearts of heroes, The courage of present times and all times; How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm, How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights, And chalk’d in large letters on a board, Be of good cheer, We will not desert you; How he saved the drifting company at last, How the lank loose-gowned women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves, How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men; All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine, I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there. — Walt Whitman

On the stage of Concord’s Town Hall, Caroline Downes Brooks Hoar set up a Christmas tree for the children of Concord, decorating it with candles and gifts. 700 children and their teachers formed a semicircle in front of the stage, a hymn was sung — and St. Nicholas appeared. While he addressed the assembly presents were passed out and bags of candy were tossed into the crowd. A box had been prepared for residents of the poor farm, and there were specific gifts for Concord notables such as Josiah Bartlett and Waldo Emerson.

This is the Christmas season on which Ellen Emerson in boarding school at age 14 had written home to her father Ralph Waldo Emerson and her mother Lidian Emerson, asking for specific presents: Dear Mother, This is only a despatch about presents which I am writing in haste.... I want presents for nine girls, pretty little ornaments and trifles of that kind are fashionable here.... May I have in my Christmas box some candy of various kinds, some macaroons ... and cocoa-nut cakes and some apples?... Two cakes of “Chocolat Perfectionné”, some almond candy, some vanilla cream candy and particularly I want a whole quantity of barley candy.... We note that it is clear from this note what is the state of development of the commercialized Christmas gift- giving tradition at this point in time: Ellen has received Christmas presents before and expects Christmas presents again, and she is thinking at least primarily of items to be purchased in stores rather than items to be made at home.

Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas, was definitely a presence by this year, or, at least, he rated a mention in the New Hampshire Gazette: The genuine New England article for the reception of all the Christmas and New Year’s gifts which the good Santa Claus chooses to bestow upon children [is] an article wonderfully characteristic of our thrift and also of our want of poetic taste, ... the woolen stocking, red or blue.... by the least imaginative among the young folks, suspended at the head of the bed, but by those whose intuitive belief in the marvelous is stronger, as near the fireplace as possible, in order to make sure that Saint Nicholas will not overlook it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1854

Samuel Peck patented a case molded out of shellac and sawdust for such glassed photos, called the “Union” case.36 Also, in this year, James “Ambrose” Cutting of Boston patented a technique for sealing the “Ambrotype,” so called, within a glass cover plate with Canada balsam, a resin.

HOW TO TELL THEM APART:

Daguerreotype direct positive, mirrorlike surface shifts from positive August 19, 1839- reversed image to negative as you tilt it circa 1860 Ambrotype direct positive, pry the sheets apart and shine a light 1855-circa 1865 reversed image through from the back to verify that the image is negative Carte de Visite non-reversed wedding band is on the proper hand, 1854-circa 1925 image you can read the titles of books, and clothing is buttoned properly for each gender “Tintype” direct positive, The metal is attracted to a magnet 1856-circa 1945 (Ferrotype) reversed image and there is no mirror appearance

36. These cases were sometimes referred to, incorrectly, as gutta-perchas, since that plasticky material had become commercially available in about 1844. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN In or about this year an image was made of Walt Whitman, probably by Gabriel Harrison in New-York.

Can you tell that this is a quarter-plate Daguerreotype?

August 14, Monday: Henry Thoreau donated a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS to the Harvard Library, gave a copy to Richard F. Fuller inscribed “from H.D.T.,” and presented a copy to Mrs. Lidian “Asia” Jackson 37 Emerson inscribed “from her friend Henry Thoreau.” After a cursory scan of the copy of WALDEN which he had just purchased, John Greenleaf Whittier commented to its publisher James Thomas Fields that it was

capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish. The practical moral of it seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped; but after all, for me I prefer walking on two legs.

Well, but this was a bit different, as a reaction, from the reaction Whittier had had when he had received a presentation copy of Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS: after looking that book over, he had tossed it — into the fireplace.38

37. These three copies are now in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. The records of the Boston Society of Natural History indicate that Thoreau had donated copies of A WEEK and WALDEN to them as well. 38. Thoreau’s copy of LEAVES OF GRASS would be knocked down on auction at Sotheby’s in 2002 or 2003, evidently to a Walt Whitman collector, for US$119,500. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1855

Here is a pre-1855 verse fragment from Walt Whitman, for comparison with WALDEN and with the Chinese philosopher who dreamed he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man:

I cannot be awake, for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.

John Bartlett of Cambridge, owner of the bookstore that served Harvard University, issued the initial edition of a collection of FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS. Also, poet Walt Whitman published a volume of twelve poems, 39 LEAVES OF GRASS, at his own expense, although this met with no commercial success.

Major W.H. Emory completed a survey of the new boundary that had been established by the Gadsden Purchase of 1852 between the United States of America and Mexico. Returned from some three years in the Southwest region of the United States, from this year until 1872 John Russell Bartlett would serve as Secretary of State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (this would be the longest anyone ever served in that capacity). He would be most diligent in the preservation of Providence and Rhode Island’s historical records.

Texas slaveowners were in the habit of offering rewards of $200-$600 for the recapture of slaves fleeing south toward the Mexican border. A group of bounty hunters, unprepared for the resistance they received, abandoned their mission. Much to his own surprise, Noah Smithwick, a member of this group, found himself hoping that the freedom-seekers they had been pursuing would be able to make their way into Mexico.40

By order of Texas Governor Elisha Pease, Captain James Callahan of the Texas Rangers entered Mexico and attempted to round up former slaves. Callahan meanwhile insisted that the purpose of his excursion was to pursue renegade native Americans, not recover fugitive slaves. The Rangers reduced a small village to ruins. The Mexican government, however, with the assistance of local native Americans, forced this band of Rangers to withdraw without the blacks they had captured.41

39. Henry Thoreau’s copy of LEAVES OF GRASS would be knocked down on auction at Sotheby’s in 2002 or 2003, evidently to a Whitman collector, for US$119,500. 40. Noah Smithwick. THE EVOLUTION OF A STATE (Austin TX: Gammel Book Company, 1900), page 326. 41. Ronnie C. Tyler. “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” Journal of Negro History, Volume 57, Issue 1 (January 1972), pages 8-9; Frederick Law Olmsted. A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS. (NY: Dix, Edwards and Company, 1857), page 333. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN According to pages 126-7 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), although Walt Whitman would in his old age imply that during his youth he had been an abolitionist, “this was simply not the case”: In his editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle during the late 1840s, he attacked the abolitionists and blamed them for retarding the end of slavery by their fanaticism. He did disapprove of slavery, of course, but mainly because of its inconsistency with American ideals. He held a low opinion of Negroes, as his Civil War correspondence with his mother reveals, and his sympathy for them was limited. It was the revolutionaries in Europe, not abolitionism, that inspired him to REVOLUTION become a poet of liberty, one whose attitude, as he described it in the 1855 preface, was “to cheer up slaves and horrify despots.”... As a young boy, Whitman learned to place a high value on political revolt. From his grandmother he heard stories about the Revolutionary War, told from a patriot’s point of view, and these formed a valued part of his education. Washington, naturally, became one of his heroes, and from his father, as is well known, he acquired a love of radical democrats. Whitman’s father knew personally and admired Thomas Paine and Frances FANNY WRIGHT Wright (an ardent Scottish-born democrat and freethinker), and these two gained young Walt’s reverence. Whitman became familiar with the writings of both, and LEAVES OF GRASS, as Justin Kaplan has pointed out, “borrowed the insurgent and questioning spirit of these mentors along with literal quotations from their writings.” During this year Whitman would be self-publishing the 1st edition of his LEAVES OF GRASS, containing “Song of Myself,” proclaiming the ever-crowdpleasing American Exceptionalist attitude that these United States of America was the venue for the redemption of the human race and destined to give birth to a new world order: 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 labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward 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, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, 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....

So far as we know (according to Anne Lyon Haight’s and Chandler B. Grannis’s BANNED BOOKS 387 B.C. TO 1978 A.D., R.R. Bowker Co, 1978) the Library Company of Philadelphia would be the only American library to procure a copy of the 1st edition of LEAVES OF GRASS.42 In Philadelphia in this year, this volume was being read aloud in the home of Friends James and Lucretia Mott, and a relative became so enthusiastic that he went out and purchased a copy specially for his 17-year-old daughter.

42. Henry Thoreau’s copy of LEAVES OF GRASS would be knocked down on auction at Sotheby’s in 2002 or 2003, evidently to a Whitman collector, for US$119,500. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

THROUGH EIGHT YEARS In 1848, ’49, I was occupied as editor of the “daily Eagle” newspaper, in Brooklyn. The latter year went off on a leisurely journey and working expedition (my brother Jeff with me) through all the middle States, and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Lived awhile in New Orleans, and work’d there on the editorial staff of “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; traveling altogether probably 8000 miles this trip, to and fro. ’51, ’53, occupied in house-building in Brooklyn. (For a little of the first part of that time in printing a daily and weekly paper, “the Freeman.”) ’55, lost my dear father this year by death. Commenced putting LEAVES OF GRASS to press for good, at the job printing office of my friends, the brothers Rome, in Brooklyn, after many MS. doings and undoings — (I had great trouble in leaving out the stock “poetical” touches, but succeeded at last.) I am now (1856-’7) passing through my 37th year.

As the poet would report in the Camden Post for April 16, 1891: “Memoranda”

Lost my dear father this year by death.... Commenced putting LEAVES OF G RASS to press, for good — after many MSS. doings and undoings — (I had great trouble in leaving out the stock “poetical” touches — but succeeded at last.) The book has since had some eight hitches or stages of growth, with one annex, (and another to come out in 1891, which will complete it.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May: Henry Thoreau reran the lines of the rough plan he had made of the land near the Fitchburg Railroad depot in Concord, the tracks, and the Frances Monroe property.

View Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

The Whitman family was attempting to benefit from a real estate boom on the outskirts of Brooklyn and the mother, Louisa Whitman, purchased a house in the middle of the block at 99 Ryerson Street, a short way north of Myrtle Avenue. According to the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, at the time this was two stories, “one of a row of small wooden houses with porches, which all seem occupied by mechanics.”43

The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward again visited Scotland. As I travelled about Scotland, both in 1853 and 1855, I found the anti-slavery feeling prevalent, deep, earnest, and intelligent. It is incorporated in the feelings, habits, and characteristics of the people. They are abolitionists from intelligent conviction, human sympathy, and religious principle. Anti-slavery principle will live in Scotland while religion has an abiding place in the hearts of her people. I attended meetings in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dalkeith, Dunfermline, Dundee, Hamilton, Stewartown, Cumnock, Kirkaldy, Falkirk, Stirling, Montrose, Rutherglen, Greenock, Rothsay, Campbelltown, &c. To the kind friends in those towns whose humble guest I had the pleasure of being (in one case, when suffering from an affection of the chest and an inflammation in my feet; in another, when on crutches from a severe lameness — circumstances which made kindness the more needed and the more acceptable), I beg hereby to tender my most hearty thanks. May the blessings of those ready to perish ever be upon them! In Glasgow there are two Anti-Slavery Committees. My immediate connection was with the new one; but Mrs. George Smith, one of the old Committee, with whom I had the pleasure of breakfasting, is most catholic in her anti-slavery views and feelings. To the slave and his cause she is true, however she may differ from some of her coadjutors. I did not happen to meet any other person in Glasgow whom I knew as belonging to the old Society. It was not my business to inquire into the differences of abolitionists, but I presume they are about the same as those between anti-slavery people in the United States. Would that the time were come, when all Christians and all Christian reformers were prepared to say, “Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and me, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen, for we be brethren.” How much do we all need to study the lesson taught us by our Lord, in his reply to the disciples, when they informed him that they had forbidden some one to cast out devils, because he did not follow with them! In other towns, I believe, this division happily does not exist. There is a very active society in Edinburgh, whose Secretary, Mrs. Wigham, treated me most kindly, inviting and introducing me to a meeting of the Ladies’ Committee.44 That Society, as such, allowed me to be the bearer of a very generous donation to those who sent me hither. They also gave me a token of kind wishes to myself personally. In Dundee is an 43.“Mechanic” = blue-collar worker. 44. Mrs. Wigham sent her carriage to my hotel, to fetch me to breakfast with her family. There I had the pleasure of making Mr. Wigham’s acquaintance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN earnest, energetic Society, whose Secretary, Mrs. Borwick, is indefatigable in its promotion. That Society also gave me tangible expressions of personal regard, and of sympathy with my cause, on both occasions of my visiting Dundee. In Greenock a Committee was formed while I was there, from which great good may be expected, because at its head is a lady45 of such untiring energy, that her efforts will effect a great deal. With her are associated so many of the truly pious and benevolent of that beautiful town, that there will be no lack of service to the general cause from that very efficient Committee. The Glasgow Society is the leading one, from its position, and the commanding influence of most of its members. Glasgow is the chief place of business north of the Tweed. Its commerce is constantly increasing; and its “merchant princes” and “factory lords” are augmenting their wealth, and that of their town, to an almost incredible degree. Hence, whatever is done in Glasgow is done for the whole of Scotland. The influence of Glasgow merchants and Glasgow ministers is considerable, owing to the greatness of this Queen of the West, and to the personal character and great learning which those ministers possess. These two facts, with the additional one that both merchants and ministers are members of the Glasgow Society, make it to all practical purposes a Society for all Scotland, as it might not improperly be called. Then, the very fraternal co-operation with it which the Anti-Slavery Societies and the ministers and Churches of the whole country show, certainly makes it a national more than a local organization. It is national, in fact, but it is the nationality of sympathy and co-operation, which is far better than that of mere name. There is much in Scotland, especially in Glasgow, for the anti- slavery cause to contend against. There is a great deal of trade between Glasgow merchants and American traders. The former do not like to run the risk of damaging their business, by offending good customers — which they fear would be the result of their taking active, open, anti-slavery ground. This is less commendable, as some of the most prosperous, most successful firms, are anti-slavery men — a fact which certainly ought to assure the timid. But timidity is not all. They are not only “fearful,” but “unbelieving.” They are not, in heart, with the anti-slavery cause; but they are, in heart, against it. I could mention the names of more than one Lord Provost who refused, a when in office, to show the least favour to our cause, because they did not approve of it. They are merchants, and look at things as Mr. Cunard does, “in a business light;” but why it should injure them more than it does Messrs. Campbells, G. Smith and Sons, McKeand and Co., Playfair and Bryce, Messrs. Smith, or Mr. W.P. Paton, all of whom are abolitionists, and merchants too, I dinna ken. Some few of the clergymen, too, it is not to be denied, seem destitute of all interest in the cause of the slave. Then there are some who were formerly slaveholders in the colonies, and whose being obliged to release their Negroes did not at all change their hearts. But what in this world could have made a pro-slavery man of Mr. Baxter, M.P. for Montrose, I cannot imagine. His father was among the most ready to forward the cause which first took me to Dundee. His venerable grandfather, one of the princely patriarchs of Scotland, took me kindly by the 45. Mrs. Hepburn. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN hand, and made the largest contribution, save one, that I received in Scotland to the cause. I bowed with him at the altar of prayer; we united our supplications together: it was eight- and-forty hours after the demise of Dr. Wardlaw, whom the venerable William Baxter soon joined, in heaven. I have his autograph. It is doubly dear to me since his decease. Loving him as I did, I could but feel the deepest regret that a cause to which he was so ardently attached should be wounded by one in whose veins flowed the blood of William Baxter! In Edinburgh I found a warm coadjutor in the person of the excellent Rev. J.R. Campbell, M.A.46 The Rev. Dr. Candlish put himself to some inconvenience to attend my meeting there. Mr. Joseph Watson, John Wigham, Esq., Mr. Thomas Russell, and the Rev. Geo. Cullen of Leith, gave me very substantial proofs of their friendly regard for the cause of my poor people. J.B. Tod, Esq., and his amiable family, made their house my home, and a most delightful home it was. Mr. Tod is one of the earliest abolitionists of Scotland. He was warm and devoted in the cause, in days when some were opposing, others doubting and hesitating. Mr. John Dunlop, of Burntisland, was an anti-slavery man in those days too. He sacrificed a small fortune in the cause, rather than retain the ownership of human beings. A more cordial friend the anti-slavery cause has not in Scotland, than John Dunlop, Esq. Much excitement prevailed throughout Scotland in May, 1855, owing to the fact that the missionaries of the United Presbyterian Church had admitted slaveholders to the communion and membership of the body, at Old Calabar, in Africa. The arguments pro and con showed that the question of the religious character of slaveholders, and of their fitness for fellowship in a Christian Church, was one in which the denomination took a deep interest. Members of other bodies as well shared in the interest excited by this discussion. Without professing to understand the matter in its length and breadth, I feel quite sure that the honest disposition of all is, to arrive at the truth and to practise it. This is an earnest, not only of present right-mindedness, but of future success in grappling with the difficulties of the case, and overcoming them: as they must be, if the body be kept pure. The same honoured denomination is doing very much to evangelize Jamaica. No doubt their interest in the cause of the Negro will continue, while they are engaged in doing so much for his very best weal. It is to that body that my eloquent cousin, Rev. H.H. Garnet, of Westmoreland, county of Cornwall, Jamaica, belongs. While I was in Edinburgh, I gladly accepted the kind offer of Mrs. Tod and her accomplished daughter, to accompany me to Holyrood House. I had read so much of that palace, and had made myself so familiar with the history of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her unhappy husbands (to accommodate onesself to a term not strictly correct), that I was anxious to visit it. Mrs. Tod is an Irish lady — whether of the old school or not, I cannot say; but of the school of kind politeness, refined manners, well stored intellect, and extraordinary conversational powers, with an abundance to converse about of that which is far above mere commonplace parlance. Her daughter, though born in Scotland, of a Scottish father, is to all appearance and to all purposes an Irish girl, in all that is good, accomplished, ladylike, and 46. Now of Bradford, Yorkshire. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN simple-hearted, which that term includes. With such companions, and a succession of servants to show us over the different apartments, we took our tour of Holyrood House —for it is no small journey— and were first shown into the room in which King James is said to have been born. Our guide (as, unfortunately, is not very uncommon with such officials, in that country) was in a state that would pass among ordinary judges for drunk. He made some stupid blunder about the lock of the door, so that he could not unfasten it to let us out. There we were — Mrs. Tod, Miss Tod, our guide, and myself — locked in the room in which, he said, James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England was born! Imprisoned in Holyrood House! After the far less than sober guide had exercised his skill upon the door, the lock, and the key, sufficiently to convince us that he could never release us, I took an old battle-axe, affirmed to be 600 years old (everything is ancient in such places, according to the chronology of guides and servants), and broke the door open, effecting deliverance from durance for myself and party. We were shown Queen Mary’s bed, some tapestry of her own working, and a thousand and one curiosities connected with that unhappy woman, which every visitor of Holyrood has had pointed out to him, in her apartments. The fabulous blood of Rizzio was shown us, of course; what was it kept there for, but to be shown? But the most amusing thing was pointing out the stone, on the floor of the ruined abbey, where Queen Mary stood when she was married to Bothwell! That was a little “more than I had bargained for”; I therefore said to the person who showed it — “Will you be kind enough, first to tell me when she was married to Bothwell, or, whether she was married to him or not? We will see the stone they stood upon when married, afterwards.” “There is, I confess, some doubt about it, in some minds, sir,” he remarked apologetically. “And I am one of the most sceptical,” said I. The ladies laughed, and the guide kept better “within the record” after that. Going over the apartments recently occupied by the royal family, I was delighted to see the simplicity and plainness of the furniture in the bedrooms. The bedsteads of the princes were just such as Masters Anybody in the kingdom would sleep on. In the royal apartments, which the person who showed them told us were not exhibited to all visitors (hinting both that we were privileged and that we ought to pay for it), I saw two elegant chairs, which were brought from Montreal to the Exhibition of 1851. I was charged with being so delighted with these productions of my own colony, as to almost forget everything else I saw; and the charge, I must acknowledge, is more than half true. It was no small gratification, to know that one’s own colony was well and honourably represented in that Exhibition, and to know that the royal family honoured that colony either by the purchase or the acceptance of those articles, and caused them to be placed in the ancient palace of Holyrood. When at Stirling and Perth, I was so lame as to be unable either to walk about or ride on horseback; and was therefore obliged to leave both places without seeing their great beauties, and their points of almost classic interest. This was, to me, a matter of deep regret; but, indulging the hope of visiting Scotland at some future day, with my family, I contented myself with the promise of then seeing the lakes, the highlands, the midsummer twilight of the far North, the city of Aberdeen, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN the beautiful scenery surrounding Stirling and Perth. I was equally disappointed at Hamilton, Greenock, and Rothsay; but fortunate enough to receive the kind sympathy, active and hearty co-operation, and personal kindness, of the good friends of the cause in those towns. I forgot to say, that the Glasgow New Abolition Society has a Committee of Ladies as well as one of gentlemen. These two, while somewhat independent, yet act together. It was my privilege to be employed by them for twenty days; and I shall not soon forget either their trueness and devotion to the cause, or their kindness to myself personally. There are a great many disagreeables connected with an agency, especially a travelling agency; that was the last I accepted, and I hope never to accept another: but all the unpleasant things naturally and necessarily appertaining to an agency are very greatly modified, if not entirely overcome, by such kindness as that shown me by this society and John Smith, Esq., its respected Secretary. I think I can say of Scottish abolitionists generally, that they are as laborious and self-sacrificing as any band of anti- slavery people I ever saw. I have already said that it partakes of their very intelligent religious character. But this is not all. It is formed of the traits which make up the whole of Scottish character: the elements of the latter enter into and comprise the former. It follows, that whatever of sterling integrity, deep earnestness, unfaltering perseverance, enlightened and large-hearted humanity, and high-toned religious sentiment, are peculiar to the Scot, both by nature and by education, mark and distinguish his abolitionism. Hence, the announcement of a meeting or a contribution brings the true Scot to the place of assemblage, and brings, with him, his donation and his prayer. It may rain, his funds may be low,47 there may be other obstacles: but what of these? He is a Scotchman. This is duty; its performance, with him, is not to depend upon whether it be convenient or not. Hence, also, when Scotchmen have gone to the colonies, they have made those distant countries feel the impress of their character in general matters, producing the best fruits of energy and intelligence; but when they have so drifted with the stream, in slaveholding countries, as to become partakers of the evil deeds of their neighbours, they have not been restrained from the lowest depths of wickedness to which many of other nations have sunk. Scotchmen, in the West Indies, became slaveholders. They were severely exacting and oppressive. It was just like them to demand, and, if possible, to receive, the last “baubee,” from the unpaid toil of their slaves. They required the exhibition of Scottish energy from their bondmen; if they did not receive it, they were prepared to exhibit Scotch energy in forcing it out of them. Instances of this sort are to be remembered of many Scotch slaveholders (and, alas! by many Negroes, who were their slaves) to this day. The record of them, and the names of their perpetrators, would be the largest, blackest roll and record of infamy that ever disgraced the Scottish name or blighted Scottish character. It is therefore most fit that there should be in their native country a fearless, persevering band, who are redeeming the name and character of the nation, disgraced by such recreants. It is true, also, that among the thousand and 47. “A man may tak his neebur’s part Yet hae no cash to spare.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN one vices into which no inconsiderable number of our fellow subjects from the North fell, when slaveholders, was that which violated the seventh commandment. Like others, they treated their children of African blood as half-castes, and denied them social equality with whites — raising them above the condition of their mothers, depressing them beneath that of their fathers — them a silly, supercilious, unmanly, half-race, unfit for any social position, alike uncomfortable among whites or blacks. But while it is true that, in these matters, Scotchmen showed themselves but human beings, it is also true that, unlike Yankee slaveholders, they did not, as a rule, trade in the persons of their own children! They would not disown them; they would and did educate them, and settle property upon them. This is, I believe, commonly true of Scotch slaveholders in America — more commonly than of any others. A Yankee will sell his own child quite as readily as one of his black neighbour’s; and with as little remorse or concern. He can do that and belong to Church, and remain “in good and regular standing.” A Scotchman, as a rule, says practically, “I canna do that”! I must do Scotchmen the justice to add, too, that in America they do not forget, so soon as other men from these islands, the fact that they were born in a land of freedom and equality as to races and colours. They do not so easily learn to trample upon a free Negro, and to tread his rights in the dust. I do not deny that there are most lamentable cases of this description, but I do affirm that they are not nearly so frequent and so numerous as is true of other British nationalities. Perhaps I shall be excused for stating a case of some prominence, which illustrates my idea. There is in America a total abstinence organization called the “Sons of Temperance.” It is, in some respects, a secret society. It has done a great deal to promote the cause of total abstinence in that country, where such labours are greatly needed; but, like other benevolent societies in America, this order passes the black man by, and accommodates the prejudices of its members and the community by treating coloured persons after the ordinary way of treating them — refusing them membership upon equal terms with others. This is done by the Churches to which these gentlemen belong: and why should not a Temperance Society take the Church for its model? They also refuse to grant black persons charters empowering them to form Lodges of blacks. In a word, they seem to prefer the gratification of their ill will to the Negro, to allowing him to receive the benefits of their Order. I grieve to say, that they have not changed in the least, in this disposition. They still seem to say, “we prefer the continued drunkenness of the Negro, with all its attendant horrors, to admitting him to our fraternity. If some one will save him, well; but as for us and our Order, we prefer his going to perdition as he is, to the relaxation of our rule.” In the early history of the Order there was no rule on the subject. Accordingly, in some divisions (as the Lodges are called) remote from New York, blacks were admitted. Several were received in New England; many are in Canada. I was admitted in Cortland; but the dissatisfaction arising out of my case was so great, that the New York Division sent a deputy48 to order my expulsion. In 1851, the National Division passed a rule declaring it “illegal and inexpedient to admit coloured 48. Captain Cady. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN persons;” they have since that time confirmed this vote, by refusing to amend or alter it. In my own case, we threw our charter into their teeth, and dissolved the Division. The presiding officer was a member of my Church; the next in rank was the clerk of the Church; another member was a deacon, whom I had ordained; many more were attendants upon my ministry. Could they submit to a demand to expel their chosen pastor, on account of his colour? Could they consent to belong to a fraternity demanding it? No; they honoured themselves, their principles, and their minister, by indignantly washing their hands of all participation in such an organization. It follows, that black persons are not legal members; of course, to such, charters are not to be granted. Besides, if blacks might form constituent Divisions, they would be entitled to be represented in Grand Divisions: that would never answer. It may be, that in another world, whether of bliss or woe, blacks and whites are in close association, or even in close contact; but on earth — i.e., American earth, and among the Sons of Temperance — such a thing is out of the question. But what has this to do with Scotchmen? I will show. In the face of this general universal Negro-hate, several Scottish temperance men in the city of New York withdrew from the Order, formed the Caledonian Division, admitted black members, and granted them charters to form black Divisions on terms of the most perfect equality with themselves. The same, I am sorry to say, is not true of any other British nationality; but Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, and Canadians, belong to the Negro-hating Divisions, and help to enforce and sustain the anti-Negro rule. I will take the liberty of saying here, that were all Scotchmen and other British people, upon going to America, to act as did this Caledonian Division, the whole current of pro-slavery opinion in America would be turned. So numerous — and so powerful, after a very short residence — are those who once were subjects of Britain, in that country, that they could have long since revolutionized public sentiment on this matter, had they chosen to do so. Let me state a case. The Rev. Mr. McClure says, that in one of the Methodist Churches in a large town in New Jersey, there were several English, and also several coloured, communicants. The rule was (a rule almost invariable among American Methodists and others), that the black members should not commune until the whites had been served. These Englishmen, in a body, remained until the coloured people were called, and then came and received the emblems with them — thus identifying themselves, as Jesus did, with the poor. The consequence was, that the rule was broken down; and now, whites and blacks are treated alike, as they should be. Mr. McClure observes, that were the same thing, in like circumstances, done by Englishmen generally, in America, they are numerous enough to carry their point in almost every community. I know that the same would be true of Irishmen and Scotchmen, had they the manliness to try it. Emigrants from England, therefore, when going to America and becoming Americanized on this subject, not only do great evil to the Negro, but fail, guiltily fail, to do him the good which lies in their power. I could not write so freely as I have concerning American guilt, and be silent touching the like turpitude of former British subjects. In contrast with what is too common there, I take great pleasure in bearing testimony to HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN the noble stand of the Caledonian Division; and beg to add, that one of the aims of the Scottish Anti-Slavery Societies, and those in all other parts of the three kingdoms, should be, in my humble judgment, the maintenance of a high-toned Christian anti-slavery sentiment in every part of Britain, for the purpose of warning emigrants against the guilt and danger to which they will be exposed in this matter, when settled in the United States; and, in the event of their falling into such practice, rebuking them for lapsing from principles which it was their pride to avow when at home. While in Scotland, I spoke freely upon this point; and am proud to be able to say, that I did so with the fullest concurrence of the ladies and gentlemen of the Anti-Slavery Societies. I never saw, before or elsewhere, such cultivation of the soil, as in Scotland. I have travelled from Maine to Wisconsin, and over the finest portions of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio; but never saw farming so perfect as it is everywhere in the Scotch lowlands. Ayrshire, the Lothians, the valleys of the Clyde and the Tay, the land surrounding Edinburgh, and the valley of the Tweed, exceed not only in fertility, but in highly finished and scientific culture, anything I ever saw. Give Canada such farming, and she will stand among the first agricultural countries of the north temperate zone — if not, indeed, becoming the first of them.49 Had Australia such farming, her inexhaustible gold mines would be but a subordinate source of wealth. If poor Jamaica were but advanced to an equal pitch of agricultural industry, she would become a source of illimitable wealth, and exceed in the future the palmiest days of her past history. Perhaps I did not form so high an estimate of the religious character of the Scottish people as some travellers do; but what I saw of it was quite sufficient to make me thankful that it is what it is, and that it is doing so much to elevate the character of the colonies, to which its possessors are swarming in such vast numbers every year. My only criticism upon it is, an expression of the fear that it may possibly be more educational than spiritual, more intelligent than feeling, more doctrinal than practical — more refined, metaphysical, and casuistic, than reformatory. I utter this apprehension with extreme deference, hoping that the remark will be received as coming from a grateful, loving heart, not censuring, but simply criticizing, with the full recollection of my extreme incompetency to judge in such matters. Nor do I agree with the great majority of travellers as to the alleged intemperance of the Scotch: indeed, I heard more about this from Scotchmen than from any others. The Scotch clergy do more in the cause of temperance than the clergy of any other country, save America or Canada. There is more legislation on the subject in Scotland than anywhere else in Europe. The subject is therefore more frequently spoken of, more thoroughly examined, and its statistics are more prominently brought out, than in the South. It is true that custom demands and sanctions, in good society, drinking more whiskey than is used by the same amount of population in England; but that drunkenness is more common among the lower classes, or that the use of whiskey in the North furnishes occasion for saying anything more of the middle classes there than the use of wine here affords, is 49. Except Scotland, of course. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN certainly neither according to my observation, nor to any comparison of the two countries on the subject which I was able to make, either from sight or reading. That the temperance cause has yet very much to do in both countries, is most lamentably evident; that religious men are called upon to look this question directly in the face, and grapple with it, is equally evident: and it is most gratifying to say, that the good already done and now doing by total abstinence men is also as evident. Everybody is remarking upon the diminution of wine-drinking, and the almost entire absence of inebriation, in the middling and higher classes. Had the lower orders learned and practised like moderation for the past thirty years, how different would have been their state! how changed their present condition! What different prospects would both English and Scotch working classes present, as well to their temporal and present as their future and eternal welfare! I spoke of “moderation,” and know how that term is hated by some temperance men; but beg to say, that it is neither an unscriptural nor an unphilosophical term. However, in the case of a man to whom alcoholic beverages present too strong a temptation to allow of any use of such drinks without intoxication, his only course is immediate, lifelong, total abstinence.50 May the demon of drunkenness soon be banished from this otherwise happy island!

May 15, Tuesday: Walt Whitman registered his LEAVES OF GRASS with the United States District Court in New-York.

The Emperor Napoléon III opened the Universal Exposition of Paris in the Palais de l’Industrie.

May 15. P.M. —To Beck Stow’s. Suddenly very warm. hear a hummingbird in the garden. Pear blossomed, — some perhaps yesterday. Locust, black and scarlet oak, and some buttonwoods leaf. A yellow butterfly. I hear from the top of a pitch pine in the swamp that loud, clear, familiar whistle [Olive-sided Flycatcher Contopus borealis] which I have sometimes wrongly referred to the wood pewee, –whip-ter- phe-ee. Is it the whip-tom-kelly note which Sloane and Wilson gave to the red-eye, but which Nuttall says he never heard from it? Sometimes ter-phee-e. This is repeated at considerable intervals, the bird sitting quite still a long time. I saw it dart out once, catch an insect, and return to its perch muscicapa-like. (Probably M. Cooperi. Vide June 10th.) As near as I could see it had a white throat, was whitish, streaked with dark, beneath, darker tail and wings, and maybe olivaceous [sic] shoulders; bright-yellow within bill. Andromeda Calyculata begins to leaf — separate twigs from blossoming ones. Andromeda Polifolia just open. Buck-bean, apparently in three days (in house the 18th). The 13th, saw large water-bugs (Gyrinus) crawled up high on rocks. Watch a pine warbler on a pitch pine, slowly and faithfully searching it creeper-like. It encounters a black and white creeper on the same tree; they fly at each other, and the latter leaves, apparently driven off by the first. This warbler shuts its bill each time to produce its peculiar note. Rhodora will apparently open in two or three days. See and hear for a moment a small warbler-like bird in Nemopanthes Swamp which sings somewhat like tchut a-worieter-worieter-worieter-woo. The greater part of the large sugar maples on the Common leaf. Large red maples generally are late to leaf. Minott says that some years ago, maybe ten or fifteen, a man in Bedford climbed to an owl’s nest (probably a cat owl’s), and the owl took out one of his eyes and nearly killed him. He read it in the papers.

50. That some should abstain, for the sake of example to others, is most praiseworthy self-denial: all I claim is, that so to do is not, as I once believed, the demand of the BIBLE, in the case of all persons. I do not feel at liberty to write as if I were a total abstainer, now that I am not; yet would not on any account withhold my humble tribute of praise from those who are, nor say a word to injure the temperance cause. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Early Summer: After giving his last recitation for the term, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn took a summer vacation, initially in Boston and along the north shore, but then spending 3 weeks at his family home in Hampton Falls. Sanborn sent off a note to Henry Thoreau who, on January 16th, had made a brief visit to Sanborn’s room in Holworthy Hall in Cambridge to drop off worms intended for Thaddeus William Harris, and to drop off also a complimentary copy of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS for Edwin Morton (Sanborn not being there, he simply left the packages in the room), and who had written to him on February 2d. When on January 30th Sanborn had acknowledged receipt of the volume, he had praised Thoreau’s descriptions but had opinioned that were anyone to ask him what he thought of Thoreau’s philosophy, “I should be apt to answer it is not worth a straw.”

Walt Whitman had been going every day from the 2-story wooden home into which the Whitman family had moved in May at 99 Ryerson north of Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn to the print shop of the Rome brothers in a 3-story red brick building on the corner of Cranberry and Fulton (now the Cadman Plaza West), to help produce his book LEAVES OF GRASS. His brother George Washington Whitman remembered later how unimpressed he and their mother had been:

I saw the book — didn’t read it all — didn’t think it worth reading — fingered it a little.

Mother thought as I did — did not know what to make of it.

No mention being made of the father, clearly at this point he must have been too far along in his final illness (he would die on July 11).51

July 11, Wednesday: Walt Whitman’s father Walter Whitman, Sr. died.

July 11. See young piping plover running in a troop on the beach like peetweets. Patches of shrub oaks, bayberry, beach plum, and early wild roses, overrun with woodbine. What a splendid show of wild roses, whose sweetness is mingled with the aroma of the bayberry!! 51. An acerbic 1855 review of Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS concluded with the phrase “Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum,” which translates as “That horrible sin unable to be mentioned among Christians.” In BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES ON THE LAWS OF ENGLAND (1765-1769) and in BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY, this phrase was a euphemism for what the lay person would term “Sodomy.” What legal types, and paralegals, precisely meant at the time by this Latin would, of course, have depended upon the peculiar circumstances of the various cases that were in process at the time under such a rubric. What the population in general would have supposed to have constituted “Sodomy” would be, perhaps, another question entirely. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Small made three thousand shingles of a mast, worth six dollars a thousand. A bar wholly made within three months; first exposed about first of May; as I paced, now seventy-five rods long and six or eight rods wide at high water, and bay within six rods wide. The bay has extended twice as far, but is filled up. Lespedeza Stuvei (?) or procumbens (?). I see five young swallows dead on the sand under their holes. Fell out and died in the storm? The upland plover hovers almost stationary in the air with a quivering note of alarm. Above, dark-brown interspersed with white, darkest in rear; gray-spotted breast, white beneath; bill dark above, yellowish at base beneath, and legs yellowish. Totanus Bartramius — “gray,” “grass,” “field” plover. Bank at lighthouse one hundred and seventy feet on the slope, perpendicular one hundred and ten; say shelf slopes four and ordinary tide-fall is nine, makes one hundred and twenty-three in all. Saw sandbank south fifteen to twenty-five feet higher. Small says cantle for quintal. Mackerel-fishing not healthy like cod-fishing; hard work packing the mackerel, stooping over.

July 21, Saturday: The famous Sage of Concord, Waldo Emerson wrote Walt Whitman a letter praising LEAVES OF GRASS in the most unstinting terms — a private letter which the young journalist-poet would soon publicize to great personal advantage:

Concord, Massachusetts, 21 July, 1855. DEAR SIR — I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging. I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects. R. W. Emerson.

In this, it was not Whitman’s lust for fame alone that was at fault: Charles A. Dana would encourage the poet to make public advantage of this incautious private letter of encouragement.

July 21. A red-eyed vireo nest on a red maple on Island Neck, on meadow-edge, ten feet from ground; HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN one egg half hatched and one cowbird's egg, nearly fresh (!), a trifle larger. The first white (the minute brown dots washing off), sparsely black-dotted at the large end. Have them.

After August 26 and before September 17: Moncure Daniel Conway spent a day with Waldo Emerson in Concord, and then he visited Walt Whitman in Brooklyn on or before September 17th. On the way down to New York aboard the steamboat Metropolis to visit Whitman, he read the copy of LEAVES OF GRASS he had just purchased. Then he went on to his new season in his pulpit in Washington DC. That summer there had been a yellow fever epidemic in Norfolk, Virginia, and the board of aldermen of the District of Columbia had asked citizens to go to their churches and pray to God that He would spare the District this retribution. Conway promptly struck the attitude that a benevolent deity would not be sending a plague such as this to punish us, but to instruct us. He declared that he was able to decipher God’s telegram, and that the message was that “the rich and educated cannot afford, any more than the poor, that there should be any class so poor as to be squalid or unhealthy.” He announced that therefore the doors of the Unitarian church would not be opened to the parishioners on the day that had been appointed for this intercessory public prayer. What fun, to tug on their beards in such a manner! –And, in this, he had the support of his congregation. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

September 17: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway reported to Waldo Emerson that to find the Walt Whitman home he had to consult a directory and first use the Fulton Street Ferry to get from Manhattan Island to Brooklyn on Long Island and then take a car up Fulton and Myrtle Avenue dismounting at the corner of “Ryerton” (the Ryersons, an early Dutch family) Street “fearfully far (out of Brooklyn, nearly).”

November: The Dickinsons moved back into their home at 280 Main Street. Soon Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson would begin construction of his home “The Evergreens” at 214 Main Street, which would be connected with Emily Dickinson’s home by a board fence and a 300-foot path.

Louisa Whitman, Walt’s mother, sold the house she had purchased in May at 99 Ryerson Street on the outskirts of Brooklyn, where the family had lived while Walt Whitman, unemployed, had been putting the finishing touches to the first edition of LEAVES OF GRASS.

During this month and the following one, some 2,000 pro-slavery men, self-proclaimed “Border Ruffians,” would come to camp around the fledgling town of Lawrence on the Wakarusa River (really a creek) in the Kansas Territory. After an anti-slavery man had been gunned down while attempting to cross the sentry line of the Border Ruffians, several Free State women, Mrs. Lois Brown (helpmate of the editor of the Kansas Herald of Freedom) and Mrs. Margaret Wood (helpmate of an organizer of anti-slavery immigration) would conceal sacks of gunpowder under the fronts and bustles of their dresses, and insert bars of lead into their stockings, and –pretending to be heavily gravid– ride in wagons into the town in order to arm its defenders. This was the so-called Wakarusa War, which some regard as the 1st military engagement of the Civil War. The engagement would end when the governor of the territory formally recognized the militia that was being organized by the Free State settlers. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1856

August: Walt Whitman wrote from Brooklyn to Waldo Emerson: “Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong.” This was an exceedingly long letter in which he explained the universe and life and art and stuff, ostensibly in response to that note of praise which Emerson had incautiously posted to him on July 21, 1855 which he had so egregiously misused.(He would include this letter as an appendix to the 1856 LEAVES OF GRASS.) Here are thirty-two Poems, which I send you, dear Friend and Master, not having found how I could satisfy myself with sending any usual acknowledgment of your letter. The first edition, on which you mailed me that till now unanswered letter, was twelve poems — I printed a thousand copies, and they readily sold; these thirty-two Poems I stereotype, to print several thousand copies of. I much enjoy making poems. Other work I have set for myself to do, to meet people and The States face to face, to confront them with an American rude tongue; but the work of my life is making poems. I keep on till I make a hundred, and then several hundred — perhaps a thousand. The way is clear to me. A few years, and the average annual call for my Poems is ten or twenty thousand copies — more, quite likely. Why should I hurry or compromise? In poems or in speeches I say the word or two that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step with the countless common footsteps, and remind every man and woman of something. Master, I am a man who has perfect faith. Master, we have not come through centuries, caste, heroisms, fables, to halt in this land today. Or I think it is to collect a ten-fold impetus that any halt is made. As nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, impassive amid the threats and screams of disputants, so America. Let all defer. Let all attend respectfully the leisure of These States, their politics, poems, literature, manners, and their free-handed modes of training their own offspring. Their own comes, just matured, certain, numerous and capable enough, with egotistical tongues, with sinewed wrists, seizing openly what belongs to them. They resume Personality, too long left out of mind. Their shadows are projected in employments, in books, in the cities, in trade; their feet are on the flights of the steps of the Capitol; they dilate, a larger, brawnier, more candid, more democratic, lawless, positive native to The States, sweet-bodied, completer, dauntless, flowing, masterful, beard- faced, new race of men. Swiftly, on limitless foundations, the United States too are founding a literature. It is all as well done, in my opinion, as could be practicable. Each element here is in condition. Every day I go among the people of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, and other cities, and among the young men, to discover the spirit of them, and to refresh myself. These are to be attended to; I am myself more drawn here than to those authors, publishers, importations, reprints, and so forth. I pass coolly through those, understanding them perfectly well. and that they do the indispensable service, outside of men like me, which nothing else could do. In poems, the young men of The States shall be represented, for they out-rival the best of the rest of the earth. The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN mighty inheritance of the English language — all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own, to be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female — to give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America, with all the passions of home, with the inimitable sympathies of having been boys and girls together, and of parents who were with our parents. What else can happen The States, even in their own despite? That huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable, has done incalculable good here, and is to be spoken of for its own sake with generous praise and with gratitude. Yet the price The States have had to lie under for the same has not been a small price. Payment prevails; a nation can never take the issues of the needs of other nations for nothing. America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations? They struggled long for their literature, painfully working their way, some with deficient languages, some with priest-craft, some in the endeavor just to live — yet achieved for their times, works, poems, perhaps the only solid consolation left to them through ages afterward of shame and decay. You are young, have the perfectest of dialects, a free press, a free government, the world forwarding its best to be with you. As justice has been strictly done to you, from this hour do strict justice to yourself. Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood. With composure I see such propositions, seeing more and more every day of the answers that serve. Expressions do not yet serve, for sufficient reasons; but that is getting ready, beyond what the earth has hitherto known, to take home the expressions when they come, and to identify them with the populace of The States, which is the schooling cheaply procured by any outlay any number of years. Such schooling The States extract from the swarms of reprints, and from the current authors and editors. Such service and extract are done after enormous, reckless, free modes, characteristic of The States. Here are to be attained results never elsewhere thought possible; the modes are very grand too. The instincts of the American people are all perfect, and tend to make heroes. It is a rare thing in a man here to understand The States. All current nourishments to literature serve. Of authors and editors I do not know how many there are in The States, but there are thousands, each one building his or her step to the stairs by which giants shall mount. Of the twenty-four modern mammoth two-double, three-double, and four-double cylinder presses now in the world, printing by steam, twenty-one of them are in These HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN States. The twelve thousand large and small shops for dispensing books and newspapers — the same number of public libraries, any one of which has all the reading wanted to equip a man or woman for American reading — the three thousand different newspapers, the nutriment of the imperfect ones coming in just as usefully as any — the story papers, various, full of strong-flavored romances, widely circulated — the one-cent and two-cent journals — the political ones, no matter what side — the weeklies in the country — the sporting and pictorial papers — the monthly magazines, with plentiful imported feed — the sentimental novels, numberless copies of them — the low-priced flaring tales, adventures, biographies — all are prophetic; all waft rapidly on. I see that they swell wide, for reasons. I am not troubled at the movement of them, but greatly pleased. I see plying shuttles, the active ephemeral myriads of books also, faithfully weaving the garments of a generation of men, and a generation of women, they do not perceive or know. What a progress popular reading and writing has made in fifty years! What a progress fifty years hence! The time is at hand when inherent literature will be a main part of These States, as general and real as steam-power, iron, corn, beef, fish. First- rate American persons are to be supplied. Our perennial materials for fresh thoughts, histories, poems, music, orations, religions, recitations, amusements, will then not be disregarded, any more than our perennial fields, mines, rivers, seas. Certain things are established, and are immovable; in those things millions of years stand justified. The mothers and fathers of whom modern centuries have come, have not existed for nothing; they too had brains and hearts. Of course all literature, in all nations and years, will share marked attributes in common, as we all, of all ages, share the common human attributes. America is to be kept coarse and broad. What is to be done is to withdraw from precedents, and be directed to men and women — also to The States in their federalness; for the union of the parts of the body is not more necessary to their life than the union of These States is to their life. A profound person can easily know more of the people than they know of themselves. Always waiting untold in the souls of the armies of common people, is stuff better than anything that can possibly appear in the leadership of the same. That gives final verdicts. In every department of These States, he who travels with a coterie, or with selected persons, or with imitators, or with infidels, or with the owners of slaves, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a man, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a woman, or with any thing less than the bravest and the openest, travels straight for the slopes of dissolution. The genius of all foreign literature is clipped and cut small, compared to our genius, and is essentially insulting to our usages, and to the organic compacts of These States. Old forms, old poems, majestic and proper in their own lands here in this land are exiles; the air here is very strong. Much that stands well and has a little enough place provided for it in the small scales of European kingdoms, empires, and the like, here stands haggard, dwarfed, ludicrous, or has no place little enough provided for it. Authorities, poems, models, laws, names, imported into America, are useful to America today to destroy them, and so move disencumbered to great works, great days. Just so long, in our country or any country, as no revolutionists HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN advance, and are backed by the people, sweeping off the swarms of routine representatives, officers in power, book-makers, teachers, ecclesiastics, politicians, just so long, I perceive, do they who are in power fairly represent that country, and remain of use, probably of very great use. To supersede them, when it is the pleasure of These States, full provision is made; and I say the time has arrived to use it with a strong hand. Here also the souls of the armies have not only overtaken the souls of the officer, but passed on, and left the souls of the officers behind out of sight many weeks' journey; and the souls of the armies now go en-masse without officers. Here also formulas, glosses, blanks, minutiæ, are choking the throats of the spokesmen to death. Those things most listened for, certainly those are the things least said. There is not a single History of the World. There is not one of America, or of the organic compacts of These States, or of Washington, or of Jefferson, nor of Language, nor any Dictionary of the English Language. There is no great author; every one has demeaned himself to some etiquette or some impotence. There is no manhood or life-power in poems; there are shoats and geldings more like. Or literature will be dressed up, a fine gentleman, distasteful to our instincts, foreign to our soil. Its neck bends right and left wherever it goes. Its costumes and jewelry prove how little it knows Nature. Its flesh is soft; it shows less and less of the indefinable hard something that is Nature. Where is any thing but the shaved Nature of synods and schools? Where is a savage and luxuriant man? Where is an overseer? In lives, in poems, in codes of law, in Congress, in tuitions, theatres, conversations, argumentations, not a single head lifts itself clean out, with proof that it is their master, and has subordinated them to itself, and is ready to try their superiors. None believes in These States, boldly illustrating them in himself. Not a man faces round at the rest with terrible negative voice, refusing all terms to be bought off from his own eye-sight, or from the soul that he is, or from friendship, or from the body that he is, or from the soil and sea. To creeds, literature, art, the army, the navy, the executive, life is hardly proposed, but the sick and dying are proposed to cure the sick and dying. The churches are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves; the priests are continually telling what they know well enough is not so, and keeping back what they know is so. The spectacle is a pitiful one. I think there can never be again upon the festive earth more bad-disordered persons deliberately taking seats, as of late in These States, at the heads of the public tables — such corpses' eyes for judges — such a rascal and thief in the Presidency. Up to the present, as helps best, the people, like a lot of large boys, have no determined tastes, are quite unaware of the grandeur of themselves, and of their destiny, and of their immense strides — accept with voracity whatever is presented them in novels, histories, newspapers, poems, schools, lectures, every thing. Pretty soon, through these and other means, their development makes the fibre that is capable of itself, and will assume determined tastes. The young men will be clear what they want, and will have it. They will follow none except him whose spirit leads them in the like spirit with themselves. Any such man will be welcome as the flowers of May. Others will be put HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN out without ceremony. How much is there anyhow, to the young men of These States, in a parcel of helpless dandies, who can neither fight, work, shoot, ride, run, command — some of them devout, some quite insane, some castrated — all second-hand, or third, fourth, or fifth hand — waited upon by waiters, putting not this land first, but always other lands first, talking of art, doing the most ridiculous things for fear of being called ridiculous, smirking and skipping along, continually taking off their hats — no one behaving, dressing, writing, talking, loving, out of any natural and manly tastes of his own, but each one looking cautiously to see how the rest behave, dress, write, talk, love — pressing the noses of dead books upon themselves and upon their country — favoring no poets, philosophs, literats here, but dog- like danglers at the heels of the poets, philosophs, literats, of enemies’ lands — favoring mental expressions, models of gentlemen and ladies, social habitudes in These States, to grow up in sneaking defiance of the popular substratums of The States? Of course they and the likes of them can never justify the strong poems of America. Of course no feed of theirs is to stop and be made welcome to muscle the bodies, male and female, for Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Boston, Worcester, Hartford, Portland, Montreal, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Iowa City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Raleigh, Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, Brownsville, San Francisco, Havana, and a thousand equal cities, present and to come. Of course what they and the likes of them have been used for, draws toward its close, after which they will all be discharged, and not one of them will ever be heard of any more. America, having duly conceived, bears out of herself offspring of her own to do the workmanship wanted. To freedom, to strength, to poems, to personal greatness, it is never permitted to rest, not a generation or part of a generation. To be ripe beyond further increase is to prepare to die. The architects of These States laid their foundations, and passed to further, spheres. What they laid is a work done; as much more remains. Now are needed other architects, whose duty is not less difficult, but perhaps more difficult. Each age forever needs architects. America is not finished, perhaps never will be; now America is a divine true sketch. There are Thirty-Two States sketched — the population thirty millions. In a few years there will be Fifty States. Again in a few years there will be A Hundred States, the population hundreds of millions, the freshest and freest of men. Of course such men stand to nothing less than the freshest and freest expression. Poets here, literats here, are to rest on organic different bases from other countries; not a class set apart, circling only in the circle of themselves, modest and pretty, desperately scratching for rhymes, pallid with white paper, shut off, aware of the old pictures and traditions of the race, but unaware of the actual race around them — not breeding in and in among each other till they all have the scrofula. Lands of ensemble, bards of ensemble! Walking freely out from the old traditions, as our politics has walked out, American poets and literats recognize nothing behind them superior to what is present with them — recognize with joy the sturdy living forms of the men and women of These States, the divinity of sex, the perfect eligibility of the female with the male, all The States, liberty and HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN equality, real articles, the different trades, mechanics, the young fellows of Manhattan Island, customs, instincts, slang, Wisconsin, Georgia, the noble Southern heart, the hot blood, the spirit that will be nothing less than master, the filibuster spirit, the Western man, native-born perceptions, the eye for forms, the perfect models of made things, the wild smack of freedom, California, money, electric telegraphs, free-trade, iron and the iron mines — recognize without demur those splendid resistless black poems, the steam-ships of the sea-board states, and those other resistless splendid poems, the locomotives, followed through the interior states by trains of rail-road cars. A word remains to be said, as of one ever present, not yet permitted to be acknowledged, discarded or made dumb by literature, and the results apparent. To the lack of an avowed, empowered, unabashed development of sex, (the only salvation for the same,) and to the fact of speakers and writers fraudulently assuming as always dead what every one knows to be always alive, is attributable the remarkable non-personality and indistinctness of modern productions in books, art, talk; also that in the scanned lives of men and women most of them appear to have been for some time past of the neuter gender; and also the stinging fact that in orthodox society today. if the dresses were changed, the men might easily pass for women and the women for men. Infidelism usurps most with foetid polite face; among the rest infidelism about sex. By silence or obedience the pens of savans, poets, historians, biographers, and the rest, have long connived at the filthy law, and books enslaved to it, that what makes the manhood of a man, that sex, womanhood, maternity, desires, lusty animations, organs, acts, are unmentionable and to be ashamed of, to be driven to skulk out of literature with whatever belongs to them. This filthy law has to be repealed — it stands in the way of great reforms. Of women just as much as men, it is the interest that there should not be infidelism about sex, but perfect faith. Women in These States approach the day of that organic equality with men, without which, I see, men cannot have organic equality among themselves. This empty dish, gallantry, will then be filled with something. This tepid wash, this diluted deferential love, as in songs, fictions, and so forth, is enough to make a man vomit; as to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print. I say that the body of a man or woman, the main matter, is so far quite unexpressed in poems; but that the body is to be expressed, and sex is. Of bards for These States, if it come to a question, it is whether they shall celebrate in poems the eternal decency of the amativeness of Nature, the motherhood of all, or whether they shall be the bards of the fashionable delusion of the inherent nastiness of sex, and of the feeble and querulous modesty of deprivation. This is important in poems, because the whole of the other expressions of a nation are but flanges out of its great poems. To me, henceforth, that theory of any thing, no matter what, stagnates in its vitals, cowardly and rotten, while it cannot publicly accept, and publicly name, with specific words, the things on which all existence, all souls, all realization, all decency, all health, all that is worth being here for, all of woman and of man, all beauty, all purity, all sweetness, all friendship, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN all strength, all life, all immortality depend. The courageous soul, for a year or two to come, may be proved by faith in sex, and by disdaining concessions. To poets and literats — to every woman and man, today or any day, the conditions of the present, needs, dangers, prejudices, and the like, are the perfect conditions on which we are here, and the conditions for wording the future with undissuadable words. These States, receivers of the stamina of past ages and lands, initiate the outlines of repayment a thousand fold. They fetch the American great masters, waited for by old worlds and new, who accept evil as well as good, ignorance as well as erudition, black as soon as white, foreign-born materials as well as home-born, reject none, force discrepancies into range, surround the whole, concentrate them on present periods and places, show the application to each and any one's body and soul, and show the true use of precedents. Always America will be agitated and turbulent. This day it is taking shape, not to be less so, but to be more so, stormily, capriciously, on native principles, with such vast proportions of parts! As for me, I love screaming, wrestling, boiling-hot days. Of course, we shall have a national character, an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to be, it will be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and the cause of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon — with the states around the Mexican sea — with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa — with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island — with all varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis — there is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of Tho States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any exception whatever — each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to one physical form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature, including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just, open-mouthed, American- blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness, is to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality — that new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent remained incomplete, may-be a carcass, a bloat — that newer America, answering face to face with The States, with ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable seas and shores. Those shores you found. I say you have led The States there — have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after you. Receive, dear Master, these statements and assurances through me, for all the young men, and for an earnest that we know none before you, but the best following you; and that we demand to take your name into our keeping, and that we understand what you have indicated, and find the same indicated in ourselves, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN that we will stick to it and enlarge upon it through These States. WALT WHITMAN.

April 26, Saturday: Henry Thoreau read in Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella’s DE RE RUSTICA. REI RUSTICAE AUCTORES...

Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette completed Louisa May Alcott’s story “Bertha.”

Waldo Emerson made an entry in his journal in regard to Walt Whitman and his outrageously sexual or at least 52 sensuous LEAVES OF GRASS:

Whipple said of the author of “Leaves of Grass,” that he had every leaf but the fig leaf.

The audience that assembled to hear my lectures in these six weeks was called, “the effete of Boston.”

In Zürich, for friends, Richard Wagner played and sang through the 1st act of Die Walküre. The businessman Otto Wesendonck was so taken by his performance that he decided to forward 250 francs a month to the composer so that he might be unhindered in the completion of the work.

Valentine d’Aubigny, an opéra comique by Fromental Halévy to words of Barbier and Carré, was performed for the initial time, at the Théâtre Favart, Paris.

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN which you mailed me that till now unanswered letter, was twelve poems — I printed a thousand copies, and they readily sold; these thirty-two Poems I stereotype, to print several thousand copies of. I much enjoy making poems. Other work I have set for myself to do, to meet people and The States face to face, to confront them with an American rude tongue; but the work of my life is making poems. I keep on till I make a hundred, and then several hundred — perhaps a thousand. The way is clear to me. A few years, and the average annual call for my Poems is ten or twenty thousand copies — more, quite likely. Why should I hurry or compromise? In poems or in speeches I say the word or two that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step with the countless common footsteps, and remind every man and woman of something. Master, I am a man who has perfect faith. Master, we have not come through centuries, caste, heroisms, fables, to halt in this land today. Or I think it is to collect a ten-fold impetus that any halt is made. As nature, inexorable, onward, resistless, impassive amid the threats and screams of disputants, so America. Let all defer. Let all attend respectfully the leisure of These States, their politics, poems, literature, manners, and their free-handed modes of training their own offspring. Their own comes, just matured, certain, numerous and capable enough, with egotistical tongues, with sinewed wrists, seizing openly what belongs to them. They resume Personality, too long left out of mind. Their shadows are projected in employments, in books, in the cities, in trade; their feet are on the flights of the steps of the Capitol; they dilate, a larger, brawnier, more candid, more democratic, lawless, positive native to The States, sweet-bodied, completer, dauntless, flowing, masterful, beard- faced, new race of men. Swiftly, on limitless foundations, the United States too are founding a literature. It is all as well done, in my opinion, as could be practicable. Each element here is in condition. Every day I go among the people of Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, and other cities, and among the young men, to discover the spirit of them, and to refresh myself. These are to be attended to; I am myself more drawn here than to those authors, publishers, importations, reprints, and so forth. I pass coolly through 52. Thoreau’s favorite among Walt Whitman’s poems was the one that in the 1856 edition was being entitled “Sun-Down Poem” — the one that we now know under the title “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” THE FERRY AT BROOKLYN PIER, NEW-YORK HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN those, understanding them perfectly well. and that they do the indispensable service, outside of men like me, which nothing else could do. In poems, the young men of The States shall be represented, for they out-rival the best of the rest of the earth. The lists of ready-made literature which America inherits by the mighty inheritance of the English language — all the rich repertoire of traditions, poems, historics, metaphysics, plays, classics, translations, have made, and still continue, magnificent preparations for that other plainly signified literature, to be our own, to be electric, fresh, lusty, to express the full-sized body, male and female — to give the modern meanings of things, to grow up beautiful, lasting, commensurate with America, with all the passions of home, with the inimitable sympathies of having been boys and girls together, and of parents who were with our parents. What else can happen The States, even in their own despite? That huge English flow, so sweet, so undeniable, has done incalculable good here, and is to be spoken of for its own sake with generous praise and with gratitude. Yet the price The States have had to lie under for the same has not been a small price. Payment prevails; a nation can never take the issues of the needs of other nations for nothing. America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit, collapses quick as lightning at the repeated, admonishing, stern words, Where are any mental expressions from you, beyond what you have copied or stolen? Where the born throngs of poets, literats, orators, you promised? Will you but tag after other nations? They struggled long for their literature, painfully working their way, some with deficient languages, some with priest-craft, some in the endeavor just to live — yet achieved for their times, works, poems, perhaps the only solid consolation left to them through ages afterward of shame and decay. You are young, have the perfectest of dialects, a free press, a free government, the world forwarding its best to be with you. As justice has been strictly done to you, from this hour do strict justice to yourself. Strangle the singers who will not sing you loud and strong. Open the doors of The West. Call for new great masters to comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants. Submit to the most robust bard till he remedy your barrenness. Then you will not need to adopt the heirs of others; you will have true heirs, begotten of yourself, blooded with your own blood. With composure I see such propositions, seeing more and more every day of the answers that serve. Expressions do not yet serve, for sufficient reasons; but that is getting ready, beyond what the earth has hitherto known, to take home the expressions when they come, and to identify them with the populace of The States, which is the schooling cheaply procured by any outlay any number of years. Such schooling The States extract from the swarms of reprints, and from the current authors and editors. Such service and extract are done after enormous, reckless, free modes, characteristic of The States. Here are to be attained results never elsewhere thought possible; the modes are very grand too. The instincts of the American people are all perfect, and tend to make heroes. It is a rare thing in a man here to understand The States. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN All current nourishments to literature serve. Of authors and editors I do not know how many there are in The States, but there are thousands, each one building his or her step to the stairs by which giants shall mount. Of the twenty-four modern mammoth two-double, three-double, and four-double cylinder presses now in the world, printing by steam, twenty-one of them are in These States. The twelve thousand large and small shops for dispensing books and newspapers — the same number of public libraries, any one of which has all the reading wanted to equip a man or woman for American reading — the three thousand different newspapers, the nutriment of the imperfect ones coming in just as usefully as any — the story papers, various, full of strong-flavored romances, widely circulated — the one-cent and two-cent journals — the political ones, no matter what side — the weeklies in the country — the sporting and pictorial papers — the monthly magazines, with plentiful imported feed — the sentimental novels, numberless copies of them — the low-priced flaring tales, adventures, biographies — all are prophetic; all waft rapidly on. I see that they swell wide, for reasons. I am not troubled at the movement of them, but greatly pleased. I see plying shuttles, the active ephemeral myriads of books also, faithfully weaving the garments of a generation of men, and a generation of women, they do not perceive or know. What a progress popular reading and writing has made in fifty years! What a progress fifty years hence! The time is at hand when inherent literature will be a main part of These States, as general and real as steam-power, iron, corn, beef, fish. First- rate American persons are to be supplied. Our perennial materials for fresh thoughts, histories, poems, music, orations, religions, recitations, amusements, will then not be disregarded, any more than our perennial fields, mines, rivers, seas. Certain things are established, and are immovable; in those things millions of years stand justified. The mothers and fathers of whom modern centuries have come, have not existed for nothing; they too had brains and hearts. Of course all literature, in all nations and years, will share marked attributes in common, as we all, of all ages, share the common human attributes. America is to be kept coarse and broad. What is to be done is to withdraw from precedents, and be directed to men and women — also to The States in their federalness; for the union of the parts of the body is not more necessary to their life than the union of These States is to their life. A profound person can easily know more of the people than they know of themselves. Always waiting untold in the souls of the armies of common people, is stuff better than anything that can possibly appear in the leadership of the same. That gives final verdicts. In every department of These States, he who travels with a coterie, or with selected persons, or with imitators, or with infidels, or with the owners of slaves, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a man, or with that which is ashamed of the body of a woman, or with any thing less than the bravest and the openest, travels straight for the slopes of dissolution. The genius of all foreign literature is clipped and cut small, compared to our genius, and is essentially insulting to our usages, and to the organic compacts of These States. Old forms, old poems, majestic and proper in their own lands here in this land are exiles; the air here is very strong. Much that stands well and has a little enough place provided for it in the small HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN scales of European kingdoms, empires, and the like, here stands haggard, dwarfed, ludicrous, or has no place little enough provided for it. Authorities, poems, models, laws, names, imported into America, are useful to America today to destroy them, and so move disencumbered to great works, great days. Just so long, in our country or any country, as no revolutionists advance, and are backed by the people, sweeping off the swarms of routine representatives, officers in power, book-makers, teachers, ecclesiastics, politicians, just so long, I perceive, do they who are in power fairly represent that country, and remain of use, probably of very great use. To supersede them, when it is the pleasure of These States, full provision is made; and I say the time has arrived to use it with a strong hand. Here also the souls of the armies have not only overtaken the souls of the officer, but passed on, and left the souls of the officers behind out of sight many weeks' journey; and the souls of the armies now go en-masse without officers. Here also formulas, glosses, blanks, minutiæ, are choking the throats of the spokesmen to death. Those things most listened for, certainly those are the things least said. There is not a single History of the World. There is not one of America, or of the organic compacts of These States, or of Washington, or of Jefferson, nor of Language, nor any Dictionary of the English Language. There is no great author; every one has demeaned himself to some etiquette or some impotence. There is no manhood or life-power in poems; there are shoats and geldings more like. Or literature will be dressed up, a fine gentleman, distasteful to our instincts, foreign to our soil. Its neck bends right and left wherever it goes. Its costumes and jewelry prove how little it knows Nature. Its flesh is soft; it shows less and less of the indefinable hard something that is Nature. Where is any thing but the shaved Nature of synods and schools? Where is a savage and luxuriant man? Where is an overseer? In lives, in poems, in codes of law, in Congress, in tuitions, theatres, conversations, argumentations, not a single head lifts itself clean out, with proof that it is their master, and has subordinated them to itself, and is ready to try their superiors. None believes in These States, boldly illustrating them in himself. Not a man faces round at the rest with terrible negative voice, refusing all terms to be bought off from his own eye-sight, or from the soul that he is, or from friendship, or from the body that he is, or from the soil and sea. To creeds, literature, art, the army, the navy, the executive, life is hardly proposed, but the sick and dying are proposed to cure the sick and dying. The churches are one vast lie; the people do not believe them, and they do not believe themselves; the priests are continually telling what they know well enough is not so, and keeping back what they know is so. The spectacle is a pitiful one. I think there can never be again upon the festive earth more bad-disordered persons deliberately taking seats, as of late in These States, at the heads of the public tables — such corpses' eyes for judges — such a rascal and thief in the Presidency. Up to the present, as helps best, the people, like a lot of large boys, have no determined tastes, are quite unaware of the grandeur of themselves, and of their destiny, and of their immense strides — accept with voracity whatever is presented them in novels, histories, newspapers, poems, schools, lectures, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN every thing. Pretty soon, through these and other means, their development makes the fibre that is capable of itself, and will assume determined tastes. The young men will be clear what they want, and will have it. They will follow none except him whose spirit leads them in the like spirit with themselves. Any such man will be welcome as the flowers of May. Others will be put out without ceremony. How much is there anyhow, to the young men of These States, in a parcel of helpless dandies, who can neither fight, work, shoot, ride, run, command — some of them devout, some quite insane, some castrated — all second-hand, or third, fourth, or fifth hand — waited upon by waiters, putting not this land first, but always other lands first, talking of art, doing the most ridiculous things for fear of being called ridiculous, smirking and skipping along, continually taking off their hats — no one behaving, dressing, writing, talking, loving, out of any natural and manly tastes of his own, but each one looking cautiously to see how the rest behave, dress, write, talk, love — pressing the noses of dead books upon themselves and upon their country — favoring no poets, philosophs, literats here, but dog- like danglers at the heels of the poets, philosophs, literats, of enemies’ lands — favoring mental expressions, models of gentlemen and ladies, social habitudes in These States, to grow up in sneaking defiance of the popular substratums of The States? Of course they and the likes of them can never justify the strong poems of America. Of course no feed of theirs is to stop and be made welcome to muscle the bodies, male and female, for Manhattan Island, Brooklyn, Boston, Worcester, Hartford, Portland, Montreal, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Iowa City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Raleigh, Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, Brownsville, San Francisco, Havana, and a thousand equal cities, present and to come. Of course what they and the likes of them have been used for, draws toward its close, after which they will all be discharged, and not one of them will ever be heard of any more. America, having duly conceived, bears out of herself offspring of her own to do the workmanship wanted. To freedom, to strength, to poems, to personal greatness, it is never permitted to rest, not a generation or part of a generation. To be ripe beyond further increase is to prepare to die. The architects of These States laid their foundations, and passed to further, spheres. What they laid is a work done; as much more remains. Now are needed other architects, whose duty is not less difficult, but perhaps more difficult. Each age forever needs architects. America is not finished, perhaps never will be; now America is a divine true sketch. There are Thirty-Two States sketched — the population thirty millions. In a few years there will be Fifty States. Again in a few years there will be A Hundred States, the population hundreds of millions, the freshest and freest of men. Of course such men stand to nothing less than the freshest and freest expression. Poets here, literats here, are to rest on organic different bases from other countries; not a class set apart, circling only in the circle of themselves, modest and pretty, desperately scratching for rhymes, pallid with white paper, shut off, aware of the old pictures and traditions of the race, but unaware of the actual race around them — not breeding in and in among each other till they all have the scrofula. Lands of ensemble, bards HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN of ensemble! Walking freely out from the old traditions, as our politics has walked out, American poets and literats recognize nothing behind them superior to what is present with them — recognize with joy the sturdy living forms of the men and women of These States, the divinity of sex, the perfect eligibility of the female with the male, all The States, liberty and equality, real articles, the different trades, mechanics, the young fellows of Manhattan Island, customs, instincts, slang, Wisconsin, Georgia, the noble Southern heart, the hot blood, the spirit that will be nothing less than master, the filibuster spirit, the Western man, native-born perceptions, the eye for forms, the perfect models of made things, the wild smack of freedom, California, money, electric telegraphs, free-trade, iron and the iron mines — recognize without demur those splendid resistless black poems, the steam-ships of the sea-board states, and those other resistless splendid poems, the locomotives, followed through the interior states by trains of rail-road cars. A word remains to be said, as of one ever present, not yet permitted to be acknowledged, discarded or made dumb by literature, and the results apparent. To the lack of an avowed, empowered, unabashed development of sex, (the only salvation for the same,) and to the fact of speakers and writers fraudulently assuming as always dead what every one knows to be always alive, is attributable the remarkable non-personality and indistinctness of modern productions in books, art, talk; also that in the scanned lives of men and women most of them appear to have been for some time past of the neuter gender; and also the stinging fact that in orthodox society today. if the dresses were changed, the men might easily pass for women and the women for men. Infidelism usurps most with foetid polite face; among the rest infidelism about sex. By silence or obedience the pens of savans, poets, historians, biographers, and the rest, have long connived at the filthy law, and books enslaved to it, that what makes the manhood of a man, that sex, womanhood, maternity, desires, lusty animations, organs, acts, are unmentionable and to be ashamed of, to be driven to skulk out of literature with whatever belongs to them. This filthy law has to be repealed — it stands in the way of great reforms. Of women just as much as men, it is the interest that there should not be infidelism about sex, but perfect faith. Women in These States approach the day of that organic equality with men, without which, I see, men cannot have organic equality among themselves. This empty dish, gallantry, will then be filled with something. This tepid wash, this diluted deferential love, as in songs, fictions, and so forth, is enough to make a man vomit; as to manly friendship, everywhere observed in The States, there is not the first breath of it to be observed in print. I say that the body of a man or woman, the main matter, is so far quite unexpressed in poems; but that the body is to be expressed, and sex is. Of bards for These States, if it come to a question, it is whether they shall celebrate in poems the eternal decency of the amativeness of Nature, the motherhood of all, or whether they shall be the bards of the fashionable delusion of the inherent nastiness of sex, and of the feeble and querulous modesty of deprivation. This is important in poems, because the whole of the other expressions of a nation are but flanges out of its great poems. To me, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN henceforth, that theory of any thing, no matter what, stagnates in its vitals, cowardly and rotten, while it cannot publicly accept, and publicly name, with specific words, the things on which all existence, all souls, all realization, all decency, all health, all that is worth being here for, all of woman and of man, all beauty, all purity, all sweetness, all friendship, all strength, all life, all immortality depend. The courageous soul, for a year or two to come, may be proved by faith in sex, and by disdaining concessions. To poets and literats — to every woman and man, today or any day, the conditions of the present, needs, dangers, prejudices, and the like, are the perfect conditions on which we are here, and the conditions for wording the future with undissuadable words. These States, receivers of the stamina of past ages and lands, initiate the outlines of repayment a thousand fold. They fetch the American great masters, waited for by old worlds and new, who accept evil as well as good, ignorance as well as erudition, black as soon as white, foreign-born materials as well as home-born, reject none, force discrepancies into range, surround the whole, concentrate them on present periods and places, show the application to each and any one's body and soul, and show the true use of precedents. Always America will be agitated and turbulent. This day it is taking shape, not to be less so, but to be more so, stormily, capriciously, on native principles, with such vast proportions of parts! As for me, I love screaming, wrestling, boiling-hot days. Of course, we shall have a national character, an identity. As it ought to be, and as soon as it ought to be, it will be. That, with much else, takes care of itself, is a result, and the cause of greater results. With Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Oregon — with the states around the Mexican sea — with cheerfully welcomed immigrants from Europe, Asia, Africa — with Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island — with all varied interests, facts, beliefs, parties, genesis — there is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of Tho States, accomplished and to be accomplished, without any exception whatever — each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, personal style, as the plenteous varieties of the race adhere to one physical form. Such character is the brain and spine to all, including literature, including poems. Such character, strong, limber, just, open-mouthed, American- blooded, full of pride, full of ease, of passionate friendliness, is to stand compact upon that vast basis of the supremacy of Individuality — that new moral American continent without which, I see, the physical continent remained incomplete, may-be a carcass, a bloat — that newer America, answering face to face with The States, with ever-satisfying and ever-unsurveyable seas and shores. Those shores you found. I say you have led The States there — have led Me there. I say that none has ever done, or ever can do, a greater deed for The States, than your deed. Others may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, break up farms; it is yours to have been the original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, positive, rendering the first report, to be told less by any report, and more by the mariners of a thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving and departing, many years after HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN you. Receive, dear Master, these statements and assurances through me, for all the young men, and for an earnest that we know none before you, but the best following you; and that we demand to take your name into our keeping, and that we understand what you have indicated, and find the same indicated in ourselves, and that we will stick to it and enlarge upon it through These States. WALT WHITMAN.

October 20, Monday: The Surveyor General’s office moved to Lecompton, that had come to function as the capital of the Kansas Territory. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

Henry Thoreau wrote to Thomas Cholmondeley in gratitude for the gift of the Indian books (you will note that in this thank-you note Thoreau makes mention of the volumes of Jean Froissart’s CHRONICLES on his shelf, in an edition printed in 1855: presumably that would be due to the fact that the antique family of his benefactor, as Cholmondeley of course well knew, had received honorable mention in that illuminated medieval work). At some point, also, Thoreau sent to England a packet including a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, 53 Walt Whitman’s POEMS and LEAVES OF GRASS, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s book on the general culture of the Southern states, A JOURNEY IN THE SEABOARD SLAVE STATES. Concord Mass. Oct 20th 1856. Dear Cholmondeley I wish to thank you again for those books. They are the nucleus of my library. I wrote to you on the receipt of them last winter, (directing as now) but not having heard from you, do not know in what part of the world this may find you. Several here are enquiring if you have returned to England, as you had just started for the Crimea at the last accounts. The books have long been shelved in cases of my own construction made partly of the driftwood of our river. They are the admiration of all beholders. Alcott and Emerson, besides myself have been cracking some of the nuts. Certainly I shall never pay you for them. Of those new to me the Rig Veda is the most savory that I have yet tasted. As primitive poetry, I think as any extant. Indeed all the Vedantic literature is priceless. There they stand occupying two shelves, headed by Froissart, stretching round Egypt and India “Ultima Thule”, as a fit conclusion. What a world of variety. I shall browse there for some winters to come. While war has given place to peace on your side, perhaps a more serious war still is breaking out here. I seem to hear its distant mutterings, though it may be long before the bolt will fall in our midst. There has not been anything which you could call union between the north and south in this country for many years, and there cannot be so long as slavery is in the way. I only wish that northern –that any men –were better material, or that I for one had more skill to deal with them; that the north h ad more spirit and would settle the question at once, and here instead of struggling feebly and pro- tractedly away off on the plains of Kansas. They are on the eve of a

53. Would this be the “Henry Thoreau’s copy of LEAVES OF GRASS” that was knocked down on auction at Sotheby’s in 2002 or 2003, evidently to a Whitman collector, for US$119,500? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Presidential election, as perhaps you know. — and all good people are praying that of the three candidates Fremont may be the man; but in my opinion the issue is quite doubtful. As far as I have observed, the worst man stands the best chance in this country. But as for politics, what I most admire now-a-days, is not the regular governments but the irregular primitive ones, like the Vigilance committee in California and even the free state men in Kansas. They are the most divine. — I have just taken a run up country, as I did with you once, only a little farther this time; to the Connecticut river in New Hampshire, where I saw Alcott, King of men. He is among those who ask after you, and takes a special interest in the oriental books. He cannot say enough about them. “And then that he should send you a library! Think of it!” I am sorry that I can give but a poor account of myself. I got “run down'' they say, more than a year ago, and have not yet got fairly up again. It has not touched my spirits however, for they are as indifferently tough, as sluggishly resilient, as a dried fungus. I would it were the kind called punk; that they might catch and retain some heavenly spark. I dwell as much aloof from society as ever; find it just as impossible to agree in opinion with the most intelligent of my neighbors; they not having improved one jot, no r I either. I am still immersed in nature, have much of the time a living sense of the breadth of the field on whose verge I dwell. The great west and north west stretching on infinitely far and grand and wild, qualifying all our thoughts. That is the only America I know. I prize this western reserve chiefly for its intellectual value. That is the road to new life and freedom, – if ever we are dissatisfied with this and not to exile as in Siberia and knowing this, one need not travel it. That great north-west where several of our shrubs, fruitless here, retain and mature their fruits properly. I am pleased to think of you in that England, where we all seem to have originated, or at least sojourned which Emerson values so much, but which I know so little about. That island seems as full of good things as a nut is of meat: and I trust that it still is a sound nut without mould or worm. I hope that by this time you are settled in your mind and satisfactorily employed there. My father mother and sister send their best wishes, and would be glad to see you in this country again. We are all quite anxious to hear that you are safe and sound: I in particular hope that you are in all respects unscathed by the battle of life, ready for still worthier encounters. Yours, H. D. T. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Frederick Douglass spoke in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN November 9, Sunday: Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott were traveling to Brooklyn Heights on Paumanok “Long Island” in order for them to hear the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher preach in his Plymouth Church. In Cincinnati, Ohio on this Sunday morn, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway, on trial, was preaching an anti- slavery sermon in the Unitarian church at 4th and Race streets overlooking the Ohio River and, on the opposite shore, the laboring slaves of Kentucky. The sermon accorded better with the political climate in Cincinnati than it did with the political climate either of that opposite bank or of Washington DC. 54 AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

The sermon by the Reverend Conway might have been more congenial to Thoreau than the one he actually heard from the Reverend Beecher, a message which distressed him considerably: although the Reverend Beecher was a favorite of Walt Whitman’s, Thoreau found he most definitely was not impressed with this proffered mixture of pantheistic life-worship and self-worship disguised as God-worship. After the sermon, Thoreau and Alcott visited the Whitman home on Portland Avenue twice, finally meeting Whitman.55

Remember that it had been at the Hester Street meetinghouse, in 1826, that the English evangelical preacher Thomas Shillitoe had declared the cause of Friend Elias Hicks to be “unchristian,” and that it had been at this meetinghouse, in 1828, that Samuel Mott had had to be raised up and handed over the heads of the crowd to reach the Clerk’s table, after being duly elected Clerk, whereupon the clerk’s table was torn apart and the evangelical Quakers walked and the great division occurred. (We can be sure that people there informed Thoreau of these utterly infamous events.) Remember that in 1830 the corpse of Friend Elias had been dug up at night to make a bust which Whitman purchased: this bust, set up in Whitman’s home, must have been of great interest to Thoreau, who had heard Friend Lucretia Mott preach in the meetinghouse in which Samuel Mott had been handed along over the heads of the resistors. After meeting Whitman, Thoreau went on to the Eagleswood community on the New Jersey shore. On First Day evening with these Hicksite Quakers, Thoreau read “Walking.”56

54. Moncure Daniel Conway. VIRTUE vs. DEFEAT: A DISCOURSE, PREACHED ON NOVEMBER 9, 1856 (THE FIRST SUNDAY AFTER THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION), IN THE UNITARIAN CHURCH, CINCINNATI, OHIO, BY MONCURE D. CONWAY, MINISTER OF THE CHURCH. Pamphlet. Printed by the Cincinnati Gazette Company, 1856, Cincinnati. READ THE FULL TEXT

55. He at that time was putting out his expanded 2d edition of his LEAVES OF GRASS, the edition that Thoreau would own. 56. Walter Harding, “A Check List of Thoreau’s Lectures,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 52 (February 1948): 85. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 6, Saturday: A story by Louisa May Alcott appeared in Boston’s Saturday Evening Gazette, entitled “Ruth’s Secret.”

After making his way back home to Concord and spending the Thanksgiving holiday with his family, Henry Thoreau wrote to his friend H.G.O. BlakeH.G.O. BLAKE in Worcester about the overwhelming feeling of gratitude which he was experiencing:

I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite — only a sense of existence —

In this letter he also attempted to describe the experiences he had had in the train depot in Blake’s town in the cold before-dawn hours of Tuesday, November 25th while on his way home from Eagleswood, New Jersey. He had taken a walk up to Theophilus Brown’s tailor shop, which at the time was in Butman Row (on the site of the present Slater Building), and peered within, deciding not to attempt to return Brown’s Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art by leaving it in the door handle: Concord Dec 6 ’56

Mr Blake, What is wanting above is merely an engraving of Eagleswood, which I have used. I trust that you got a note from me at Eagleswood about a fortnight ago. I passed thro’ [W]orcester on the morning of the 25th of November, and spent several hours (from 3.30 to 6.20) in the travellers’ room at the Depot, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN as in a dream, it now seems. As the first Nashua train unexpectedly connected with the first from Fitchburg, I did not spend the forenoon with you, as I had anticipated, on account of baggage &c — If it had been a reasonable hour I should have seen you, i.e. if you had not been gone to a horse-race. But think of making a call at half past

Page 2 three in the morning! (Would it not have implied a 3 o clock in the morning courage in both you & me?) As it were ignoring the fact that mankind are really not at home — are not out, but so deeply in that they cannot be seen — nearly half their hours at this season of the year. I walked up & down the Main Street at half past 5 in the dark, and paused long in front of Brown’s store trying to distinguish its features; considering whether I might safely leave his “Putnam” in the door handle, but concluded not to risk it. Meanwhile a watchman ? seemed to be watching me, & I moved off. Took another turn round there, had a little later — , and the very earliest ^ offer of the Transcript from an urchin behind, whom I actually could not see, it was so dark. — So I withdrew,

Page 3 wondering if you & B. would know that I had been there. You little dream who is occupying Worcester when you are all asleep. Several things occurred then that night, which I will venture to say were not put into the Transcript. A CAT cat caught a mouse at the Depot, & gave it to her kitten to play with. So that world-famous tragedy goes on by night as well as by day, & nature is emphatically wrong. Also I saw a young Irish- man kneel before his mother, as if in prayer, while she wiped a cinder out of his eye with her tongue; and I found that it was never too late (or early?) to learn something. — These things transpired HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN while you & B. were, to all practical purposes, [nowhere], & good for nothing — not even for society, — not for horse-races, — nor the taking back of a P[utnam’s] Mag[azine]. It is true, I might have recalled you to life, but it would have been a cruel act, considering the kind of life you would have come back to. However, I would fain write to you now by broad [daylight], and report to you some of my life, such as it is, and recall you to your life, {written vertically through top of letter: Left on the stove too long.}

Page 4 which is not always lived by you, even by day light. Blake! Blake! are you awake? Are you aware what an ever-glorious morning this is? — What long expected never to be repeated opportunity is now offered to get life & knowledge? For my part I am trying to wake up, — to wring slumber out of my pores; — For, generally, I take events as unconcernedly as a fence post, — absorb wet & cold like it, and am pleasantly tickled with lichens slowly spreading over me. Could I not be content then to be a cedar post, which lasts 25 years? Would I not rather be that than the farmer that set it? or he that preaches to that farmer — ? — & go to the heaven of posts at last? I think I should like to be that as well as any would like it. But I should not care if I sprouted into a living tree, put forth leaves & flowers, & bore fruit. I am grateful for what I am & have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite — only a sense of

Page 5

existence — Well anything for variety. I am ready to try this for the next HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 10000 years, & exhaust it. How sweet to think of! [M]y extremities well charred, and my intellectual part too, so that there is no danger of worm or rot for a long while. My breath is sweet to me. O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches — No run on my bank can drain it — for my wealth is not possession but en- joyment. What are all these years made for? And how another winter [come], so much like the last? Cant we satisfy the beggars once for all? Have you got in your wood

Page 6 for this winter? What else have you got in? Of what use a great fire on the hearth & a confounded little fire in the heart? Are you prepared to make a decisive campaign — to pay for your costly tuition — to pay for the suns of past summers — for happiness & unhappiness lavished upon you? Does not Time go by swifter than the swiftest equine trotter or racker? Stir up Brown — [R]emind him of his duties, which outrun the date & span of Worceste[r’s] years past & to come. Tell him to be sure that he is on the Main Street, however narrow it may be — & to have a lit sign, visible by night as well as by day. Are they not patient waiters — they who wait for us? But even they shall

Page 7 not be losers. Dec. 7th That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. I have just read his 2nd edition (which he gave me) and it has done me more good than any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remember best the poem of Walt Whitman An American & the Sun Down Poem — There are 2 or 3 pieces HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN in the book which are disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all — It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt, there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants. But even on this side, he has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know. I have found his poem exhilirating — encouraging. As for its sensuality, — & it may turn out to be less sensual than it appears — I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men & women were so pure that they could read

Page 8 them without harm, that is without understanding them. One woman told me that no woman could read it — as if a man could read what a woman could not. Of course Walt Whitman can communicate to us no experience, and if we are shocked, and if we are shocked whose experience is it that we are reminded of? On the whole it sounds to me very brave & American, after whatever deductions. I do not believe that all the sermons so called that have been preached in this land put together are equal to it for preaching — We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human. You cant confound him with the other inhabitants of Brook- lyn or New York. How they must shudder when they read him! He is awefully good. To be sure I am sometimes feel a little imposed on — By his heartiness & broad general- ities he puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to see wonders — as it were sets me upon a hill or in the midst of a plain — stirs me well up, and then[ — ]throws in a thousand of brick. Though rude & sometimes ineffectual, it is HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Page 9 a great primitive poem — an alarum or trumpet note ringing through the American Camp. Wonderfully like the orientals too, considering that when I asked him if he had read them he answered “No! tell me about them.” I did not get far in conversation with him — two more being present, and among the few things which I chanced to say, I remember that one was, in answer to him as representing America, that I did not think much of America or of politics & so on — Which may have been somewhat of a damper to him. Since I have seen him I find that I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism 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 — H. D. T. One might wonder, on reading this analysis of Walt Whitman’s poems, whether Thoreau might have been a closet Puritan. This passage in WALDEN is often considered to be dyed-in-the-wool Puritanism:

WALDEN: All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

It is, however, not. You will note that this passage is bracketed in WALDEN with a troubling pithy remark above it and another troubling pithy remark below it. Above this passage we find “He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established.” Below it we find “Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome.”

Recognizing the fact that this sort of talk gives a lot of folks nowadays the heartburn — I need to say that I personally agree with Thoreau’s analysis of Whitman’s poetry, and with everything he wrote at this point in WALDEN. The reason is simple: this world we live in is by nature indecent, uncaring, unkind, and unforgiving. The only decency, the only caring, the only kindness, the only forgiveness that we will ever discover in this world, must be the decency, the caring, the kindness, the forgiveness that we ourselves can find it in ourselves to import into it. We are the source of this, we are the donors. If decency cannot come from us -- it cannot be here at all. (That’s why it’s termed human decency.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

You little dream who is occupying Worcester when you are all asleep. Several things occurred CAT there that night which I will venture to say were not put into the Transcript. A cat caught a mouse at the depôt, and gave it to her kitten to play with. So that world-famous tragedy goes on by night as well as by day, and nature is emphatically wrong. Also I saw a young Irishman kneel before his mother, as if in prayer, while she wiped a cinder out of his eye with her tongue; and I found that it was never too late (or early?) to learn something…. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Our Henry was awake, for he had finally had his full tiandi bu ren, yi wanwu wei chugou experience:

“The natural realm is without/outside human benevolence; it treats everything as mere straw dogs.”

If, that is, we desire this to be a world which includes benevolence, we must ourselves create benevolence within our own human57 realm — for this is not to be found unless it is created and is not to be created unless it is we who create it.

57. And this is the man whose most recent biographer insists is “probably the greatest spokesman of the last two hundred years for the view that we must turn … to nature for our morality” (Robert D. Richardson, Jr., page 191), whose “life was far more an imitation

of Apollo than of Christ” and who was “not interested in a religion that strove to redeem man from this world, or to raise him above it” (192), a man who sought “knowledge, not grace” (193). This biographer has only one word for the above incident, and that a derogatory dismissive word: “astonishing” (357). Clearly, Richardson, thinking he is writing biography, has instead been writing autobiography (or, supposing that he had a seance with Thoreau’s soul, he has instead been listening to a rapping from Emerson), for this incident bore directly on a disagreement between Friend Lucretia Mott and Waldo Emerson in regard to his “The Law of Success” essay –the one that claimed that nature utilized not only the good but also the bad– for Lucretia’s reaction to that Emersonian lecture was “human wickedness works only evil, and that continually.” Clearly, also, Richardson’s got aholt of Thoreau’s corpus by a leg and I’ve got aholt by an arm, and we’re going to tug until we see whose piece includes the head and heart of Thoreau.

Emphatically Wrong HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 58 In his A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, page 362, our Henry had asserted that

A WEEK: We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both. All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy. The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality. The Tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics, that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee, and he professes another religion than it teaches, and worships at a foreign shrine. Anciently the faith of a philosopher was identical with his system, or, in other words, his view of the universe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

And in his Journal for June 30, 1852, our Henry had asserted that

Nature must be viewed humanly to be viewed at all; that is, her scenes must be associated with humane affections, such as are associated with one’s native place, for instance. She is most significant to a lover. A lover of Nature is pre-eminently a lover of man. If I have no friend, what is Nature to me? She ceases to be morally significant.

In a contrast between William Wordsworth’s poetry and William Wordsworth’s philosophizing or

58.The poet W.H. Auden has in 1962 brought forward part of this from A WEEK as:

THE VIKING BOOK OF APHORISMS, A PERSONAL SELECTION BY W.H. AUDEN…

Pg Topic Aphorism Selected by Auden out of Thoreau

He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle 259 Science exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one. Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics; that is mixed mathematics. The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist. The purest science is still biographical. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN philosophastering, C.S. Lewis has offered:

Nor have many people been taught moral philosophy by an “impulse from a vernal wood.” If they were, it would not necessarily be the sort of moral philosophy Wordsworth would have approved. It might be that of ruthless competition. For some moderns I think it is. They love nature in so far as, for them, she calls to “the dark gods in the blood”; not although, but because, sex and hunger and sheer power there operate without pity or shame. If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you have already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call “love of nature.” But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to them, the “moods” and “spirits” of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, “Look. Listen. Attend.” The fact that this imperative is so often misinterpreted and sets people making theologies and pantheologies and antitheologies –all of which can be debunked– does not really touch the central experience itself. What nature-lovers –whether they are Wordsworthians or people with “dark gods in their blood”– get from nature is an iconography, a language of images. I do not mean simply visual images; it is the “moods” or “spirits” themselves –the powerful expositions of terror, gloom, jocundity, cruelty, lust, innocence, purity– that are the images. In them each man can clothe his own belief. We must learn our theology or philosophy elsewhere (not surprisingly, we often learn them from theologians and philosophers). But when I speak of “clothing” our belief in such images I do not mean anything like using nature for similes or metaphors in the manner of the poets. Indeed I might have said “filling” or “incarnating” rather than clothing. Many people –I am one myself– would never, but for what nature does to us, have had any content to put into the words we must use in confessing our faith. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the “fear” of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.

Now, C.S. Lewis might be classed as a person who evidently had never been exposed to the geist of Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN For I think he never refers to Thoreau in his writings on religion, even in the most appropriate locations. The moral conclusion I derive from the above quotation is that –since even non-Thoreauvian popular writers can “get it,” we should speak firmly, even harshly, to “Thoreauvians” who refuse to “get it” on this point of nature and morality, and continue to credit their Thoreau with some simpleminded nature-worship or with some ethic derived from naturalness or whatever, some shallow belief system derived not from Thoreau’s materials but from their own lack of thoughtfulness.

While Thoreau was undergoing this spiritual upheaval, John Brown was indulging in unlimited revolutionary scheming with Frederick Douglass at the Douglass home outside Rochester, New York. How could the black people of the South be induced to rise up in a suicidal violent attempt to produce a circulation of the elites, a replacement of a repressive white ruling caste with a progressive black ruling caste? (—Or die in the attempt—) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1857

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s “The Theater” was being distributed in the form of a pamphlet by Truman & Spofford of Cincinnati, Ohio. He was in favor of theatrical performances.59 He paid a 2d visit to Walt Whitman.

May: In Liverpool, England, briefly, Herman Melville again met with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In Edinburgh, the family of Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson relocated from 1 Inverleith Terrace to 17 Heriot Row.

It was probably during the period from this month until May 1859 that Walt Whitman would be meeting Fred Vaughan, and writing his “Calamus” poems.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

May 26, Tuesday: Thomas Cholmondeley, in London, was writing to Henry Thoreau to let him know that he had received, and had read in their entirety, the copies that had been posted to him of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Waldo Emerson’s POEMS, Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s book on the Southern states.

May 26. 1857 London. My dear Thoreau I have received your four books & what is more I have read them. Olmstead was the only entire stranger. His book I think might have been shortened–& if he had indeed written only one word instead of ten – I should have liked it better. It is a horrid vice this wordiness– Emerson is beautiful & glorious.– Of all his poems the “Rhodora” is my favorite. I repeat it to myself over & over again. I am also delighted with “Guy” “Uriel” & “Beauty” Of your own book I will say nothing but I will ask you a question, which perhaps may be a very ignorant one. I have observed a few lines about Walt Whitman “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

59. Moncure Daniel Conway. THE THEATER: A DISCOURSE, DELIVERED IN THE UNITARIAN CHURCH, CINCINNATI, O., ON JUNE 7, 1857, BY M.D. CONWAY, MINISTER. Cincinnati. Pamphlet. Truman & Spofford, 1857. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Now there is something here unlike anything else in these pages. Are they absolutely your own; or whose? And afterward you shall hear what I think of them. Walt Whitmans poems have only been heard of in England to be laughed at & voted offensive– Here are “Leaves” indeed which I can no more understand than the book of Enoch or the inedited Poems of Daniel! I cannot believe that such a man lives unless I actually touch him. He is further ahead of me in yonder west than Buddha is behind me in the Orient. I find reality & beauty mixed with not a little violence & coarseness, both of which are to me effeminate. I am amused at his views of sexual energy – which however are absurdly false. I believe that rudeness & excitement in the act of generation are injurious to the issue. The man appears to me not to know how to behave himself. I find the gentleman altogether left out of the book! Altogether these leaves completely puzzle me. Is there actually such a man as Whitman? Has anyone seen or handled him? His is a tongue “not understanded” of the English people. It is the first book I have ever seen which I should call “a new book” & thus I would sum up the impression it makes upon me. While I am writing, Prince Albert & Duke Constantine are reviewing the guards in a corner of St James Park. I hear the music. About two hours ago I took a turn round the Park before breakfast & saw the troops formed. The varieties of colour gleamed fully out from their uniforms– They looked like an Army of soldier butterflies just dropped from the lovely green trees under which they marched. Never saw the trees look so green before as they do this spring– Some of the oaks incredibly so– I stood before some the other day in Richmond & was obliged to pinch myself & ask “is this oak tree really growing on the earth they call so bad & wicked an earth; & itself so undeniably & astonishingly fresh & fair”.? It did not look like magic. It was magic. I have had a thousand strange experiences lately – most of them delicious & some almost awful. I seem to do so much in my life when I am doing nothing at all. I seem to be hiving up strength all the while as a sleeping man does; who sleeps & dreams & strengthens himself unconsciously; only sometimes half-awakes with a sense of cool refreshment. Sometimes it is wonderful to me that I say so little & somehow cannot speak even to my friends! Why all the time I was at Concord I never could tell you much of all I have seen & done!– I never could somehow tell you anything! How ungrateful to my guardian genius to think any of it trivial or superfluous! But it always seemed already-told & long ago said – what is past & what is to come seems as it were all shut up in some very simple but very dear notes of music which I never can repeat. Tonight I intend to hear Mr. Dow the american lecture in Exeter hall– I believe it is tonight. But I go forearmed against him – being convinced in my mind that a good man is all the better for a bottle of Port under his belt every day of his life. . . . I heard Spurgeon the Preacher the other day. He said some very good things: among others “If I can make the bells ring in one heart I shall be content.” Two young men not behaving themselves, he called them as sternly to order as if they were serving under him– Talking of Jerusalem he HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN said that “every good man had a mansion of his own there & a crown that would fit no other head save his”. That I felt was true. It is the voice of Spurgeon that draws more than his matter. His organ is very fine – but I fear he is hurting it by preaching to too large & frequent congregations. I found this out – because he is falling into two voices the usual clerical infirmity.

. . . The bells – church bells are ringing somewhere for the queens birthday they tell me– I have not a court-guide at hand to see if this is so. . . . London is cram-full. Not a bed! Not a corner! After all the finest sight is to see such numbers of beautiful girls riding about & riding well. There are certainly no women in the world like ours. The men are far, far inferior to them. I am still searching after an abode & really my adventures have been most amusing. One Sussex farmer had a very good little cottage close to Battle – but he kept a “few horses & a score or two of Pigs” under the very windows. I remarked that his stables were very filthy. The man stared hard at me – as an english farmer only can stare: ie, as a man stares who is trying to catch a thought which is always running away from him. At last he said striking his stick on the ground– “But that is why I keep the Pigs– I want their dung for my hop-grounds” We could not arrange it after that! I received a very kind note today from Concord informing me that there was a farm to be sold on the Hill just over your river & nearly opposite your house. But it is out of the question buying land by deputy! I have however almost decided to settle finally in America– There are many reasons for it. I think of running over in the trial-trip of the Great Eastern which will be at the close of the year. She is either to be the greatest success – or else to sink altogether without more ado! She is to be something decided. I was all over her the other day. The immense creature musical with the incessant tinkling of hammers is as yet unconscious of life.– By measurement she is larger than the Ark. From the promenade of her decks you see the town & trade of London; the river –(the sacred river)–; Greenwich with its park & palace; the vast town of Southwark & the continuation of it at Deptford; the Sydenham palace & the Surrey hills. Altogether a noble Poem. . . . Only think, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of warm trash– If I had held to cold drinks – they would have lasted me out; but the effeminacy of tea coffee chocolate & sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine & beef. Hence God to punish them for their feeble hearts takes away the grinders from their representatives, one of whom I have been induced to become. But, Thoreau, if ever I live again I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. It is as dangerous as to take a Pill which I am convinced is a most immoral custom. Give me ale for breakfast & claret or Port or ale again for dinner– I should then have a better conscience & not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue. Farewell Thoreau. Success & the bounty of the gods attend you HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN yrs ever Thos Cholley. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Cholmondeley wrote Thoreau about losing his teeth, speculating that this was due to warm drinks: “Only think, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of warm trash– If I had held to cold drinks — they would have lasted me out; but the effeminacy of tea coffee chocolate & sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine & beef. Hence God to punish them for their feeble hearts takes away the grinders from their representatives, one of whom I have been induced to become. But, Thoreau, if ever I live again I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. It is as dangerous as to take a Pill which I am convinced is a most immoral custom. Give me ale for breakfast & claret or Port or ale again for dinner– I should then have a better conscience & not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue.”

The Dred Scotts became free at last. See, life isn’t always totally vicious, especially when your case has gotten lots of media attention. What happened was that the surgeon/owner, John Emerson, had died while the Dred Scott lawsuit had been dragging through the courts, and Emerson’s widow had remarried, and her new husband was more easily embarrassed than her old. So Dred Scott was able to go to work as a hotel porter in St. Louis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Friend Daniel Ricketson leaving Concord, to his journal:

Left Concord at 7 1/ A.M. Had a long conversation with Miss Ellen Emerson, ELLEN EMERSON 2 eldest daughter of R.W. Emerson, who attends the school of Professor Agassiz at LOUIS AGASSIZ Cambridge. She is a very sensible, open-hearted, intelligent young lady, but quite peculiar and original in her ideas upon many subjects; modest of her own qualities, but evidently a strongly marked person, one that will grow in strength and finally make a noble woman. I was on the whole quite interested and pleased with her. In Boston called about noon at Dr. Walter Channing’s, in Bowdoin St.; there saw besides the doctor the two eldest children of my friend Wm. Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller C. and Caroline Sturgis C., daughters worthy of a poet and of whom any father might be proud: sweet sensitive girls, Margaret not 13 and DR. WALTER CHANNING Caroline about 10. How tenderly I regarded them, deprived of their lovely ELLERY CHANNING mother and so neglected by their talented and wayward father! Dined with Arthur B. Fuller, the brother, and Mrs. Fuller, the mother of the revered and RGARET FULLER CHANNING lamented Margaret and Ellen — Madam Ossoli and Mrs. William E. Channing. ROLINE STURGIS CHANNING After a long and instructive as well as interesting conversation, the latter part with Mrs. Fuller, I left, deeply impressed with their genuine goodness and beauty of character, about 5 P.M. In the dining-room were three engravings (saved from the wreck) of Madam Ossoli’s, to wit: “Tasso’s Oak,” “Pine in the Colonna Gardens, Rome,” Michael Angelo’s “Cypresses, Rome;” also a scene in Rome, MADAM OSSOLI with her residence there. In Mr. Fuller’s own room upstairs were several line ELLEN FULLER CHANNING engravings from paintings by Zampieri. In the front parlor was a raised plaster head of Margaret, and the engraving underneath the same, placed in the memoirs of her by her brother, very much like the original daguerreotype of Miss Ellen Channing with a child in her arms — a sweet motherly face, truly lovely; also a fine portrait of the deceased wife of Mr. Fuller, a sweet open face. In the dining-room was a portrait of the Hon. Timothy Fuller, the father of Margaret — reddish hair, blue eyes, and rather mild countenance — the portrait resembling in style that of Fisher Ames. Mr. F. presented me with several manuscript pieces of Margaret’s, and Mrs. Fuller with a volume of poems by J.W. Randall, a friend of hers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN At a later point he added the following observation to his journal, about this meal with the Fullers:

The short stay at my friend Arthur B. Fuller’s, where I only dined, was very agreeable from the cordiality of Mrs. Fuller, the mother of the celebrated M.F. Ossoli. I was introduced to Richard H. Fuller, Esq., of the legal profession, but also a farmer, or rather the owner of a farm at Wayland, some twenty miles north of Boston. He as well as the rest of the family are very devout and intelligent people.

May 26. Pink azalea in garden. Mountain-ash a day; also horse-chestnut the same. Beach plum well out, several days at least. Wood pewee, and Minott heard a loon go laughing over this morning. The vireo days have fairly begun. They are now heard amid the elm-tops. Thin coats and straw hats are worn. I have noticed that notional nervous invalids, who report to the community the exact condition of their heads and stomachs every morning, as if they alone were blessed or cursed with these parts; who are old betties and quiddles, if men; who can’t eat their breakfasts when they are ready, but play with their spoons, and hanker after an ice-cream at irregular hours; who go more than half-way to meet any invalidity, and go to bed to be sick on the slightest occasion, in the middle of the brightest forenoon,—improve the least opportunity to be sick;—I observe that such are self-indulgent persons, without any regular and absorbing employment. They are nice, discriminating, experienced in all that relates to bodily sensations. They come to you stroking their wens, manipulating their ulcers, and expect you to do the same for them. Their religion and humanity stick. They spend the day manipulating their bodies and doing no work; can never get their nails clean. Some of the earliest willows about warm edges of woods are gone to seed and downy. P. M.—To Saw Mill Brook. It is very hazy after a sultry morning, but the wind is getting east and cool. The oaks are in the gray, or a little more, and the silvery leafets of the deciduous trees invest the woods like a permanent mist. At the same season with this haze of buds comes also the kindred haziness of the air. I see the common small reddish butterflies. Very interesting now are the red tents of expanding oak leaves, as you go through sprout-lands,—the crimson velvet of the black oak and the more pinkish white oak. The salmon and pinkish-red canopies or umbrellas of the white oak are particularly interesting. The very sudden expansion of the great hickory buds, umbrella-wise. Now, at last, all leaves dare unfold, and twigs begin to shoot. As I am going down the footpath from Britton’s camp to the spring, I start a pair of nighthawks (they had the white on the wing) from amid the dry leaves at the base of a bush, a bunch of sprouts, and away they flitted in zigzag noiseless flight a few rods through the sprout-land, dexterously avoiding the twigs, uttering a faint hollow what, as if made by merely closing the bill, and one alighted flat on a stump. On those carpinus trees which have fertile flowers, the sterile are effete and drop off. The red choke-berry not in bloom, while the black is, for a day or more at least. Roadside near Britton’s camp, see a grosbeak, apparently female of the rose-breasted, quite tame, as usual, brown above, with black head and a white streak over the eye, a less distinct one beneath it, two faint bars on wings, dirty-white bill, white breast, dark spotted or streaked, and from time [to time] utters a very sharp chirp of alarm or interrogation as it peers through the twigs at me. A lady’s-slipper. At Cliffs, no doubt, before. At Abel Brooks’s (or Black Snake, or Red Cherry, or Rye) Hollow, hear the wood thrush. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

In Thrush Alley, see one of those large ant-hills, recently begun, the grass and moss partly covered with sand over a circle two feet in diameter, with holes two to five inches apart, and the dry sand is dark-spotted with the fresh damp sand about each hole. My mother was telling to-night of the sounds which she used to hear summer nights when she was young and lived on the Virginia Road,—the lowing of cows, or cackling of geese, or the beating of a drum [this is a reference to the drumming of the male Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the woods] as far off as Hildreth’s, but above all Joe Merriam whistling to his team, for he was an admirable whistler. Says she used to get up at midnight and go and sit on the door-step when all in the house were asleep, and she could hear nothing in the world but the ticking of the clock in the house behind her. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1858

The first transatlantic cable was officially in operation, as Queen Victoria and U.S. President Buchanan sent messages to one another. Cyrus W. Field, the primary venture capitalist behind the transatlantic cable, was hailed by Walt Whitman as “the foremost man of the nineteenth century.” What this new Cyrus the Great had brought about, Whitman trumpeted, was nothing less than

the union of the great Anglo-Saxon race, henceforth forever to be a unit, that makes the States throb with tumultuous emotion and thrills every breast with admiration and triumph. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Walt Whitman was hoping for a solution to the issue of American slavery by a vaguely expressed fantasy in which other races simply disappeared or, somehow, went somewhere else, went to “some secure and ample part of the earth.” For “is not America for the Whites?” Although all races had equal rights, some were simply more developed than others, farther along the evolutionary pathway of the soul from its animal origin to its angel destiny. Miscegenation between white males and colored females, Whitman suggested in an early fiction, risked the production of “half-breed” children that were “half-idiot, half-devil.” Southern slavery was wrong, Whitman inferred, not so much because of its impact on blacks –who didn’t count because they were inferior beings, not as worthy of God’s protection– as because of its impact on the “miserable, ignorant, and shiftless” poor white trash of the South, whose manual work –and therefore their very being– was devalued by comparing it with the manual labor produced by enforced slavery.60

Before After

Poor white people — helpless victims of their slaves! Poor Walt — couldn’t handle his hammer the way a black carpenter could! Poor Dred — free at last!

Summer: Horace Greeley toured California.

Walt Whitman, who had been editing the Brooklyn Times, became unemployed. He would be frequenting Pfaff’s restaurant and saloon during this period.

60.This was a lifelong attitude. Many years later Whitman declared “The nigger like the Injun, will be eliminated.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1860

Walt Whitman came to Boston to oversee the printing of the 3d edition of LEAVES OF GRASS. He had picked up, from various scientific and scientistic sources in the general culture, the Lamarckian notion that if you ate right and exercised, and then had good free sex, your children could be genetically improved, leading to the progressive development of the human kind.61 Waldo Emerson tried to persuade him to omit his overtly sexual “Children of Adam” poem (Whitman explained later that Emerson “did not see that if I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out,” because his doctrine that the expression of human instinct was the expression of divine immanence could not allow that in a single exception the expression of human instinct was the expression of something else, something not divine, something that needed to be, not uninhibited, but inhibited). Whitman was proposing a new nationalistic chronology, according to which the supreme, in fact pivotal, event of world history was not the birth of Christ but the date of our throwing off the English yoke. Thus that 3d edition, issued in AD1860, was marked “85TS,” that is, the 86th year of These States. Despite all this hot patriotism, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, Lidian Emerson, and Abba Alcott, discussing together, put it out to the menfolk that this Walt fellow would not to be welcome in their homes.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s OUT-DOOR PAPERS, which would eventually take John Burroughs out of his track of Emerson-essay-imitation and set him on his track of nature writing.62

Waldo Emerson’s “The Conduct of Life” was published by Ticknor & Fields in Boston (a copy would be found in Henry Thoreau’s personal library). THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

Horace Rice Hosmer purchased the only copy of the 2d edition of LEAVES OF GRASS that would be sold in Concord.63

Helen Fiske (Hunt) (Jackson) met Emily Dickinson again.

61. That hot fantasy did not necessarily have anything in particular to do with Waldo Emerson’s worm “striving to be man” as it “mounts through all the spires of form,” for it was a notion that had been around for a long time: certain ancient Greeks believed that were a woman to receive an inadequate quantity or quality of semen and sexual interest during her pregnancy, she was more likely to bear a female / deformed / inadequate child. And Lamarckism would also be around for a long time after Whitman, as witness such pop luminaries of our own era as Arthur Koestler and Teilhard de Chardin. 62. During the civil war John Burroughs was chumming around with Walt Whitman in Washington DC. 63. According to Jonathan Ned Katz’s THE INVENTION OF HETEROSEXUALITY (NY: Dutton, 1995), it was during this decade, in Germany, that we began our current preoccupation with sorting our sexual behavior out into the categories “heterosexual” versus “homosexual.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February: Walt Whitman came to Boston to oversee the printing of the 3d edition of LEAVES OF GRASS. He had picked up, from various scientific and scientistic sources in the general culture, the Lamarckian notion that if you ate right and exercised, and then had good free sex, your children could be genetically improved, leading to the progressive development of the human kind.64 Waldo Emerson tried to persuade him to omit his overtly sexual “Children of Adam” poem (Whitman explained later that Emerson “did not see that if I had cut sex out I might just as well have cut everything out,” because his doctrine that the expression of human instinct was the expression of divine immanence could not allow that in a single exception the expression of human instinct was the expression of something else, something not divine, something that needed to be, not uninhibited, but inhibited). “Specimen Days”

BOSTON COMMON — MORE OF EMERSON I spend a good deal of time on the Common, these delicious days and nights — every mid-day from 11.30 to about 1 — and almost every sunset another hour. I know all the big trees, especially the old elms along Tremont and Beacon streets, and have come to a sociable-silent understanding with most of them, in the sunlit air, (yet crispy-cool enough,) [Page 915] as I saunter along the wide unpaved walks. Up and down this breadth by Beacon street, between these same old elms, I walk’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 when 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, reconnoitring, review, attack, and pressing home, (like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, infantry,) of all that could be said against that part (and a main part) in the construction of my poems, “Children of Adam.” More precious than gold to me that dissertation — it afforded me, ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson; each point 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 unmistakable 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 touch’d with qualms, (as I confess I had been two or three times before).

Whitman was proposing a new nationalistic chronology, according to which the supreme, in fact pivotal, event of world history was not the birth of Christ but the date of our throwing off the English yoke. Thus that 3d edition, issued in AD1860, was marked “85TS,” that is, the 86th year of These States. Despite all this hot patriotism, Miss Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, Mrs. Lidian Emerson, and Mrs. Abba Alcott, discussing together, put it out to the menfolk that this Walt fellow would not to be welcome in their homes. THE ALCOTT FAMILY

64. That hot fantasy did not necessarily have anything in particular to do with Waldo Emerson’s worm “striving to be man” as it “mounts through all the spires of form,” for it was a notion that had been around for a long time: certain ancient Greeks believed that were a woman to receive an inadequate quantity or quality of semen and sexual interest during her pregnancy, she was more likely to bear a female / deformed / inadequate child. And Lamarckism would also be around for a long time after Whitman, as witness such pop luminaries of our own era as Arthur Koestler and Teilhard de Chardin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

February 26, Sunday evening: Abraham Lincoln was visiting New-York in order to speak importantly at the Cooper Institute, and publicly disassociate himself from the idea of trying to help the negro slave improve his lot:

John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.

On the evening before this important address, the candidate took the ferry across the East River to see and be seen at the Plymouth Church, and to hear the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher sermonize. There is a small plaque on the pew in which he sat, #89. (There is no plaque where Lajos Kossuth had sat, nor is there a plaque where Walt Whitman had sat, or where Bronson Alcott and Henry Thoreau had sat, evidently because we don’t know specifically which pews these folks sat in or for some other reason.)

Feb. 26. Sunday. 2 P. M.—Thermometer 30; cold northwest wind. The water is about six inches above Hoar’s steps. That well covers the meadows generally. Cold and strong northwest wind this and yesterday.

Mid-March: Walt Whitman came to Boston not to attend Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s hearing (which of course hadn’t yet been imagined) but to correct proofs for a new edition of his LEAVES OF GRASS. As they strolled together under the giant elms on Tremont and Beacon Streets, Waldo Emerson attempted to persuade him not to republish the “Children of Adam” verses: I told him I only felt more settled than ever to adhere to my own theory, and to exemplify it.

April 4, Wednesday: On the day after the attempt to seize Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Henry Thoreau made a typically laconic comment about this in his journal: “Lodged at Sanborn’s last night after his rescue, he being away.” His entry is so subdued, one wonders that he bothered to mention the incident at all — unless he was using this laconic entry as a reminder to himself of the relative weight which should be assigned in one’s life to events of such nature: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 4: Wednesday morning. Lodged at Sanborn’s last night after his rescue, he being away. It is warmer, an April-like morning after two colder and windy days, threatening a moist or more or less showery Thoreau as day, which followed.The birds sing quite numerously at sunrise about the villages, –robins, tree sparrows, and methinks I heard a purple finch. The birds are eager to sing, as the flowers to bloom, after raw weather has held Ornithologist them in check.

Walt Whitman, who had come to Boston to republish his book, was present at the Supreme Court hearing in the Sanborn matter. The record made by Louisa May Alcott was somewhat more succinct than Sanborn’s but nowhere near as laconic as Thoreau’s:

Sanborn was nearly kidnapped for being a friend of John Brown; but his sister rescued him when he was handcuffed, and the scamps drove off. A meeting and general flurry.

At the meeting in Concord which Louisa May Alcott mentions above, Thoreau had spoken for resistance to unjust law. None of our three diarists here, not Sanborn, not Alcott, and not Thoreau, considered this worthy of mention.

John S. Keyes, John Andrew, Samuel E. Sewall, and Robert Treat Paine, acting together as legal counsel on Sanborn’s behalf, went before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. Walt Whitman, who had come to Boston to republish his book, was present at the Supreme Court hearing, as was Wendell Phillips. The court room was filled with my Concord and Boston friends, including the always elegant Mr. Wendell Phillips and, in his workingman’s outfit, Mr. Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman would allege later that he had been at the hearing specifically to help rescue Sanborn had this become necessary. There were plenty of others, Whitman would indicate, who also had come to take action should the hearing go sour. With Whitman were his publishers, Charles Thayer and William Eldridge, at whose place of business an abolitionist group known as the Black Strings sometimes held their meetings. Another of their authors, James Redpath, was present also.

The journalist Richard J. Hinton who had recommended LEAVES OF GRASS to Thayer and Eldridge was present. William Douglas O’Connor, who had received an advance on his forthcoming antislavery manuscript HARRINGTON, was in attendance. When Judge Lemuel Shaw declared that no one but an officer of the Senate had the legal authority to undertake such an arrest, it became clear that violence would not be appropriate. Sanborn returned to Concord a hero, lauded by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Waldo Emerson at a spontaneous homecoming celebration held at Town Hall. Thoreau received applause when he opinioned that the government ought to have been out arresting slave kidnappers, rather than attempting to kidnap Sanborn. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August: This month’s issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. CONSULT THIS ISSUE

Louisa May Alcott put in a solid month’s work on a 1st draft of her novel MOODS,

“Moods.” Genius burned so fiercely that for four weeks I wrote all day and planned nearly all night, being quite possessed by my work. I was perfectly happy, and seemed to have no wants. Finished my book, or a rough draft of it, and put it away to settle. Mr. Emerson offered to read it when Mother told him it was “moods” and had one of his sayings for motto.1 Daresay nothing will ever come of it; but it had to be done, and I’m the richer for a new experience.

1. Alcott’s epigraph in MOODS: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus. — Emerson” What Emerson had written in the essay “Experience” published in ESSAYS, 2D SERIES: “Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh and giggle? or if he apologize? or is affected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go by food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood? ...”

which her biographer refers to as “a love story about Henry Thoreau” and as “a stormy, triangular love story based on her long-term, secret infatuation with Henry Thoreau.65 It was a story from the heart, lingering over passionate possibilities and displaying Louisa’s unrequited desire for an absorbing, erotic love.”66 65. The novel would need to be cut almost in half so it could be published as a saleable single volume rather than as an unsalable double volume on October 8, 1864, Abba’s 64th birthday. The sanctimonious publisher, A.K. Loring, insisted that a reference to a character as perusing Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS volume be elided. 66. In an undated letter to Louisa, this Loring unashamedly exposed the American businessman’s poverty of mind and arrogance: I judge a book by the impression it makes and leaves in my mind, by the feelings solely as I am no scholar. —A story that touches and moves me, I can make others read and believe in. —What I like is conciseness in introducing the characters, getting them upon the stage and into action as quickly as possible. —Then I like a story of constant action, bustle and motion, —Conversations and descriptive scenes are delightful reading when well drawn but are too often skipped by the reader who is anxious to see what they will do next, and it’s folly to write what will be skipped in reading.... I like a story that starts to teach some lesson of life (and) goes steadily on increasing in interest till it culminates with the closing chapter leaving you spell bound, enchanted and exhausted with the intensity with which it is written, the lesson forcibly told, and a yearning desire to turn right back to the beginning and enjoy it over again.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

MOODS presents an American Rochester modeled on Henry David Thoreau, in the character of Adam Warwick. He is a very tempting mate to Sylvia. Warwick has no house to keep but rather claims the world at large and nature in particular as his domain. Moreover, he offers to share nature with Sylvia and to teach her its secrets. Somewhat like Rochester, he does have a sexual secret as well in the first MOODS; he is betrothed to Ottila. Thoreau’s influence on the character of Warwick is twofold: both natural and sexual. Thoreau’s “prejudice for Adamhood” became well known, establishing a direct relationship with nature as one American model of manhood. He was the Alcott girls’ favorite companion on cross-country nature rambles. Charming birds and chipmunks, telling stories of Indian history and natural geography, he attracted Louisa May Alcott as well. She recalled trailing behind Thoreau and her father as they discussed Thoreau’s essays. In addition Thoreau provides a possible source for the fictional rivalry between Warwick and Moor; there were rumors of an attraction between Lidian Emerson and Thoreau. Even though critics found the triangles in MOODS “impossible,” Alcott confided to her JOURNALS, in a postscript to the 1865 pages, that a case of the sort exists in Concord and the woman came and asked me how I knew it. I did not know or guess, but perhaps felt it without any other guide, and unconsciously put the thing into my book, for I changed the ending about that time. It was meant to show a life affected by Moods, not a discussion of marriage which I knew so little about, except to observe that very few were happy ones. ...[Warwick is] “restless, brilliant and violently virtuous.” Like Thoreau, who supported John Brown’s Harper Ferry raid, denounced the Mexican War, and defended the cause of American Indians, Warwick is a masterful soul, bent on living out his beliefs and aspirations at any cost, much given to denunciation of wrong-doing everywhere, and eager to execute justice upon all offenders high or low.

Meanwhile, the love object was taking a train to Troy, New Hampshire and walking to Mt. Monadnock with Ellery Channing, camping out for five nights. The love object was working on his natural history materials. [SEE “MOODS” ON NEXT SCREEN]

Needless to say, if this character “Mr. Adam Warwick” in MOODS was indeed modeled by Louisa upon her “impressions of Thoreau,” then the author’s creation informs us far more about her own soul and the impressions which it insisted upon manufacturing than about the soul of the person to whom she was seeming to relate. But perhaps these easy identifiers (the analysts quoted above) were quite mistaken. Perhaps this character “Mr. Adam Warwick” was indeed modeled upon a historical person, but not upon anyone so famous as Thoreau with whom we are so well acquainted. Please note that Louisa May Alcott was a little girl growing up with three other little girls in a family which attracted adult males to reside with it, at Fruitlands and HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN elsewhere, drifting characters of means such as the English metaphysical chap Charles Lane.

For the remainder of this exceedingly nasty suggestion, I will decline to carry the freight myself but instead will allow Henry James, Sr., who personally had an opportunity to observe this situation in the Alcott household over a period of years, to carry that freight for me. What he had to say in the period in which this novel first saw the light of day was as follows — and it strikes me that for 1865, the year in which it was written, this is strong meat indeed:

... Mr. Adam Warwick, is one of our oldest and most inveterate foes. he is the inevitable cavaliere servente of the precocious little girl; the laconical, satirical, dogmatical lover, of about thirty-five, with the “brown mane,” the “quiet smile,” the “masterful soul,” and the “commanding eye.” Do not all novel-readers remember a figure, a hundred figures, analogous to this? Can they not, one of his properties being given, — the “quiet smile” for instance, — reconstruct the whole monstrous shape? When the “quiet smile” is suggested, we know what is coming: we foresee the cynical bachelor or widower, the amateur of human nature, “Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the part,” who has travelled all over the world, lives on a mysterious patrimony, and spends his time in breaking the hearts and the wills of demure little school-girls, who answer him with “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir.” Mr. Warwick is plainly a great favorite with the author. She has for him that affection which writers entertain, not for those figures whom they have well known, but for such as they have much pondered....

I take it that this “whole monstrous shape” who “spends his time in breaking the hearts and wills of demure little school-girls” amounts to about as close as one might come in the literary world of the 19th Century to a suggestion that there had been pederasts, either active or latent, in the vicinity during the childhood formation of the author (if you have some easier interpretation of his concern, please do share this easier interpretation with us). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Little notice was taken of her stories, but they found a market; and encouraged by this fact, she resolved to make a bold stroke for fame and fortune. Having copied her novel for the fourth time, read it to all her confidential friends, and submitted it with fear and trembling to three publishers, she at last disposed of it, on condition that she would cut it down one-third, and omit all the parts which she particularly admired. “Now I must either bundle it back in to my tin-kitchen to mold, pay for printing it myself, or chop it up to suit purchasers and get what I can for it. Fame is a very good thing to have in the house, but cash is more convenient; so I wish to take the sense of the meeting on this important subject,” said Jo, calling a family council. “Don’t spoil your book, my girl, for there is more in it than you know, and the idea is well worked out. Let it wait and ripen,” was her father’s advice; and he practiced what he preached, having waited patiently thirty years for fruit of his own to ripen, and being in no haste to gather it even now when it was sweet and mellow. “It seems to me that Jo will profit more by taking the trial than by waiting,” said Mrs. March. “Criticism is the best test of such work, for it will show her both unsuspected merits and faults, and help her to do better next time. We are too partial, but the praise and blame of outsiders will prove useful, even if she gets but little money.” “Yes,” said Jo, knitting her brows, “that’s just it. I’ve been fussing over the thing so long, I really don’t know whether it’s good, bad, or indifferent. It will be a great help to have cool, impartial persons take a look at it, and tell me what they think of it.” “I wouldn’t leave a word out of it. You’ll spoil it if you do, for the interest of the story is more in the minds than in the actions of the people, and it will be all a muddle if you don’t explain as you go on,” said Meg, who firmly believed that this book was the most remarkable novel ever written. “But Mr. Allen says, ‘Leave out the explanations, make it brief and dramatic, and let the characters tell the story,’” interrupted Jo, turning to the publisher’s note. “Do as he tells you. He knows what will sale, and we don’t. Make a good, popular book, and get as much money as you can. By and by, when you’ve got a name, you can afford to digress, and have philosophical and metaphysical people in your novels,” said Amy, who took a strictly practical view of the subject. “Well,” said Jo, laughing, “if my people are ‘philosophical and metaphysical,’ it isn’t my fault, for I know nothing about such things, except what I hear father say, sometimes. If I’ve got some of his wise ideas jumbled up with my romance, so much the better for me. Now, Beth, what do you say?” “I should so like to see it printed soon,” was all Beth said, and smiled in saying it. But there was an unconscious emphasis on the last word, and a wistful look in the eyes that never lost their childlike candor, which chilled Jo’s heart for a minute with a forboding fear, and decided her to make her little venture ‘soon.’ So, with Spartan firmness, the young authoress laid her firstborn on her table, and chopped it up as ruthlessly as any ogre. In the hope of pleasing every one, she took every one’s advice, and like the old man and his donkey in the fable, suited nobody. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1861

April 13, Saturday: News of the bombardment of Fort Sumter began to reach the cities of the North:

In Boston, in order to generate an autograph, Parker Pillsbury summoned the following sentiment: “First battle against slavery with deadly weapons! Memorable in American history will the twelfth of April be, as well as the nineteenth. Yesterday began the cannonade of Fort Sumter! ‘God speed the night.’ — Parker Pillsbury — Boston 13 April 1861.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Walt Whitman reported from New-York that: “Specimen Days”

OPENING OF THE SECESSION WAR News of the attack on fort Sumter and the flag at Charleston harbor, S.C., was receiv’d in New York city late at night (13th April, 1861,) and was immediately sent out in extras of the newspapers. I had been to the opera in Fourteenth street that night, and after the performance was walking down Broadway toward twelve o’clock, on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side even more furiously than usual. I bought an extra and cross’d to the Metropolitan hotel (Niblo’s) where the great lamps were still brightly blazing, and, with a crowd of others, who gather’d impromptu, read the news, which was evidently authentic. For the benefit of some who had no papers, one of us read the telegram aloud, while all listen’d silently and attentively. No remark was made by any of the crowd, which had increas’d to thirty or forty, but all stood a minute or two, I remember, before they dispers’d. I can almost see them there now, under the lamps at midnight again.

That evening Whitman would recall that “News of the attack on fort Sumter and the flag at Charleston harbor, S.C., was receiv’d in New York city late at night (13th April, 1861) and was immediately sent out in extras of the newspapers. I had been to the opera in Fourteenth street that night, and after the performance was walking down Broadway toward twelve o’clock, on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys.” (He had been hearing Clara Louisa Kellogg sing the title role of Linda di Chamounix.) (Charleston) The cannonading is going on fiercely from all points, and from the vessels outside and all along our coast. It is reported that Fort Sumter is on fire! 10:30 A.M: At intervals of twenty minutes firing was kept up all night on Ft. Sumter. Maj. Anderson ceased firing from Ft. Sumter in the evening. All night he was engaged in repairing damages and protecting the barbette guns. He commenced to return the fire at 7 o’clock this morning. Ft. Sumter seems to be greatly disabled. The battery on Cumming’s Point does Fort Sumter great damage. At 9 o’clock this morning a dense smoke poured out from Ft. Sumter. The federal flag is at half mast signaling distress. The shells from Fort Moultrie and the batteries on Morris Island fall into Maj. Anderson’s stronghold thick and fast, and they can be seen in their course from the Charleston Battery. 1 1/2 o’clock- Firing ceased. Unconditional surrender made. Carolinians are surprised the fight is over. After flag staff was shot away, Wigfall was sent by Beauregard to Sumter with white flag, to offer assistance to subdue the flames. He was meet by Anderson, who had just displayed a white flag. But batteries had not stopped firing. Wigfall replied: Anderson must haul down the American flag, and surrender, or fight was the word. Anderson then hauled the flag down. Several of Beauregard’s staff came over and stipulated that the surrender must be unconditional. Anderson allowed them to take actual possession. Five of Anderson’s men wounded one thought mortally. At 2:30PM Fort Sumter did surrender, wherupon a boat and 10 men were sent from ships of war outside to Morris’ Island requesting permission for a vessel to take off Anderson’s command. Anderson’s reported surrender was because quarters and barracks had been destroyed and they had no hope of reinforcements. Fleet lay by 30 hours. Couldn’t or wouldn’t help him. His men were prostrated by over exertion. Explosions heard in Sumter. Everything in ruins but the casements. Many guns are dismounted, and the walls look like honey combs. Moultrie is badly damaged. The houses on the island are riddled. Boats sent from the fort to- HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN night officially notify the fleet of the surrender of Sumter. It is not known what will be done with Sumter or the vanquished. (New-York) The President received the war news calmly and with a confident feeling that he had done his duty in the matter. Senator Sherman arrived from Ohio and reports the Republicans there ready to stand by to the last. The opinion prevails that an attempt will be made before sunrise to run the light draft vessels of the fleet up to Sumter to reinforce and provision it. Washington Tribune dispatch says Capt. Fox commands the vessel with provisions which is to lead the expedition into Charleston. US CIVIL WAR

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR APRIL 13th] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1862

February: Waldo Emerson lectured to the Reverend Theodore Parker’s “Fraternity” in Boston, and made some remarks in his journal about the dying Henry Thoreau:67

H D T ... Perhaps his fancy for Walt Whitman grew out of his taste for wild nature, for an otter, a wood-chuck, or a loon. He loved sufficiency, hated a sum that would not prove: loved Walt & hated Alcott. * * * Therien came to see Thoreau on business, but Thoreau at once perceived that he had been drinking; and advised him to go home & cut his throat, and that speedily. Therien did not well know what to make of it, but went away, & Thoreau said, he learned that he had been repeating it about town, which he was glad to hear, & hoped that by this time he had begun to understand what it meant.

WALT WHITMAN Emerson also remarked in his journal about Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, mobilizing for this purpose a Thoreau trope:

Holmes came out late in life with a strong sustained growth for two or three years, like old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, & at last begin & grow great. The Lowells come forward slowly, & H.T. remarks, that men may have two growths like pears.

67. We may here treat as a projection of his own attitudes, a displacement, Waldo Emerson’s strange and entirely unsupported assertion that Henry Thoreau’s affect toward Bronson Alcott amounted to a species of contempt, and we may likewise desire to distance ourselves from Emerson’s idea that Thoreau in this reported incident with Alek Therien was merely expressing a hostile attitude — rather than attempting to administer to this long-term friend a much needed corrective.

As a temperance Friend, John Greenleaf Whittier “would have been quite incapable of such an act as Henry Thoreau committed when he advised an intemperate man who came to see him under the influence of liquor to go home and cut his throat and do it quickly.… [He] contributed an article to The American Manufacturer on ‘Cultivation of the Vine’” (pages 24-25 of Wagenknecht, Edward. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER: A PORTRAIT IN PARADOX. NY: Oxford UP, 1967). There is abundant evidence that, despite temperance convictions, despite being known as “a cold-water man by habit and principle,” Whittier not only drank hard cider and used alcoholic drinks for medicinal purposes and for sleeplessness but even, while traveling, carried on his person a flask of brandy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 15, Tuesday: Emily Dickinson wrote the first of her letters to the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson after a reading of his essay “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

(At some point during this year, Emily responded to a now-lost letter from the Reverend: “You speak of Mr. Whitman — I never read his book — but was told he was disgraceful.”) The Confederate forces were expelled from Arizona by Union troops under Colonel James Henry Carleton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

How shallow seemed to me yesterday in the woods the speech one often hears from tired citizens who have spent their brief enthusiasm for the country, that Nature is tedious, and they have had enough of green leaves. Nature and the green leaves are a million fathoms deep, and it is these eyes that are superficial.

“Thoreau” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. At Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau’s insistence Emerson had omitted the implicit reference which he had made, during his funeral oration, to Walt Whitman, “one who is not known to those here assembled.”

In his oration over Henry Thoreau’s corpse Emerson had mentioned the dead man’s “mythical record of ... disappointments.” Now, although we don’t have documentation that he had ever bothered to read through WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, this, clearly, would amount to a categorization of the hound/horse/ turtledove passage as an attempt at myth (as well as one of the author’s “riddles”), characterizing it as having to do with some series of personal life disappointments — and it would constitute evidence that Emerson had at least skimmed the first few pages of the book although it might not constitute evidence that he had HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN considered the material very carefully.

WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

The The WALDEN other parable analyses HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN It may well be that it was during this month that Emerson confided to his journal a discovery that the generals of the North were womanly:

Strange that some strong-minded president of the Woman’s Rights Convention should not offer to lead the Army of the Potomac. She could not do worse than General Maclellan [George B. McClellan].

During this month Union General John Pope would suffer defeat at the 2nd Battle of Bull Run on August 29- 30, a defeat for which General Fitz-John Porter would be held responsible since he had failed to commit his troops quickly to the battle: by 1863 this hesitant “womanly” officer would be forced out. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 13, Saturday: Marvin Sprague was born to Isaac Sprague and Sarah Eaton Sprague.

The Federal Army of the Potomac attacked Confederate troops dug in on Marye’s Heights above Fredericksburg, Virginia, south of Washington DC. They were repulsed with a loss of 12,653 men. The Confederate losses were 5,309. The abandoned Conway plantation home became a field hospital where Walt Whitman would search fruitlessly for his wounded brother down the rows of corpses and in the rooms full of mingled Union and Confederate wounded:

US CIVIL WAR The grand Conway brick home in Falmouth yet stands (although its present condition is merely a reminder):

As Whitman would report in the Camden Post for April 16, 1891: “Memoranda”

In December of this year went down to the field of war in Virginia. My brother George reported badly wounded in the Fredericksburg fight. (For 1863 and ’64, see Specimen Days.)

Just after this battle, the 33rd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment went into winter quarters near Falmouth. DANIEL FOSTER HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 21, Sunday: Visiting James Thomas Fields, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway met Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry James, Sr. Meanwhile, on the bank of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, in the rooms of the Conway plantation home, Walt Whitman was searching fruitlessly for his wounded brother:

Begin my visits among the camp hospitals in the army of the Potomac. Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle — seems to have received only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc., a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie near, each cover’d with its brown woolen blanket. In the door-yard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel- staves or broken boards, stuck in the dirt. (Most of these bodies were subsequently taken up and transported north to their friends.) The large mansion is quite crowded upstairs and down, everything impromptu, no system, all bad enough, but I have no doubt the best that can be done; all the wounds pretty bad, some frightful, the men in their old clothes, unclean and bloody. Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississippian, a captain, hit badly in leg, I talk’d with some time; he ask’d me for papers, which I gave him. (I saw him three months afterward in Washington, with his leg amputated, doing well.) I went through the rooms, downstairs and up. Some of the men were dying. I had nothing to give at that visit, but wrote a few letters to folks home, mothers, &c. Also talk’d to three or four, who seem’d most susceptible to it, and needing it.

You can still see the hammering marks on the lock of this house, made when Union troops broke in:

US CIVIL WAR December 22, Monday: President Abraham Lincoln sent a brief message to the considerable number of Union soldiers who had survived, out of his Army of the Potomac. Executive Mansion, Washington December 22, 1862 To the Army of the Potomac: I have just read your Commanding General's preliminary report of the battle of Fredericksburg. Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN nor the failure other than an accident. The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe, and the consummate skill and success with which you crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy, show that you possess all the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the country and of popular government. Condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded, I congratulate you that the number of both is comparatively so small. I tender to you, officers and soldiers, the thanks of the nation.

December 23, Tuesday to December 31, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

AFTER FIRST FREDERICKSBURG The results of the late battle are exhibited everywhere about here in thousands of cases, (hundreds die every day,) in the camp, brigade, and division hospitals. These are merely tents, and sometimes very poor ones, the [Page 713] wounded lying on the ground, lucky if their blankets are spread on layers of pine or hemlock twigs, or small leaves. No cots; seldom even a mattress. It is pretty cold. The ground is frozen hard, and there is occasional snow. I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them. Once in a while some youngster holds on to me convulsively, and I do what I can for him; at any rate, stop with him and sit near him for hours, if he wishes it.

Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes. These are curious shows, full of characters and groups. I soon get acquainted anywhere in camp, with officers or men, and am always well used. Sometimes I go down on picket with the regiments I know best. As to rations, the army here at present seems to be tolerably well supplied, and the men have enough, such as it is, mainly salt pork and hard tack. Most of the regiments lodge in the flimsy little shelter-tents. A few have built themselves huts of logs and mud, with fire-places.

US CIVIL WAR

Late December: After the December 13th defeat of the Union army at Fredericksburg, where it was attempting to advance from the capitol Washington DC toward the Confederate capitol Richmond, Virginia, Walt Whitman went to the battlefield to find his brother George. His brother’s wound wasn’t serious, so Whitman stayed on in the capitol city to help other sick and wounded soldiers in the hospitals there, and to attempt to obtain a government job. Waldo Emerson had written a letter of recommendation for him, but when this letter was delivered to Secretary of the Treasure Salmon P. Chase, Chase kept the letter as a collectible autograph and refused to consider employing the notorious Whitman. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Nevertheless, Whitman and Louisa May Alcott tried to tell us what they saw. Here is Whitman:

Outdoors, at the foot of a tree, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, etc., a full load for a one-horse cart.

(Brought to you by) THE CIVIL WAR AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY (feet under the table)

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. —Walter Benjamin

“Autumnal Tints,” and “Wild Apples” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, by then under new editorship. The talks “The Wild” and “Walking” which had grown out of and had been broken apart from “The Wild” were reassembled and published as “Walking” in The Atlantic Monthly. “I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is, I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN This 1862 photo of Waldo Emerson ready to lecture is from THE WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON (Boston, 1883). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

And what of the more than sixteen hundred Indian men, women, and children penned up on the stockade at Fort Snelling after the mass hangings in December of 1862? None of them had been convicted of any crime, or had even been brought to trial. Many were from the friendlies’ camp, the Indians who had protected the white captives before Sibley arrived with his troops. Some were mixed-bloods who had been prisoners [of the Dakota warriors] themselves. With their homes and farms destroyed in the uprising, they had no place to go, and they willingly entered the stockade in order to have food and shelter for themselves and their children. The conditions were appalling; measles and other diseases were widespread.... HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1863

January: The indigenous people of the Pacific island of Rapa were alerted to the fact that a Peruvian ship, the Cora, was approaching, and would attempt to capture local people to transport to South America for sale as slaves. When the Cora arrived, therefore, its crew was quickly overwhelmed and most of the crew members were taken to Tahiti for trial. These Rapa islanders, however, for some reason retained three Chileans and a Mexican from the crew with them on their island.

A report from Walt Whitman, who was, basically, a white man interested primarily in what happens to white people: “Specimen Days”

BACK TO WASHINGTON Left camp at Falmouth, with some wounded, a few days since, and came here by Aquia creek railroad, and so on government steamer up the Potomac. Many wounded were with us on the cars and boat. The cars were just common platform ones. The railroad journey of ten or twelve miles was made mostly before sunrise. The soldiers guarding the road came out from their tents or shebangs of bushes with rumpled hair and half-awake look. Those on duty were walking their posts, some on banks over us, others down far below the level of the track. I saw large cavalry camps off the road. At Aquia creek landing were numbers of wounded going north. While I waited some three hours, I went around among them. Several wanted word sent home to parents, brothers, wives, &c., which I did for them, (by mail the next day from Washington.) On the boat I had my hands full. One poor fellow died going up. [Page 714]

I am now remaining in and around Washington, daily visiting the hospitals. Am much in Patent-office, Eighth street, H street, Armory-square, and others. Am now able to do a little good, having money, (as almoner of others home,) and getting experience. To-day, Sunday afternoon and till nine in the evening, visited Campbell hospital; attended specially to one case in ward 1, very sick with pleurisy and typhoid fever, young man, farmer’s son, D. F. Russell, company E, 60th New York, downhearted and feeble; a long time before he would take any interest; wrote a letter home to his mother, in Malone, Franklin county, N. Y., at his request; gave him some fruit and one or two other gifts; envelop’d and directed his letter, &c. Then went thoroughly through ward 6, observ’d every case in the ward, without, I think, missing one; gave perhaps from twenty to thirty persons, each one some little gift, such as oranges, apples, sweet crackers, figs, &c.

US CIVIL WAR

January 21, Wednesday: Samuel Bailey had sent John Stuart Mill a gift of a volume of his LETTERS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND — in effect, “Let’s you and me have another quarrel, that will return me to the public eye.” On this day Mill, no dummy, responded, in effect, “Well, let’s not.” Like everything I have read of yours, it is both instructive and interesting; and if ... I sometimes differ from you, it is always as from a thinker, and from one whose canons of thought are not HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN fundamentally different from my own. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Devoted the main part of the day to Armory-square hospital; went pretty thoroughly through wards F, G, H, and I; some fifty cases in each ward. In ward F supplied the men throughout with writing paper and stamp’d envelope each; distributed in small portions, to proper subjects, a large jar of first-rate preserv’d berries, which had been donated to me by a lady — her own cooking. Found several cases I thought good subjects for small sums of money, which I furnish’d. (The wounded men often come up broke, and it helps their spirits to have even the small sum I give them.) My paper and envelopes all gone, but distributed a good lot of amusing reading matter; also, as I thought judicious, tobacco, oranges, apples, &c. Interesting cases in ward I; Charles Miller, bed 19, company D, 53d Pennsylvania, is only sixteen years of age, very bright, courageous boy, left leg amputated below the knee; next bed to him, another young lad very sick; gave each appropriate gifts. In the bed above, also, amputation of the left leg; gave him a little jar of raspberries; bed 1, this ward, gave a small sum; also to a soldier on crutches, sitting on his bed near. . . . (I am more and more surprised at the very great proportion of youngsters from fifteen to twenty-one in the army. I afterwards found a still greater proportion among the southerners.)

Evening, same day, went to see D. F. R., before alluded [Page 715] to; found him remarkably changed for the better; up and dress’d — quite a triumph; he afterwards got well, and went back to his regiment. Distributed in the wards a quantity of note-paper, and forty or fifty stamp’d envelopes, of which I had recruited my stock, and the men were much in need. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

FIFTY HOURS LEFT WOUNDED ON THE FIELD Here is a case of a soldier I found among the crowded cots in the Patent-office. He likes to have some one to talk to, and we will listen to him. He got badly hit in his leg and side at Fredericksburgh that eventful Saturday, 13th of December. He lay the succeeding two days and nights helpless on the field, between the city and those grim terraces of batteries; his company and regiment had been compell’d to leave him to his fate. To make matters worse, it happen’d he lay with his head slightly down hill, and could not help himself. At the end of some fifty hours he was brought off, with other wounded, under a flag of truce. I ask him how the rebels treated him as he lay during those two days and nights within reach of them — whether they came to him — whether they abused him? He answers that several of the rebels, soldiers and others, came to him at one time and another. A couple of them, who were together, spoke roughly and sarcastically, but nothing worse. One middle- aged man, however, who seem’d to be moving around the field, among the dead and wounded, for benevolent purposes, came to him in a way he will never forget; treated our soldier kindly, bound up his wounds, cheer’d him, gave him a couple of biscuits and a drink of whiskey and water; asked him if he could eat some beef. This good secesh, however, did not change our soldier’s position, for it might have caused the blood to burst from the wounds, clotted and stagnated. Our soldier is from Pennsylvania; has had a pretty severe time; the wounds proved to be bad ones. But he retains a good heart, and is at present on the gain. (It is not uncommon for the men to remain on the field this way, one, two, or even four or five days.)

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

January 30, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Afternoon, visited Campbell hospital. Scene of cleaning up the ward, and giving the men all clean clothes — through the ward (6) the patients dressing or being dress’d — the naked upper half of the bodies — the good-humor and fun — the shirts, drawers, sheets of beds, &c., and the general fixing up for Sunday. Gave J.L. 50 cents.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 4, Wednesday: In Washington DC, $17,000 was appropriated to carry out the “Treaty for the suppression of the African slave trade” that had been concluded with Great Britain, that had been proclaimed to the public on July 11, 1862 (STATUTES AT LARGE, XII. 639).

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Visited Armory-square hospital, went pretty thoroughly through wards E and D. Supplied paper and envelopes to all who wish’d — as usual, found plenty of men who needed those articles. Wrote letters. Saw and talk’d with two or three members of the Brooklyn 14th regt. A poor fellow in ward D, with a fearful wound in a fearful condition, was having some loose splinters of bone taken from the neighborhood of the wound. The operation was long, and one of great pain — yet, after it was well commenced, the soldier bore it in silence. He sat up, propp’d — was much wasted — had lain a long time quiet in one position (not for days only but weeks,) a bloodless, brown-skinn’d face, with eyes full of determination — belong’d to a New York regiment. There was an unusual cluster of surgeons, medical cadets, nurses, &c., around his bed — I thought the whole thing was done with tenderness, and done well. In one case, the wife sat by the side of her husband, his sickness typhoid fever, pretty bad. In another, by the side of her son, a mother — she told me she had seven children, and this was the youngest. (A fine, kind, healthy, gentle mother, good-looking, not very old, with a cap on her head, and dress’d like home — what a charm it gave to the whole ward.) I liked the [Page 717] woman nurse in ward E — I noticed how she sat a long time by a poor fellow who just had, that morning, in addition to his other sickness, bad hemorrhage — she gently assisted him, reliev’d him of the blood, holding a cloth to his mouth, as he coughed it up — he was so weak he could only just turn his head over on the pillow. One young New York man, with a bright, handsome face, had been lying several months from a most disagreeable wound, receiv’d at Bull Run. A bullet had shot him right through the bladder, hitting him front, low in the belly, and coming out back. He had suffer’d much — the water came out of the wound, by slow but steady quantities, for many weeks — so that he lay almost constantly in a sort of puddle — and there were other disagreeable circumstances. He was of good heart, however. At present comparatively comfortable, had a bad throat, was delighted with a stick of horehound candy I gave him, with one or two other trifles.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 23, Monday: Zinovios Valvis replaced Demetrios Georgiou Voulgaris as Prime Minister of Greece.

France extended a protectorate over Porto Novo (Benin).

Confederate President Jefferson Davis returned to work after his 3-week illness.

A son, Thomas Parker Sanborn, was born to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and Louisa Augusta Leavitt Sanborn.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

PATENT-OFFICE HOSPITAL I must not let the great hospital at the Patent-office pass away without some mention. A few weeks ago the vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings was crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They were placed in three very large apartments. I went there many times. It was a strange, solemn, and, with all its features of suffering and death, a sort of fascinating sight. I go sometimes at night to soothe and relieve particular cases. Two of the immense apartments are fill’d with high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter’d into the mind of man to conceive; and with curiosities and foreign presents. Between these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet wide and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick, besides a great long double row of them up and down through the middle of the hall. Many of them were very bad cases, wounds and amputations. Then there was a gallery running above the hall in which there were beds also. It was, indeed, a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, [Page 718] the gallery above, and the marble pavement under foot — the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in various degrees — occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repress’d — sometimes a poor fellow dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor also there, but no friend, no relative — such were the sights but lately in the Patent-office. (The wounded have since been removed from there, and it is now vacant again.)

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 24, Tuesday: Feramors, a lyric opera by Anton Rubinstein to words of Rodenberg after Moore, was performed for the first time, in the Dresden Hoftheater.

“Il brigidino”, a stornello for voice and piano by Giuseppe Verdi to words of Dall’Ongaro, was performed for the first time, in Parma.

Frederick Douglass became an agent for the US government to recruit Negro soldiers into its Union Army. Until sometime in July he would be traveling throughout the North recruiting black troops. His sons Lewis and Charles would be among first recruits, and both would see action with the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. US CIVIL WAR

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE WHITE HOUSE BY MOONLIGHT A spell of fine soft weather. I wander about a good deal, sometimes at night under the moon. To-night took a long look at the President’s house. The white portico — the palace-like, tall, round columns, spotless as snow — the walls also — the tender and soft moonlight, flooding the pale marble, and making peculiar faint languishing shades, not shadows — everywhere a soft transparent hazy, thin, blue moon-lace, hanging in the air — the brilliant and extra-plentiful clusters of gas, on and around the faade, columns, portico, &c. — everything so white, so marbly pure and dazzling, yet soft — the White House of future poems, and of dreams and dramas, there in the soft and copious moon — the gorgeous front, in the trees, under the lustrous flooding moon, full of reality, full of illusion — the forms of the trees, leafless, silent, in trunk and myriad-angles of branches, under the stars and sky — the White House of the land, and of beauty and night — sentries at the gates, and by the portico, silent, pacing there in blue overcoats — stopping you not at all, but eyeing you with sharp eyes, whichever way you move.

May 4, Monday: Federal forces withdrew across the Rappahannock River. The fighting of recent days at Chancellorsville, Virginia had cost 29,700 total casualties. US CIVIL WAR

The 1st boat to take Dakotas off Pike Island was the Davenport, guarded by 40 men of Company G of the 10th Minnesota regiment. 812 people, plus of course the crew, were jammed onto a boat 205 feet long and 35 feet wide. As they stopped at the steamboat landing in St. Paul at the base of the Iminijaska “White Rocks,” with the decks jammed, a mob of white men threw rocks and several women were injured — although in an attempt to avoid the rocks they were singing hymns and praying. The soldiers finally managed to clear the docks by threatening a bayonet charge. Note that the old pacifist Marpiyawicasta Man of the Clouds was not on the trip, having succumbed that winter. The radical theologian Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller of the Bekennende Kirche Confessing Church was imprisoned at the Konzentrationslager the Nazis set up in Dachau during World War II, and we have not be outdone in this regard: the first Minnesota pacifist finished his course in our Konzentrationslager full of hostages in St. Paul during our race war of the 1860s. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN The 4th of May was also marked, at the First Unitarian Church in Concord, Massachusetts, by the funeral of Mary Moody Emerson. I do not know whether they buried her in the coffin in which she had slept at night for so many years, in that black shroud she had worn as a house dress for so many years. Waldo Emerson was prepared to play a standard game of “Remember this, remember that” at the wake and was surprised that in this case no-one else was interested. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

A report from Walt Whitman about the battle of Chancellorsville: “Specimen Days”

THE WOUNDED FROM CHANCELLORSVILLE As I write this, the wounded have begun to arrive from Hooker’s command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first arrivals. The men in charge told me the bad cases were yet to come. If that is so I pity them, for these are bad enough. You ought to see the scene of the [Page 721] wounded arriving at the landing here at the foot of Sixth street, at night. Two boat loads came about half-past seven last night. A little after eight it rain’d a long and violent shower. The pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d, and lay around on the wharf and neighborhood anywhere. The rain was, probably, grateful to them; at any rate they were exposed to it. The few torches light up the spectacle. All around — on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places — the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also — only a few hard-work’d transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call’d to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be suppress’d, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance. To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next day more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 12, Tuesday: Richard Wagner moved into a new house in Penzing, near Vienna.

On the island of Madagascar off the coast of Africa, to avoid the spilling of royal blood, assassins strangled King Radama II with a cloth of silk, and so the throne would pass to one of his wives, Rabodo, as Queen Rasoherina.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis attended the funeral ceremonies for Stonewall Jackson. Meanwhile this civil war went on and on in the United States of America and there was fighting at Raymond. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A NIGHT BATTLE, OVER A WEEK SINCE There was part of the late battle at Chancellorsville, (second Fredericksburgh,) a little over a week ago, Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday, under Gen. Joe Hooker, I would like to give just a glimpse of — (a moment’s look in a terrible storm at sea — of which a few suggestions are enough, and full details impossible.) The fighting had been very hot during the day, and after an intermission the latter part, was resumed at night, and kept up with furious energy till 3 o’clock in the morning. That afternoon (Saturday) an attack sudden and strong by Stonewall Jackson had gain’d a great advantage to the southern army, and broken our lines, entering us like a wedge, and leaving things in that position at dark. But Hooker at 11 at night made a desperate push, drove the secesh forces back, restored his original lines, and [Page 722] resumed his plans. This night scrimmage was very exciting, and afforded countless strange and fearful pictures. The fighting had been general both at Chancellorsville and northeast at Fredericksburgh. (We heard of some poor fighting, episodes, skedaddling on our part. I think not of it. I think of the fierce bravery, the general rule.) One corps, the 6th, Sedgewick’s, fights four dashing and bloody battles in thirty-six hours, retreating in great jeopardy, losing largely but maintaining itself, fighting with the sternest desperation under all circumstances, getting over the Rappahannock only by the skin of its teeth, yet getting over. It lost many, many brave men, yet it took vengeance, ample vengeance. But it was the tug of Saturday evening, and through the night and Sunday morning, I wanted to make a special note of. It was largely in the woods, and quite a general engagement. The night was very pleasant, at times the moon shining out full and clear, all Nature so calm in itself, the early summer grass so rich, and foliage of the trees — yet there the battle raging, and many good fellows lying helpless, with new accessions to them, and every minute amid the rattle of muskets and crash of cannon, (for there was an artillery contest too,) the red life-blood oozing out from heads or trunks or limbs upon that green and dew-cool grass. Patches of the woods take fire, and several of the wounded, unable to move, are consumed — quite large spaces are swept over, burning the dead also — some of the men have their hair and beards singed — some, burns on their faces and hands — others holes burnt in their clothing. The flashes of fire from the cannon, the quick flaring flames and smoke, and the immense roar — the musketry so general, the light nearly bright enough for each side to see the other — the crashing, tramping of men — the yelling — close quarters — we hear the secesh yells — our men cheer loudly back, especially if Hooker is in sight — hand to hand conflicts, each side stands up to it, brave, determin’d as demons, they often charge upon us — a thousand deeds are done worth to write newer greater poems on — and still the woods on fire — still many are not only scorch’d — too many, unable to move, are burn’d to death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

Then the camps of the wounded — O heavens, what scene is this? — is this indeed humanity — these butchers’ shambles? [Page 723] There are several of them. There they lie, in the largest, in an open space in the woods, from 200 to 300 poor fellows — the groans and screams — the odor of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the grass, the trees — that slaughter-house! O well is it their mothers, their sisters cannot see them — cannot conceive, and never conceiv’d, these things. One man is shot by a shell, both in the arm and leg — both are amputated — there lie the rejected members. Some have their legs blown off — some bullets through the breast — some indescribably horrid wounds in the face or head, all mutilated, sickening, torn, gouged out — some in the abdomen — some mere boys — many rebels, badly hurt — they take their regular turns with the rest, just the same as any — the surgeons use them just the same. Such is the camp of the wounded — such a fragment, a reflection afar off of the bloody scene — while over all the clear, large moon comes out at times softly, quietly shining. Amid the woods, that scene of flitting souls — amid the crack and crash and yelling sounds — the impalpable perfume of the woods — and yet the pungent, stifling smoke — the radiance of the moon, looking from heaven at intervals so placid — the sky so heavenly — the clear-obscure up there, those buoyant upper oceans — a few large placid stars beyond, coming silently and languidly out, and then disappearing — the melancholy, draperied night above, around. And there, upon the roads, the fields, and in those woods, that contest, never one more desperate in any age or land — both parties now in force — masses — no fancy battle, no semi-play, but fierce and savage demons fighting there — courage and scorn of death the rule, exceptions almost none. What history, I say, can ever give — for who can know — the mad, determin’d tussle of the armies, in all their separate large and little squads — as this — each steep’d from crown to toe in desperate, mortal purports? Who know the conflict, hand-to-hand — the many conflicts in the dark, those shadowy-tangled, flashing moonbeam’d woods — the writhing groups and squads — the cries, the din, the cracking guns and pistols — the distant cannon — the cheers and calls and threats and awful music of the oaths — the indescribable mix — the officers’ orders, persuasions, encouragements — the devils fully rous’d in human hearts — the strong shout, Charge, men, charge — [Page 724] the flash of the naked sword, and rolling flame and smoke? And still the broken, clear and clouded heaven — and still again the moonlight pouring silvery soft its radiant patches over all. Who paint the scene, the sudden partial panic of the afternoon, at dusk? Who paint the irrepressible advance of the second division of the Third corps, under Hooker himself, suddenly order’d up — those rapid-filing phantoms through the woods? Who show what moves there in the shadows, fluid and firm — to save, (and it did save,) the army’s name, perhaps the nation? as there the veterans hold the field. (Brave Berry falls not yet — but death has mark’d him — soon he falls.)

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

UNNAMED REMAINS THE BRAVEST SOLDIER Of scenes like these, I say, who writes — whoe’er can write the story? Of many a score — aye, thousands, north and south, of unwrit heroes, unknown heroisms, incredible, impromptu, first-class desperations — who tells? No history ever — no poem sings, no music sounds, those bravest men of all — those deeds. No formal general’s report, nor book in the library, nor column in the paper, embalms the bravest, north or south, east or west. Unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers. Our manliest — our boys — our hardy darlings; no picture gives them. Likely, the typic one of them (standing, no doubt, for hundreds, thousands,) crawls aside to some bush-clump, or ferny tuft, on receiving his death- shot — there sheltering a little while, soaking roots, grass and soil, with red blood — the battle advances, retreats, flits from the scene, sweeps by — and there, haply with pain and suffering (yet less, far less, than is supposed,) the last lethargy winds like a serpent round him — the eyes glaze in death — none recks — perhaps the burial-squads, in truce, a week afterwards, search not the secluded spot — and there, at last, the Bravest Soldier crumbles in mother earth, unburied and unknown.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 18, Thursday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SOME SPECIMEN CASES In one of the hospitals I find Thomas Haley, company M, 4th New York cavalry — a regular Irish boy, a [Page 725] fine specimen of youthful physical manliness — shot through the lungs — inevitably dying — came over to this country from Ireland to enlist — has not a single friend or acquaintance here — is sleeping soundly at this moment, (but it is the sleep of death) — has a bullet-hole straight through the lung. I saw Tom when first brought here, three days since, and didn’t suppose he could live twelve hours — (yet he looks well enough in the face to a casual observer.) He lies there with his frame exposed above the waist, all naked, for coolness, a fine built man, the tan not yet bleach’d from his cheeks and neck. It is useless to talk to him, as with his sad hurt, and the stimulants they give him, and the utter strangeness of every object, face, furniture, &c., the poor fellow, even when awake, is like some frighten’d, shy animal. Much of the time he sleeps, or half sleeps. (Sometimes I thought he knew more than he show’d.) I often come and sit by him in perfect silence; he will breathe for ten minutes as softly and evenly as a young babe asleep. Poor youth, so handsome, athletic, with profuse beautiful shining hair. One time as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he suddenly, without the least start, awaken’d, open’d his eyes, gave me a long steady look, turning his face very slightly to gaze easier — one long, clear, silent look — a slight sigh — then turn’d back and went into his doze again. Little he knew, poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hover’d near. W. H. E., Co. F., 2d N.J. — His disease is pneumonia. He lay sick at the wretched hospital below Aquia creek, for seven or eight days before brought here. He was detail’d from his regiment to go there and help as nurse, but was soon taken down himself. Is an elderly, sallow-faced, rather gaunt, gray-hair’d man, a widower, with children. He express’d a great desire for good, strong green tea. An excellent lady, Mrs. W., of Washington, soon sent him a package; also a small sum of money. The doctor said give him the tea at pleasure; it lay on the table by his side, and he used it every day. He slept a great deal; could not talk much, as he grew deaf. Occupied bed 15, ward I, Armory. (The same lady above, Mrs. W., sent the men a large package of tobacco.) J. G. lies in bed 52, ward I; is of company B, 7th Pennsylvania. I gave him a small sum of money, some tobacco, [Page 726] and envelopes. To a man adjoining also gave twenty-five cents; he flush’d in the face when I offer’d it — refused at first, but as I found he had not a cent, and was very fond of having the daily papers to read, I prest it on him. He was evidently very grateful, but said little. J. T. L., of company F., 9th New Hampshire, lies in bed 37, ward I. Is very fond of tobacco. I furnish him some; also with a little money. Has gangrene of the feet; a pretty bad case; will surely have to lose three toes. Is a regular specimen of an old-fashion’d, rude, hearty, New England countryman, impressing me with his likeness to that celebrated singed cat, who was better than she look’d.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

Bed 3, ward E, Armory, has a great hankering for pickles, something pungent. After consulting the doctor, I gave him a small bottle of horse-radish; also some apples; also a book. Some of the nurses are excellent. The woman-nurse in this ward I like very much. (Mrs. Wright — a year afterwards I found her in Mansion house hospital, Alexandria — she is a perfect nurse.) In one bed a young man, Marcus Small, company K, 7th Maine — sick with dysentery and typhoid fever — pretty critical case — I talk with him often — he thinks he will die — looks like it indeed. I write a letter for him home to East Livermore, Maine — I let him talk to me a little, but not much, advise him to keep very quiet — do most of the talking myself — stay quite a while with him, as he holds on to my hand — talk to him in a cheering, but slow, low and measured manner — talk about his furlough, and going home as soon as he is able to travel. Thomas Lindly, 1st Pennsylvania cavalry, shot very badly through the foot — poor young man, he suffers horribly, has to be constantly dosed with morphine, his face ashy and glazed, bright young eyes — I give him a large handsome apple, lay it in sight, tell him to have it roasted in the morning, as he generally feels easier then, and can eat a little breakfast. I write two letters for him. Opposite, an old Quaker lady is sitting by the side of her son, Amer Moore, 2d U.S. artillery — shot in the head two weeks since, very low, quite rational — from hips down paralyzed — he will surely die. I speak a very few words to him [Page 727] every day and evening — he answers pleasantly — wants nothing — (he told me soon after he came about his home affairs, his mother had been an invalid, and he fear’d to let her know his condition.) He died soon after she came.

US CIVIL WAR

“Specimen Days”

MY PREPARATIONS FOR VISITS 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 25, Sundown, Thursday: At the urging of the Prince of Choshu, Emperor Osahito ordered all foreigners to depart from the nation of Japan (this edict could not be enforced).

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

AMBULANCE PROCESSIONS As I sit writing this paragraph I see a train of about thirty huge four-horse wagons, used as ambulances, fill’d with wounded, passing up Fourteenth street, on their way, probably, to Columbian, Carver, and mount Pleasant hospitals. This is the way the men come in now, seldom in small numbers, but almost always in these long, sad processions. Through the past winter, while our army lay opposite Fredericksburgh, the like strings of ambulances were of frequent occurrence along Seventh street, passing slowly up from the steamboat wharf, with loads from Aquia creek.

BAD WOUNDS — THE YOUNG The soldiers are nearly all young men, and far more American than is generally supposed — I should say nine-tenths are native-born. Among the arrivals from Chancellorsville I find a large proportion of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois men. As usual, there are all sorts of wounds. Some of the men fearfully burnt from the explosions of artillery caissons. One ward has a long row of officers, some with ugly hurts. Yesterday was perhaps worse than usual. Amputations are going on — the [Page 728] attendants are dressing wounds. As you pass by, you must be on your guard where you look. I saw the other day a gentleman, a visitor apparently from curiosity, in one of the wards, stop and turn a moment to look at an awful wound they were probing. He turn’d pale, and in a moment more he had fainted away and fallen on the floor.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 29, Monday: There was fighting at Goodrich’s Landing / The Mounds / Lake Providence. This fighting would continue on the following day. US CIVIL WAR

Commodore Henry K. Thatcher of the USS Constellation reported to the Secretary of the Navy that “I have learned ... that a very fast steamer, said to be called the Southerner, has been built in England, destined for a Confederate cruiser against United States commerce in the Mediterranean, and ... a rebel commander, T. Jefferson Page, late of the U.S. Navy, is now at Florence ... awaiting the steamer with the intention of assuming command.” During this year the Constellation would participate, unsuccessfully, in an attempt to prevent the Confederate Navy from taking possession of this steamer Southerner. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE MOST INSPIRITING OF ALL WAR’S SHOWS Just before sundown this evening a very large cavalry force went by — a fine sight. The men evidently had seen service. First came a mounted band of sixteen bugles, drums and cymbals, playing wild martial tunes — made my heart jump. Then the principal officers, then company after company, with their officers at their heads, making of course the main part of the cavalcade; then a long train of men with led horses, lots of mounted negroes with special horses — and a long string of baggage- wagons, each drawn by four horses — and then a motley rear guard. It was a pronouncedly warlike and gay show; the sabres clank’d, the men look’d young and healthy and strong; the electric tramping of so many horses on the hard road, and the gallant bearing, fine seat, and bright faced appearance of a thousand and more handsome young American men, were so good to see. An hour later another troop went by, smaller in numbers, perhaps three hundred men. They too look’d like serviceable men, campaigners used to field and fight. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 30, Tuesday: There was fighting at Hanover. US CIVIL WAR

On June 30?, 1863, Father Wm. Corby addressed a group of soldiers before the battle of Wheat Field near Gettysburg PA: “Dominus noster Jesus Christo vos absolvat.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Simon says: “The Catholic Church refuses Christian burial to the soldier who turns his back on the foe.”

July 3, Friday: The end of the administration of Sir Edward Hay Drummond Hay as governor of St. Helena, and the beginning of the administration of Admiral Sir Charles Elliot.

Giacomo Meyerbeer received a letter from Cosima von Bülow asking him to become an honorary member of a new music society in Berlin (he would accept).

Slavimo slavno slaveni! for male chorus and organ by Franz Liszt to words of Pucic was performed for the initial time, in Rome, for the millennium celebration of St. Cyril and St. Methodius.

After the race war it was open season in Minnesota. Near Hutchinson, an Indian man and boy were detected by a Minnesota farmer picking raspberries in the dusk near a poplar grove adjoining Scattered Lake, so of course the farmer stalked them with a rifle. He was able to get one from ambush, first in the groin and then in the chest. The boy could be heard crawling through the bushes to him, giving him water, covering him with a blanket, and the farmer was able to hear him saying something to the boy. Later it became clear that they had been a 53-year-old father and his 16-year-old son, and that before crawling away through the bushes the boy had taken a fresh pair of moccasins from a pouch and placed them on his father’s feet. No-one had been able to get a clear shot at him. The orphan would be soon caught starving by the army, after having managed with his last cartridge to kill a wolf to gnaw upon, and he would readily confess that he was Wowinape “The Appearing One” or “Thomas Wakeman,” son of headman Taoyateduta Little Crow “Our Red Nation,” and that it had been he, that dusk, who had been the other raspberry picker who had gotten away.68 The boy would turn 17 years old by the time he would be tried and sentenced by a military court to be hanged.69 After being released from the Sequestration Facility to the Indian reservation, Thomas Wakeman, a Presbyterian, would

68. Wowinape’s account is in the St. Peter Tribune of August 19, 1863. 69. He would then be reprieved as he had committed no offense other than being with his father when his father was killed. The crippled father also had committed no offense, having great difficulty holding a weapon and always having spoken for moderation and restraint and accommodation and negotiation — but then he was already dead and his name was already detested and his body parts were already objects of contempt and it didn’t matter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN devote his life to the YMCA.

But the above is not important as it was not what was happening to white people. (Only what happens to white people is important.)

At 2:00PM after an artillery duel lasting an hour, 13,000 Confederate assaulted the Union center on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and were repulsed with heavy losses. In the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere 7,058 people were lying dead and 33,264 had been wounded, and 10,790 were missing (many of these would have been prisoners).

US CIVIL WAR A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

This forenoon, for more than an hour, again long strings of cavalry, several regiments, very fine men and horses, four or five abreast. I saw them in Fourteenth street, coming in town from north. Several hundred extra horses, some of the mares with colts, trotting along. (Appear’d to be a number of prisoners too.) How inspiriting always the cavalry regiments. Our men are generally well mounted, feel good, are young, gay on the saddle, their blankets in a roll behind them, their sabres clanking at their sides. This noise and movement and the tramp of many horses’ hoofs has a curious effect upon one. The bugles play — presently you hear them afar off, deaden’d, mix’d with other noises. Then just as they had all pass’d, a string of ambulances commenc’d from the other [Page 729] way, moving up Fourteenth street north, slowly wending along, bearing a large lot of wounded to the hospitals.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Our national birthday, Saturday the 4th of July: An attempt at a dialect rendering, by Joseph Dugdale, of one of Sojourner Truth’s testimonies/rants, appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard: “Children, I talks to God and God talks to me. I goes out and talks to God in de fields and de woods. [The weevil had destroyed thousands of acres of wheat in the west that year.] Dis morning I was walking out, and I got over de fence. I saw de wheat a holding up its head, looking very big. I goes up and takes holt of it. You b’lieve it, dere was no wheat dare? I says, God [speaking the name in a voice of reverence peculiar to herself], what is de matter wid dis wheat? and he says to me, “Sojourner, dere is a little weasel in it.” Now I hears talkin’ about de Constitution and de rights of man. I comes up and I takes hold of dis Constitution. It looks mighty big, and I feels for my rights, but der aint any dare. Den I says, God, what ails dis Constitution? He says to me, “Sojourner, dere is a little weasel in it.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

During our nation’s 4th of July celebrations,70 while full-pitched battles were going on at Vicksburg and at Gettysburg, the corpse of the scalped71 red raspberry picker lay in the main street of Hutchinson, Minnesota while celebrants stuffed firecrackers into its body orifices. An embarrassed town doctor finally threw it into

RACE WAR IN MINNESOTA

the town refuse pit and covered it with some dirt, but then a US Army cavalry officer wanted the head in order to preserve the skull with its distinctive teeth, and it was discovered that this was Taoyateduta “Our Red Nation,” Headman Little Crow V. Then some people came around to dig up the torso as well, because the shattered forearm bones were also distinctive of the hated politician and negotiator who had failed to prevent Minnesota’s race war. US CIVIL WAR CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

70. This was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 59th birthday. He was with 25,000 other citizens, attending a “Democratic Mass Meeting” in Concord, New Hampshire at which his good ’ol buddy Franklin Pierce (quite possibly the worst president we ever endured prior to Wubya) was declaring the Emancipation Proclamation to be unconstitutional, and was in complete agreement with his good ’ol buddy on such an issue.

CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY 71. Scalped: of course the white farmer’s white son, Nathan Lamson, wanted to obtain the $75.00 the State of Minnesota was then offering for any Indian scalp no questions asked. Such a sum of blood money could never be passed up. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN The aftermath: Orphaned, the boy would be soon caught starving by the US army, after having managed with his last cartridge to kill a wolf to gnaw upon, and he would readily confess that he was Wowinape “The Appearing One” or “Thomas Wakeman,” son of headman “Our Red Nation,” and that it had been he, that dusk, who had been the other raspberry picker who had gotten away. The boy would turn 17 years old by the time he would be tried and sentenced by a military court to be hanged. After not being among those selected by President Abraham Lincoln to be hanged in the largest mass hanging in US history, and after being released from the Pike Island Sequestration Facility to the Indian reservation, Thomas Wakeman, a Presbyterian, would devote his life to the YMCA. The farmer received a large sum of money as reward from the State of Minnesota for killing the Indian father. The skull and shattered forearm bones of the father would be placed on display in a glass case at the Minnesota Historical Society. THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Of course our civil war continued without interruption on this day: did you expect otherwise? —There was “real” fighting at Helena. The above event in Minnesota was insignificant, as it was not what was being done to white people. A war dispatch from Walt Whitman: BAROUCHE “Specimen Days”

BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG The weather to-day, upon the whole, is very fine, warm, but from a smart rain last night, fresh enough, and no dust, which is a great relief for this city. I saw the parade about noon, Pennsylvania avenue, from Fifteenth street down toward the capitol. There were three regiments of infantry, (I suppose the ones doing patrol duty here,) two or three societies of Odd Fellows, a lot of children in barouches, and a squad of policemen. (A useless imposition upon the soldiers — they have work enough on their backs without piling the like of this.) As I went down the Avenue, saw a big flaring placard on the bulletin board of a newspaper office, announcing “Glorious Victory for the Union Army!” Meade had fought Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, yesterday and day before, and repuls’d him most signally, taken 3,000 prisoners, &c. (I afterwards saw Meade’s despatch, very modest, and a sort of order of the day from the President himself, quite religious, giving thanks to the Supreme, and calling on the people to do the same.) I walk’d on to Armory hospital — took along with me several bottles of blackberry and cherry syrup, good and strong, but innocent. Went through several of the wards, announc’d to the soldiers the news from Meade, and gave them all a good drink of the syrups with ice water, quite refreshing — prepar’d it all myself, and serv’d it around. Meanwhile the Washington bells are ringing their sundown peals for Fourth of July, and the usual fusilades of boys’ pistols, crackers, and guns.

A CAVALRY CAMP I am writing this, nearly sundown, watching a cavalry company (acting Signal service,) just come in through a shower, making their night’s camp ready on some broad, vacant ground, a sort of hill, in full view opposite my window. There are the men in their yellow-striped jackets. All are dismounted; the freed horses stand with drooping heads and wet sides; they are to be led off presently in groups, to water. [Page 730] The little wall-tents and shelter tents spring up quickly. I see the fires already blazing, and pots and kettles over them. Some among the men are driving in tent-poles, wielding their axes with strong, slow blows. I see great huddles of horses, bundles of hay, groups of men (some with unbuckled sabres yet on their sides,) a few officers, piles of wood, the flames of the fires, saddles, harness, &c. The smoke streams upward, additional men arrive and dismount — some drive in stakes, and tie their horses to them; some go with buckets for water, some are chopping wood, and so on.

CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

The steamboat Ontario ventured four times out of Charlotte onto Lake Ontario, bearing parties of celebrants.

In Buffalo, New York, 17 veterans of the War of 1812 marched in the parade.

At Annapolis, a “flag of truce” boat filled with secessionist women from Philadelphia and elsewhere, having departed on July 3rd, was voyaging south. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina delivered an oration in which he urged the citizenry “to continue their assistance in prosecuting the war until the independence of the Confederate States was established.”

At Randal and Aston’s store in Columbus, Ohio, 8,500 Union flags were available for purchase, but of Confederate flags not so much. In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, as the Confederate troops were making their escape from the great battle just fought there, someone threw a bunch of firecrackers among the ambulances carrying their wounded and this caused not only a stampede of the horses but also panic among the surviving soldiers. US CIVIL WAR

Vicksburg, the final Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, was captured by General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the West. In Newport, Rhode Island, when news of this would arrive, the 4th-of-July celebration would be repeated on Tuesday, July 7th and would be offered in celebration of the fact that 29,000 rebel soldiers had been forced to surrender. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY

William James was photographed during the summer of 1863 in Newport, Rhode Island. He was some swell dude, and obviously getting shot at in a civil war was not going to be his idea of fun: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

July 6, Monday: There would be fighting at Williamsport / Hagerstown / Falling Waters, until July 16th.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A steady rain, dark and thick and warm. A train of six-mule wagons has just pass’d bearing pontoons, great square-end flat-boats, and the heavy planking for overlaying them. We hear that the Potomac above here is flooded, and are wondering whether Lee will be able to get back across again, or whether Meade will indeed break him to pieces. The cavalry camp on the hill is a ceaseless field of observation for me. This forenoon there stand the horses, tether’d together, dripping, steaming, chewing their hay. The men emerge from their tents, dripping also. The fires are half quench’d.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 10, Friday: Clement Clarke Moore died notorious, at his summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. In addition to translating the works of Juvenal into English, and editing his father’s sermons, and authoring polemical pamphlets against the subversion of religion by doubters, this scholar had been the author of the immortal “The Night Before Christmas” (NOT!)

The body would be interred in the Trinity Cemetery of the Church of the Intercession, on Upper Broadway at 155th Street in New-York.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Still the camp opposite — perhaps fifty or sixty tents. Some of the men are cleaning their sabres (pleasant to-day,) some brushing boots, some laying off, reading, writing — some cooking, some sleeping. On long temporary cross-sticks back of the tents are cavalry accoutrements — blankets and overcoats are hung out to air — there are the squads of horses tether’d, feeding, continually stamping and whisking their tails to keep off flies. I sit long in my third story window and look at the scene — a hundred little things going on — peculiar objects connected with the camp that could not be described, any one of them justly, without much minute drawing and coloring in words.

On this day and the following one, there was fighting on the coast of South Carolina at Fort Wagner / Morris Island. Union artillery on Folly Island together with Rear Admiral John Dahlgren’s fleet of ironclads opened fire on Confederate defenses of Morris Island. The bombardment provided cover for Brigadier General George C. Strong’s brigade, which crossed Light House Inlet and landed by boats on the southern tip of the island. Strong’s troops advanced, capturing several batteries, to within range of Confederate Fort Wagner. At dawn on July 11th, Strong attacked the fort. Soldiers of the 7th Connecticut reached the parapet but, unsupported, were thrown back. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 22, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman about a dying white soldier: “Specimen Days”

A NEW YORK SOLDIER This afternoon, July 22d, I have spent a long time with Oscar F. Wilber, company G, 154th New York, low with chronic diarrhoea, and a bad wound also. He asked me to read him a chapter in the New Testament. I complied, and ask’d him what I should read. He said, “Make your own [Page 731] choice.” I open’d at the close of one of the first books of the evangelists, and read the chapters describing the latter hours of Christ, and the scenes at the crucifixion. The poor, wasted young man ask’d me to read the following chapter also, how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, for Oscar was feeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. He ask’d me if I enjoy’d religion. I said, “Perhaps not, my dear, in the way you mean, and yet, may-be, it is the same thing.” He said, “It is my chief reliance.” He talk’d of death, and said he did not fear it. I said, “Why, Oscar, don’t you think you will get well?” He said, “I may, but it is not probable.” He spoke calmly of his condition. The wound was very bad, it discharg’d much. Then the diarrhoea had prostrated him, and I felt that he was even then the same as dying. He behaved very manly and affectionate. The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving he return’d fourfold. He gave me his mother’s address, Mrs. Sally D. Wilber, Alleghany post-office, Cattaraugus county, N. Y. I had several such interviews with him. He died a few days after the one just described.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 28, Tuesday: There was fighting at Stony Lake. US CIVIL WAR

Walt Whitman wrote a letter from Washington DC: “Specimen Days”

Dear M., —

I am writing this in the hospital, sitting by the side of a soldier, I do not expect to last many hours. His fate has been a hard one — he seems to be only about 19 or 20 — Erastus Haskell, company K, 141st N. Y. — has been out about a year, and sick or half-sick more than half that time — has been down on the peninsula — was detail’d to go in the band as fifer-boy. While sick, the surgeon told him to keep up with the rest — (probably work’d and march’d too long.) He is a shy, and seems to me a very sensible boy — has fine manners — never complains — was sick down on the peninsula in an old storehouse — typhoid fever. The first week this July was brought up here — journey very bad, no accommodations, no nourishment, nothing but hard jolting, and exposure enough [Page 811] to make a well man sick; (these fearful journeys do the job for many) — arrived here July 11th — a silent dark-skinn’d Spanish-looking youth, with large very dark blue eyes, peculiar looking. Doctor F. here made light of his sickness — said he would recover soon, &c.; but I thought very different, and told F. so repeatedly; (I came near quarreling with him about it from the first) — but he laugh’d, and would not listen to me. About four days ago, I told Doctor he would in my opinion lose the boy without doubt — but F. again laugh’d at me. The next day he changed his opinion — I brought the head surgeon of the post — he said the boy would probably die, but they would make a hard fight for him.

The last two days he has been lying panting for breath — a pitiful sight. I have been with him some every day or night since he arrived. He suffers a great deal with the heat — says little or nothing — is flighty the last three days, at times — knows me always, however — calls me “Walter” — (sometimes calls the name over and over and over again, musingly, abstractedly, to himself.) His father lives at Breesport, Chemung county, N. Y., is a mechanic with large family — is a steady, religious man; his mother too is living. I have written to them, and shall write again to-day — Erastus has not receiv’d a word from home for months.

As I sit here writing to you, M., I wish you could see the whole scene. This young man lies within reach of me, flat on his back, his hands clasp’d across his breast, his thick black hair cut close; he is dozing, breathing hard, every breath a spasm — it looks so cruel. He is a noble youngster, — I consider him past all hope. Often there is no one with him for a long while. I am here as much as possible.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August-October: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HOSPITALS ENSEMBLE I am in the habit of going to all, and to Fairfax seminary, Alexandria, and over Long bridge to [Page 737] the great Convalescent camp. The journals publish a regular directory of them — a long list. As a specimen of almost any one of the larger of these hospitals, fancy to yourself a space of three to twenty acres of ground, on which are group’d ten or twelve very large wooden barracks, with, perhaps, a dozen or twenty, and sometimes more than that number, small buildings, capable altogether of accommodating from five hundred to a thousand or fifteen hundred persons. Sometimes these wooden barracks or wards, each of them perhaps from a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet long, are rang’d in a straight row, evenly fronting the street; others are plann’d so as to form an immense V; and others again are ranged around a hollow square. They make altogether a huge cluster, with the additional tents, extra wards for contagious diseases, guard-houses, sutler’s stores, chaplain’s house; in the middle will probably be an edifice devoted to the offices of the surgeon in charge and the ward surgeons, principal attaches, clerks, &c. The wards are either letter’d alphabetically, ward G, ward K, or else numerically, 1, 2, 3, &c. Each has its ward surgeon and corps of nurses. Of course, there is, in the aggregate, quite a muster of employs, and over all the surgeon in charge. Here in Washington, when these army hospitals are all fill’d, (as they have been already several times,) they contain a population more numerous in itself than the whole of the Washington of ten or fifteen years ago. Within sight of the capitol, as I write, are some thirty or forty such collections, at times holding from fifty to seventy thousand men. Looking from any eminence and studying the topography in my rambles, I use them as landmarks. Through the rich August verdure of the trees, see that white group of buildings off yonder in the outskirts; then another cluster half a mile to the left of the first; then another a mile to the right, and another a mile beyond, and still another between us and the first. Indeed, we can hardly look in any direction but these clusters are dotting the landscape and environs. That little town, as you might suppose it, off there on the brow of a hill, is indeed a town, but of wounds, sickness, and death. It is Finley hospital, northeast of the city, on Kendall green, as it used to be call’d. That other is Campbell hospital. Both are large establishments. I have known these two alone to have [Page 738] from two thousand to twenty five hundred inmates. Then there is Carver hospital, larger still, a wall’d and military city regularly laid out, and guarded by squads of sentries. Again, off east, Lincoln hospital, a still larger one; and half a mile further Emory hospital. Still sweeping the eye around down the river toward Alexandria, we see, to the right, the locality where the Convalescent camp stands, with its five, eight, or sometimes ten thousand inmates. Even all these are but a portion. The Harewood, Mount Pleasant, Armory- square, Judiciary hospitals, are some of the rest, and all large collections.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 8, Saturday: President Abraham Lincoln wrote to his wife regarding their surviving son Tad’s lost goat.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HOME-MADE MUSIC To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory- square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in an adjoining ward. As my soldier was asleep, I left him, and entering the ward where the music was, I walk’d half- way down and took a seat by the cot of a young Brooklyn friend, S. R., badly wounded in the hand at Chancellorsville, and who has suffer’d much, but at that moment in the evening was wide awake and comparatively easy. He had turn’d over on his left side to get a better view of the singers, but the mosquito-curtains of the adjoining cots obstructed the sight. I stept round and loop’d them all up, so that he had a clear show, and then sat down again by him, and look’d and listen’d. The principal singer was a young lady-nurse of one of the wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join’d by the lady-nurses of other wards. They sat there, making a charming group, with their handsome, healthy faces, and standing up a little behind them were some ten or fifteen of the convalescent soldiers, young men, nurses, [Page 732] &c., with books in their hands, singing. Of course it was not such a performance as the great soloists at the New York opera house take a hand in, yet I am not sure but I receiv’d as much pleasure under the circumstances, sitting there, as I have had from the best Italian compositions, express’d by world-famous performers. The men lying up and down the hospital, in their cots, (some badly wounded — some never to rise thence,) the cots themselves, with their drapery of white curtains, and the shadows down the lower and upper parts of the ward; then the silence of the men, and the attitudes they took — the whole was a sight to look around upon again and again. And there sweetly rose those voices up to the high, whitewash’d wooden roof, and pleasantly the roof sent it all back again. They sang very well, mostly quaint old songs and declamatory hymns, to fitting tunes. Here, for instance: My days are swiftly gliding by, and I a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, those hours of toil and danger; For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover. We’ll gird our loins my brethren dear, our distant home discerning, Our absent Lord has left us word, let every lamp be burning, For O we stand on Jordan’s strand, our friends are passing over, And just before, the shining shore we may almost discover.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 12, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town. He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season, but has quarters at a healthy location some three miles north of the city, the Soldiers’ home, a United States military establishment. I saw him this morning about 8 1/2 coming in [Page 733] to business, riding on Vermont avenue, near L street. He always has a company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry, with sabres drawn and held upright over their shoulders. They say this guard was against his personal wish, but he let his counselors have their way. The party makes no great show in uniform or horses. Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy- going gray horse, is dress’d in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, wears a black stiff hat, and looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man. A lieutenant, with yellow straps, rides at his left, and following behind, two by two, come the cavalry men, in their yellow-striped jackets. They are generally going at a slow trot, as that is the pace set them by the one they wait upon. The sabres and accoutrements clank, and the entirely unornamental cortège as it trots towards Lafayette square arouses no sensation, only some curious stranger stops and gazes. 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 we exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche. The cavalry always accompany him, with drawn sabres. Often I notice as he goes out evenings — and sometimes in the morning, when he returns early — he turns off and halts at the large and handsome residence of the Secretary of War, on K street, and holds conference there. If in his barouche, I can see from my window he does not alight, but sits in his vehicle, and Mr. Stanton comes out to attend him. Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony. Earlier in the summer I occasionally saw the President and his wife, toward the latter part of the afternoon, out in a barouche, on a pleasure ride through the city. Mrs. Lincoln was dress’d in complete black, with a long crape veil. The equipage is of the plainest kind, only two horses, and they nothing extra. They pass’d me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen’d to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow’d 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 [Page 734] expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

HEATED TERM There has lately been much suffering here from heat; we have had it upon us now eleven days. I go around with an umbrella and a fan. I saw two cases of sun-stroke yesterday, one in Pennsylvania avenue, and another in Seventh street. The City railroad company loses some horses every day. Yet Washington is having a livelier August, and is probably putting in a more energetic and satisfactory summer, than ever before during its existence. There is probably more human electricity, more population to make it, more business, more light-heartedness, than ever before. The armies that swiftly circumambiated from Fredericksburgh — march’d, struggled, fought, had out their mighty clinch and hurl at Gettysburg — wheel’d, circumambiated again, return’d to their ways, touching us not, either at their going or coming. And Washington feels that she has pass’d the worst; perhaps feels that she is henceforth mistress. So here she sits with her surrounding hills spotted with guns, and is conscious of a character and identity different from what it was five or six short weeks ago, and very considerably pleasanter and prouder.

SOLDIERS AND TALKS Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, you meet everywhere about the city, often superb- looking men, though invalids dress’d in worn uniforms, and carrying canes or crutches. I often have talks with them, occasionally quite long and interesting. One, for instance, will have been all through the peninsula under McClellan — narrates to me the fights, the marches, the strange, quick changes of that eventful campaign, and gives glimpses of many things untold in any official reports or books or journals. These, indeed, are the things that are genuine and precious. The man was there, has been out two years, has been through a dozen fights, the superfluous flesh of talking is long work’d off him, and he gives me little but the hard meat and sinew. I find it refreshing, these hardy, [Page 735] bright, intuitive, American young men, (experienc’d soldiers with all their youth.) The vocal play and significance moves one more than books. Then there hangs something majestic about a man who has borne his part in battles, especially if he is very quiet regarding it when you desire him to unbosom. I am continually lost at the absence of blowing and blowers among these old-young American militaires. I have found some man or other who has been in every battle since the war began, and have talk’d with them about each one in every part of the United States, and many of the engagements on the rivers and harbors too. I find men here from every State in the Union, without exception. (There are more Southerners, especially border State men, in the Union army than is generally supposed. I now doubt whether one can get a fair idea of what this war practically is, or what genuine America is, and her character, without some such experience as this I am having. —————————————————— * MR. GARFIELD (In the House of Representatives, April 15, ’79.) “Do gentlemen know that (leaving out all the border States) there were fifty regiments and seven companies of white men in our army fighting for the Union from the States that went into rebellion? Do they know that from the single State of Kentucky more Union soldiers fought under our flag than Napoleon took into the battle of Waterloo? more than Wellington took with all the allied armies against Napoleon? Do they remember that 186,000 color’d men fought under our flag against the rebellion and for the Union, and that of that number 90,000 were from the States which went into rebellion?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

DEATH OF A WISCONSIN OFFICER Another characteristic scene of that dark and bloody 1863, from notes of my visit to Armory-square hospital, one hot but pleasant summer day. In ward H we approach the cot of a young lieutenant of one of the Wisconsin regiments. Tread the bare board floor lightly here, for the pain and panting of death are in this cot. I saw the lieutenant when he was first brought here from Chancellorsville, and have been with him occasionally from day to day and night to night. He had been getting along pretty well till night before last, when a sudden hemorrhage that could not be stopt came upon him, and to-day it still continues at intervals. Notice that water- pail by the side of the bed, with a quantity of blood and bloody pieces [Page 736] of muslin, nearly full; that tells the story. The poor young man is struggling painfully for breath, his great dark eyes with a glaze already upon them, and the choking faint but audible in his throat. An attendant sits by him, and will not leave him till the last; yet little or nothing can be done. He will die here in an hour or two, without the presence of kith or kin. Meantime the ordinary chat and business of the ward a little way off goes on indifferently. Some of the inmates are laughing and joking, others are playing checkers or cards, others are reading, &c. I have noticed through most of the hospitals that as long as there is any chance for a man, no matter how bad he may be, the surgeon and nurses work hard, sometimes with curious tenacity, for his life, doing everything, and keeping somebody by him to execute the doctor’s orders, and minister to him every minute night and day. See that screen there. As you advance through the dusk of early candle-light, a nurse will step forth on tip-toe, and silently but imperiously forbid you to make any noise, or perhaps to come near at all. Some soldier’s life is flickering there, suspended between recovery and death. Perhaps at this moment the exhausted frame has just fallen into a light sleep that a step might shake. You must retire. The neighboring patients must move in their stocking feet. I have been several times struck with such mark’d efforts — everything bent to save a life from the very grip of the destroyer. But when that grip is once firmly fix’d, leaving no hope or chance at all, the surgeon abandons the patient. If it is a case where stimulus is any relief, the nurse gives milk-punch or brandy, or whatever is wanted, ad libitum. There is no fuss made. Not a bit of sentimentalism or whining have I seen about a single death-bed in hospital or on the field, but generally impassive indifference. All is over, as far as any efforts can avail; it is useless to expend emotions or labors. While there is a prospect they strive hard — at least most surgeons do; but death certain and evident, they yield the field. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN October 20, Tuesday: Colonel Buchel, in charge at Niblett’s Bluff, had 5 companies of infantry and two cannon from Captain O.G. Jones’ Texas Light Artillery. He was still awaiting arrival of a heavy artillery piece, a 32-pounder howitzer, and two mountain howitzers. Captain Bailie P.L. Vinson of the 2nd Louisiana Cavalry reported the presence of large Union forces at Franklin, of which he had been able to count 51 pieces of artillery and 20,000 soldiers. Captain Theodore Kosse of the Confederate Engineer Corps indicated that the main defenses on the Louisiana side of the river were nearly complete, but asked for more laborers with axes and shovels to complete the work, to clear trees in front of the trenches and remove brush from the abattis. He reported that the ammunition magazine and the bombproof had not yet been constructed. He reported that two of the six flatboats designated for Niblett’s Bluff had been completed, at Orange, and that a third was almost complete. He reported that each flatboat would carry 100-150 infantrymen or two field pieces of cannon with caissons and horses. Colonel Buchel reported to Captain Turner in Houston that although Captain Bland’s company of Texas state militia had at first refused to cross into Louisiana, the matter had been negotiated and the captain and 10 of his militiamen had indeed crossed the river. The commander indicated to his superiors back in Texas that, faced with this size of attack, he expected that they would be surrounded and neutralized, and would be able to hold out in their fortress only as long as their supplies might last. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A SILENT NIGHT RAMBLE To-night, after leaving the hospital at 10 o’clock, (I had been on self-imposed duty some five hours, pretty closely confined,) I wander’d a long time around Washington. The night was sweet, very clear, sufficiently cool, a voluptuous half- moon, slightly golden, the space near it of a transparent blue-gray tinge. I walk’d up Pennsylvania avenue, and then to Seventh street, and a long while around the Patent-office. Somehow it look’d rebukefully strong, majestic, there in the delicate moonlight. The sky, the planets, the constellations all so bright, so calm, so expressively silent, so soothing, after those hospital scenes. I wander’d to and fro till the moist moon set, long after midnight.

SPIRITUAL CHARACTERS AMONG THE SOLDIERS Every now and then, in hospital or camp, there are beings I meet — specimens of unworldliness, disinterestedness, and animal purity and heroism — perhaps some unconscious Indianian, or from Ohio or Tennessee — on whose birth the calmness of heaven seems to have descended, and whose gradual growing up, whatever the circumstances of work-life or change, or hardship, or small or no education that attended it, the power of a strange spiritual sweetness, fibre and inward health, have also attended. Something veil’d and abstracted is often a part of the manners of these beings. I have met them, I say, not seldom in the army, in camp, and in the hospitals. The Western regiments contain many of them. They are often young men, obeying the events and occasions about them, [Page 739] marching, soldiering, fighting, foraging, cooking, working on farms or at some trade before the war — unaware of their own nature, (as to that, who is aware of his own nature?) their companions only understanding that they are different from the rest, more silent, “something odd about them,” and apt to go off and meditate and muse in solitude. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

CATTLE DROVES ABOUT WASHINGTON Among other sights are immense droves of cattle with their drivers, passing through the streets of the city. Some of the men have a way of leading the cattle by a peculiar call, a wild, pensive hoot, quite musical, prolong’d, indescribable, sounding something between the cooing of a pigeon and the hoot of an owl. I like to stand and look at the sight of one of these immense droves — a little way off — (as the dust is great.) There are always men on horseback, cracking their whips and shouting — the cattle low — some obstinate ox or steer attempts to escape — then a lively scene — the mounted men, always excellent riders and on good horses, dash after the recusant, and wheel and turn — a dozen mounted drovers, their great slouch’d, broad-brim’d hats, very picturesque — another dozen on foot — everybody cover’d with dust — long goads in their hands — an immense drove of perhaps 1000 cattle — the shouting, hooting, movement, &c.

HOSPITAL PERPLEXITY To add to other troubles, amid the confusion of this great army of sick, it is almost impossible for a stranger to find any friend or relative, unless he has the patient’s specific address to start upon. Besides the directory printed in the newspapers here, there are one or two general directories of the hospitals kept at provost’s headquarters, but they are nothing like complete; they are never up to date, and, as things are, with the daily streams of coming and going and changing, cannot be. I have known cases, for instance such as a farmer coming here from northern New York to find a wounded brother, faithfully hunting round for a week, and then compell’d to leave and go home without getting any trace of him. When he got home he found a letter from the brother giving the right address. [Page 740] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1864

Confederate submarine CSS H.L. Hunley rammed the Housatonic, sinking it — the first submarine to sink a vessel in war. CHARLESTON

British, French, Dutch, and American warships bombarded Shimonoseki and succeeded in opening more Japanese ports for foreigners.

Imagine that — in the midst of Civil War the American federal government was able to free up some of its warships, and send them all the way across the Pacific Ocean to bombard the port of a foreign nation which was not in any way, shape, or manner aggressing against us!

A scrap of paper Walt Whitman found, with a note that he had written in 1864 in Washington DC: “Specimen Days”

ATTITUDE OF FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS DURING THE WAR … The happening to our America, abroad as well as at home, these years, is indeed most strange. The democratic republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and [Page 759] empires ordinarily great. There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. I say such is the ardent wish to-day of England and of France, as governments, and of all the nations of Europe, as governments. I think indeed it is to-day the real, heartfelt wish of all the nations of the world, with the single exception of Mexico — Mexico, the only one to whom we have ever really done wrong, and now the only one who prays for us and for our triumph, with genuine prayer. Is it not indeed strange? America, made up of all, cheerfully from the beginning opening her arms to all, the result and justifier of all, of Britain, Germany, France and Spain — all here — the accepter, the friend, hope, last resource and general house of all — she who has harm’d none, but been bounteous to so many, to millions, the mother of strangers and exiles, all nations — should now I say be paid this dread compliment of general governmental fear and hatred. Are we indignant? alarm’d? Do we feel jeopardized? No; help’d, braced, concentrated, rather. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe, and watch her frowns and smiles. We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the old world.

US CIVIL WAR

February: Captain Daniel Foster of the 37th Regiment of US Colored Troops wrote a letter home to his wife Dora. February 7, 1864 near Norfolk, Virginia My Dear Wife, I received your letter of February 5 today, and I was made very happy through the spirit of love thus breathed into my soul from HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN my dear, far-off home. After the inspection this morning I held a religious service with my men. I will mention one simple incident which shows the benefit of such influence with these men. The merchant carts passing our camp one day last week were robbed. Complaint was made and a searching investigation instituted. The result is that no man from Company B is found who could be persuaded to join in this plundering. Some from all the other companies are found to be guilty and are to be severely punished. The boys were solicited to join in this work of plunder but they replied no, our Captain has said we must not steal or do anything else to please our enemies and offend God, but in all things act like true Christian men and so they all refused. I do not think that I will be able to see you all till about next Christmas when I do hope to see you all on a good long leave of absence. Much love to the precious children and to your dear parents. Your fond husband, Daniel Foster. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

A report from Walt Whitman visiting the Union encampments in Culpepper, Virginia: “Specimen Days”

DOWN AT THE FRONT Here I am pretty well down toward the extreme front. Three or four days ago General S., who is now in chief command, (I believe Meade is absent, sick,) moved a strong force southward from camp as if intending business. They went to the Rapidan; there has since been some manoeuvring and a little fighting, but nothing of consequence. The telegraphic accounts given Monday morning last, make entirely too much of it, I should say. What General S. intended we here know not, but we trust in that competent commander. We were somewhat excited, (but not so very much either,) on Sunday, during the day and night, as orders were sent out to pack up and harness, and be ready to evacuate, to fall back towards Washington. But I was very sleepy and went to bed. Some tremendous shouts arousing me during the night, I went forth and found it was from the men above mention’d, who were returning. I talk’d with some of the men; as usual I found them full of gayety, endurance, and many fine little outshows, the signs of the most excellent good manliness of the world. It was a curious sight to see those shadowy columns moving through the night. I stood unobserv’d in the darkness and watch’d them long. The mud was very deep. The men had their usual burdens, overcoats, knapsacks, guns and blankets. Along and along they filed by me, with often a laugh, a song, a cheerful word, but never once a murmur. It may have been odd, but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American people en masse. It fell upon me like a great awe. The strong ranks moved neither fast nor slow. They had march’d seven or eight miles already through the slipping unctuous mud. The brave First corps stopt here. The equally brave Third corps moved on to Brandy station. The famous Brooklyn 14th are here, guarding the town. You see their red legs actively moving everywhere. Then they have a theatre of their own here. They give musical performances, nearly everything done capitally. Of course the audience is a jam. It is good sport to attend one of these entertainments of the 14th. I like to look around at the soldiers, and the general collection in front of the curtain, more than the scene on the stage. [Page 741]

PAYING THE BOUNTIES One of the things to note here now is the arrival of the paymaster with his strong box, and the payment of bounties to veterans re-enlisting. Major H. is here to- day, with a small mountain of greenbacks, rejoicing the hearts of the 2d division of the First corps. In the midst of a rickety shanty, behind a little table, sit the major and clerk Eldridge, with the rolls before them, and much moneys. A re- enlisted man gets in cash about $200 down, (and heavy instalments following, as the pay-days arrive, one after another.) The show of the men crowding around is quite exhilarating; I like to stand and look. They feel elated, their pockets full, and the ensuing furlough, the visit home. It is a scene of sparkling eyes and flush’d cheeks. The soldier has many gloomy and harsh experiences, and this makes up for some of them. Major H. is order’d to pay first all the re-enlisted men of the First corps their bounties and back pay, and then the rest. You hear the peculiar sound of the rustling of the new and crisp greenbacks by the hour, through the nimble fingers of the major and my friend clerk E.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

RUMORS, CHANGES, &C. About the excitement of Sunday, and the orders to be ready to start, I have heard since that the said orders came from some cautious minor commander, and that the high principalities knew not and thought not of any such move; which is likely. The rumor and fear here intimated a long circuit by Lee, and flank attack on our right. But I cast my eyes at the mud, which was then at its deepest and palmiest condition, and retired composedly to rest. Still it is about time for Culpepper to have a change. Authorities have chased each other here like clouds in a stormy sky. Before the first Bull Run this was the rendezvous and camp of instruction of the secession troops. I am stopping at the house of a lady who has witness’d all the eventful changes of the war, along this route of contending armies. She is a widow, with a family of young children, and lives here with her sister in a large handsome house. A number of army officers board with them. [Page 742]

VIRGINIA Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with war as Virginia is, wherever I move across her surface, I find myself rous’d to surprise and admiration. What capacity for products, improvements, human life, nourishment and expansion. Everywhere that I have been in the Old Dominion, (the subtle mockery of that title now!) such thoughts have fill’d me. The soil is yet far above the average of any of the northern States. And how full of breadth the scenery, everywhere distant mountains, everywhere convenient rivers. Even yet prodigal in forest woods, and surely eligible for all the fruits, orchards, and flowers. The skies and atmosphere most luscious, as I feel certain, from more than a year’s residence in the State, and movements hither and yon. I should say very healthy, as a general thing. Then a rich and elastic quality, by night and by day. The sun rejoices in his strength, dazzling and burning, and yet, to me, never unpleasantly weakening. It is not the panting tropical heat, but invigorates. The north tempers it. The nights are often unsurpassable. Last evening (Feb. 8,) I saw the first of the new moon, the outlined old moon clear along with it; the sky and air so clear, such transparent hues of color, it seem’d to me I had never really seen the new moon before. It was the thinnest cut crescent possible. It hung delicate just above the sulky shadow of the Blue mountains. Ah, if it might prove an omen and good prophecy for this unhappy State.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Summer: Brownson’s Quarterly Review, No. 2

I. The Giobertian Philosophy II. Stevens on Reconstruction CATHOLICISM III. Abolition and Negro Equality IV. The Next President V. Reade’s VERY HARD CASH VI. Military Matters and Men VII. Literary Notices and Criticisms

MAGAZINES ORESTES AUGUSTUS BROWNSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman, who had returned to Washington DC after visiting the Union encampments in Culpepper, Virginia: “Specimen Days”

SUMMER OF 1864 I am back again in Washington, on my regular daily and nightly rounds. Of course there are many specialties. Dotting a ward here and there are always cases of poor fellows, long-suffering under obstinate wounds, or weak and dishearten’d from typhoid fever, or the like; mark’d cases, needing special and sympathetic nourishment. These I sit down and either talk to, or silently cheer them up. They always like it hugely, (and so do I.) Each case has its peculiarities, and needs some new adaptation. I have learnt to thus conform — learnt a good [Page 743] deal of hospital wisdom. Some of the poor young chaps, away from home for the first time in their lives, hunger and thirst for affection; this is sometimes the only thing that will reach their condition. The men like to have a pencil, and something to write in. I have given them cheap pocket-diaries, and almanacs for 1864, interleav’d with blank paper. For reading I generally have some old pictorial magazines or story papers — they are always acceptable. Also the morning or evening papers of the day. The best books I do not give, but lend to read through the wards, and then take them to others, and so on; they are very punctual about returning the books. In these wards, or on the field, as I thus continue to go round, I have come to adapt myself to each emergency, after its kind or call, however trivial, however solemn, every one justified and made real under its circumstances — not only visits and cheering talk and little gifts — not only washing and dressing wounds, (I have some cases where the patient is unwilling any one should do this but me) — but passages from the Bible, expounding them, prayer at the bedside, explanations of doctrine, &c. (I think I see my friends smiling at this confession, but I was never more in earnest in my life.) In camp and everywhere, I was in the habit of reading or giving recitations to the men. They were very fond of it, and liked declamatory poetical pieces. We would gather in a large group by ourselves, after supper, and spend the time in such readings, or in talking, and occasionally by an amusing game called the game of twenty questions.

A NEW ARMY ORGANIZATION FIT FOR AMERICA It is plain to me out of the events of the war, north and south, and out of all considerations, that the current military theory, practice, rules and organization, (adopted from Europe from the feudal institutes, with, of course, the “modern improvements,” largely from the French,) though tacitly follow’d, and believ’d in by the officers generally, are not at all consonant with the United States, nor our people, nor our days. What it will be I know not — but I know that as entire [Page 744] an abnegation of the present military system, and the naval too, and a building up from radically different root-bases and centres appropriate to us, must eventually result, as that our political system has resulted and become establish’d, different from feudal Europe, and built up on itself from original, perennial, democratic premises. We have undoubtedly in the United States the greatest military power — an exhaustless, intelligent, brave and reliable rank and file — in the world, any land, perhaps all lands. The problem is to organize this in the manner fully appropriate to it, to the principles of the republic, and to get the best service out of it. In the present struggle, as already seen and review’d, probably three-fourths of the losses, men, lives, &c., have been sheer superfluity, extravagance, waste.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

DEATH OF A HERO I wonder if I could ever convey to another — to you, for instance, reader dear — the tender and terrible realities of such cases, (many, many happen’d,) as the one I am now going to mention. Stewart C. Glover, company E, 5th Wisconsin — was wounded May 5, in one of those fierce tussles of the Wilderness — died May 21 — aged about 20. He was a small and beardless young man — a splendid soldier — in fact almost an ideal American, of his age. He had serv’d nearly three years, and would have been entitled to his discharge in a few days. He was in Hancock’s corps. The fighting had about ceas’d for the day, and the general commanding the brigade rode by and call’d for volunteers to bring in the wounded. Glover responded among the first — went out gayly — but while in the act of bearing in a wounded sergeant to our lines, was shot in the knee by a rebel sharpshooter; consequence, amputation and death. He had resided with his father, John Glover, an aged and feeble man, in Batavia, Genesee county, N. Y., but was at school in Wisconsin, after the war broke out, and there enlisted — soon took to soldier-life, liked it, was very manly, was belov’d by officers and comrades. He kept a little diary, like so many of the soldiers. On the day of his death he wrote the following in it, to-day the doctor says I must die — all is over with me — ah, so young to die. On another blank leaf he pencill’d [Page 745] to his brother, dear brother Thomas, I have been brave but wicked — pray for me.

HOSPITAL SCENES. — INCIDENTS It is Sunday afternoon, middle of summer, hot and oppressive, and very silent through the ward. I am taking care of a critical case, now lying in a half lethargy. Near where I sit is a suffering rebel, from the 8th Louisiana; his name is Irving. He has been here a long time, badly wounded, and lately had his leg amputated; it is not doing very well. Right opposite me is a sick soldier-boy, laid down with his clothes on, sleeping, looking much wasted, his pallid face on his arm. I see by the yellow trimming on his jacket that he is a cavalry boy. I step softly over and find by his card that he is named William Cone, of the 1st Maine cavalry, and his folks live in Skowhegan. Ice Cream Treat: One hot day toward the middle of June, I gave the inmates of Carver hospital a general ice cream treat, purchasing a large quantity, and, under convoy of the doctor or head nurse, going around personally through the wards to see to its distribution. An Incident: In one of the fights before Atlanta, a rebel soldier, of large size, evidently a young man, was mortally wounded top of the head, so that the brains partially exuded. He lived three days, lying on his back on the spot where he first dropt. He dug with his heel in the ground during that time a hole big enough to put in a couple of ordinary knapsacks. He just lay there in the open air, and with little intermission kept his heel going night and day. Some of our soldiers then moved him to a house, but he died in a few minutes. Another: After the battles at Columbia, Tennessee, where we repuls’d about a score of vehement rebel charges, they left a great many wounded on the ground, mostly within our range. Whenever any of these wounded attempted to move away by any means, generally by crawling off, our men without exception brought them down by a bullet. They let none crawl away, no matter what his condition. [Page 746]

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN October: A report from Walt Whitman of a chance encounter on a Washington avenue, and of the experience of a Union prisoner of the South: [See Next Screen]

October 24, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

DESERTERS Saw a large squad of our own deserters, (over 300) surrounded with a cordon of arm’d guards, marching along Pennsylvania avenue. The most motley collection I ever saw, all sorts of rig, all sorts of hats and caps, many fine-looking young fellows, some of them shame-faced, some sickly, most of them dirty, shirts very dirty and long worn, &c. They tramp’d along without order, a huge huddling mass, not in ranks. I saw some of the spectators laughing, but I felt like anything else but laughing. These deserters are far more numerous than would be thought. Almost every day I see squads of them, sometimes two or three at a time, with a small guard; sometimes ten or twelve, under a larger one. (I [Page 748] hear that desertions from the army now in the field have often averaged 10,000 a month. One of the commonest sights in Washington is a squad of deserters.)

A GLIMPSE OF WAR’S HELL-SCENES In one of the late movements of our troops in the valley, (near Upperville, I think,) a strong force of Moseby’s mounted guerillas attack’d a train of wounded, and the guard of cavalry convoying them. The ambulances contain’d about 60 wounded, quite a number of them officers of rank. The rebels were in strength, and the capture of the train and its partial guard after a short snap was effectually accomplish’d. No sooner had our men surrender’d, the rebels instantly commenced robbing the train and murdering their prisoners, even the wounded. Here is the scene or a sample of it, ten minutes after. Among the wounded officers in the ambulances were one, a lieutenant of regulars, and another of higher rank. These two were dragg’d out on the ground on their backs, and were now surrounded by the guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinn’d firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them and thrust into the ground. These two officers, as afterwards found on examination, had receiv’d about twenty such thrusts, some of them through the mouth, face, &c. The wounded had all been dragg’d (to give a better chance also for plunder,) out of their wagons; some had been effectually dispatch’d, and their bodies were lying there lifeless and bloody. Others, not yet dead, but horribly mutilated, were moaning or groaning. Of our men who surrender’d, most had been thus maim’d or slaughter’d. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

A YANKEE SOLDIER As I turn’d off the Avenue one cool October evening into Thirteenth street, a soldier with knapsack and overcoat stood at the corner inquiring his way. I found he wanted to go part of the road in my direction, so we walk’d on together. We soon fell into conversation. He was small and not very young, and a tough little fellow, as I judged in the evening light, catching glimpses by the lamps we pass’d. His answers were short, but clear. His name was Charles Carroll; he belong’d to one of the Massachusetts regiments, and was born in or near Lynn. His parents were living, but were very old. There were four sons, and all had enlisted. Two had died of starvation and misery in the prison at Andersonville, and one had been kill’d in the west. He only was left. He was now going home, and by the way he talk’d I inferr’d that his time was nearly out. He made great calculations on being with his parents to comfort them the rest of their days.

UNION PRISONERS SOUTH Michael Stansbury, 48 years of age, a sea-faring man, a southerner by birth and raising, formerly captain of U. S. light ship Long Shoal, station’d at Long Shoal point, Pamlico sound — though a southerner, a firm Union man — was captur’d Feb. 17, 1863, and has been nearly two years in the Confederate prisons; was at one time order’d releas’d by Governor Vance, but a rebel officer re-arrested him; then sent on to Richmond for exchange — but instead of being exchanged was sent down (as a southern citizen, not a soldier,) to Salisbury NC, where he remain’d until lately, when he escap’d among the exchang’d by assuming the name of a dead soldier, and coming up via Wilmington with the rest. Was about sixteen months in Salisbury. Subsequent to October, ’64, there were about 11,000 Union prisoners in the stockade; about 100 of them southern unionists, 200 U. S. deserters. During the past winter 1500 of the prisoners, to save their lives, join’d the confederacy, on condition of being assign’d merely to guard duty. Out of the 11,000 not more than 2500 came out; 500 of these were pitiable, helpless wretches — the rest were in a condition [Page 747] to travel. There were often 60 dead bodies to be buried in the morning; the daily average would be about 40. The regular food was a meal of corn, the cob and husk ground together, and sometimes once a week a ration of sorghum molasses. A diminutive ration of meat might possibly come once a month, not oftener. In the stockade, containing the 11,000 men, there was a partial show of tents, not enough for 2000. A large proportion of the men lived in holes in the ground, in the utmost wretchedness. Some froze to death, others had their hands and feet frozen. The rebel guards would occasionally, and on the least pretence, fire into the prison from mere demonism and wantonness. All the horrors that can be named, starvation, lassitude, filth, vermin, despair, swift loss of self- respect, idiocy, insanity, and frequent murder, were there. Stansbury has a wife and child living in Newbern — has written to them from here — is in the U. S. lighthouse employ still — (had been home to Newbern to see his family, and on his return to the ship was captured in his boat.) Has seen men brought there to Salisbury as hearty as you ever see in your life — in a few weeks completely dead gone, much of it from thinking on their condition — hope all gone. Has himself a hard, sad, strangely deaden’d kind of look, as of one chill’d for years in the cold and dark, where his good manly nature had no room to exercise itself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

A GLIMPSE OF WAR’S HELL-SCENES [CONTINUED] At this instant a force of our cavalry, who had been following the train at some interval, charged suddenly upon the secesh captors, who proceeded at once to make the best escape they could. Most of them got away, but we gobbled two officers and seventeen men, in the very acts just described. The sight was one which admitted of little discussion, as may be imagined. The seventeen captur’d men and two officers were put under guard for the night, but it was decided there and [Page 749] then that they should die. The next morning the two officers were taken in the town, separate places, put in the centre of the street, and shot. The seventeen men were taken to an open ground, a little one side. They were placed in a hollow square, half-encompass’d by two of our cavalry regiments, one of which regiments had three days before found the bloody corpses of three of their men hamstrung and hung up by the heels to limbs of trees by Moseby’s guerillas, and the other had not long before had twelve men, after surrendering, shot and then hung by the neck to limbs of trees, and jeering inscriptions pinn’d to the breast of one of the corpses, who had been a sergeant. Those three, and those twelve, had been found, I say, by these environing regiments. Now, with revolvers, they form’d the grim cordon of the seventeen prisoners. The latter were placed in the midst of the hollow square, unfasten’d, and the ironical remark made to them that they were now to be given “a chance for themselves.” A few ran for it. But what use? From every side the deadly pills came. In a few minutes the seventeen corpses strew’d the hollow square. I was curious to know whether some of the Union soldiers, some few, (some one or two at least of the youngsters,) did not abstain from shooting on the helpless men. Not one. There was no exultation, very little said, almost nothing, yet every man there contributed his shot. Multiply the above by scores, aye hundreds — verify it in all the forms that different circumstances, individuals, places, could afford — light it with every lurid passion, the wolf’s, the lion’s lapping thirst for blood — the passionate, boiling volcanoes of human revenge for comrades, brothers slain — with the light of burning farms, and heaps of smutting, smouldering black embers — and in the human heart everywhere black, worse embers — and you have an inkling of this war. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

GIFTS — MONEY — DISCRIMINATION As a very large proportion of the wounded came up from the front without a cent of money in their pockets, I soon discover’d that it was about the best thing I could do to raise their spirits, and show them that somebody cared for them, [Page 750] and practically felt a fatherly or brotherly interest in them, to give them small sums in such cases, using tact and discretion about it. I am regularly supplied with funds for this purpose by good women and men in Boston, Salem, Providence, Brooklyn, and New York. I provide myself with a quantity of bright new ten-cent and five-cent bills, and, when I think it incumbent, I give 25 or 30 cents, or perhaps 50 cents, and occasionally a still larger sum to some particular case. As I have started this subject, I take opportunity to ventilate the financial question. My supplies, altogether voluntary, mostly confidential, often seeming quite Providential, were numerous and varied. For instance, there were two distant and wealthy ladies, sisters, who sent regularly, for two years, quite heavy sums, enjoining that their names should be kept secret. The same delicacy was indeed a frequent condition. From several I had carte blanche. Many were entire strangers. From these sources, during from two to three years, in the manner described, in the hospitals, I bestowed, as almoner for others, many, many thousands of dollars. I learn’d one thing conclusively — that beneath all the ostensible greed and heartlessness of our times there is no end to the generous benevolence of men and women in the United States, when once sure of their object. Another thing became clear to me — while cash is not amiss to bring up the rear, tact and magnetic sympathy and unction are, and ever will be, sovereign still.

ITEMS FROM MY NOTE BOOKS Some of the half-eras’d, and not over-legible when made, memoranda of things wanted by one patient or another, will convey quite a fair idea. D. S. G., bed 52, wants a good book; has a sore, weak throat; would like some horehound candy; is from New Jersey, 28th regiment. C. H. L., 145th Pennsylvania, lies in bed 6, with jaundice and erysipelas; also wounded; stomach easily nauseated; bring him some oranges, also a little tart jelly; hearty, full-blooded young fellow — (he got better in a few days, and is now home on a furlough.) J. H. G., bed 24, wants an undershirt, drawers, and socks; has not had a change for quite a while; is evidently a neat, clean boy from New England — (I supplied him; also with a comb, [Page 751] tooth- brush, and some soap and towels; I noticed afterward he was the cleanest of the whole ward.) Mrs. G., lady-nurse, ward F, wants a bottle of brandy — has two patients imperatively requiring stimulus — low with wounds and exhaustion. (I supplied her with a bottle of first-rate brandy from the Christian commission rooms.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

A CASE FROM SECOND BULL RUN Well, poor John Mahay is dead. He died yesterday. His was a painful and long- lingering case, (see p. 717 ante.) I have been with him at times for the past fifteen months. He belonged to company A, 101st New York, and was shot through the lower region of the abdomen at second Bull Run, August, ’62. One scene at his bedside will suffice for the agonies of nearly two years. The bladder had been perforated by a bullet going entirely through him. Not long since I sat a good part of the morning by his bedside, ward E, Armory square. The water ran out of his eyes from the intense pain, and the muscles of his face were distorted, but he utter’d nothing except a low groan now and then. Hot moist cloths were applied, and reliev’d him somewhat. Poor Mahay, a mere boy in age, but old in misfortune. He never knew the love of parents, was placed in infancy in one of the New York charitable institutions, and subsequently bound out to a tyrannical master in Sullivan county, (the scars of whose cowhide and club remain’d yet on his back.) His wound here was a most disagreeable one, for he was a gentle, cleanly, and affectionate boy. He found friends in his hospital life, and, indeed, was a universal favorite. He had quite a funeral ceremony.

ARMY SURGEONS — AID DEFICIENCIES I must bear my most emphatic testimony to the zeal, manliness, and professional spirit and capacity, generally prevailing among the surgeons, many of them young men, in the hospitals and the army. I will not say much about the exceptions, for they are few; (but I have met some of those few, and very incompetent and airish they were.) I never ceas’d to find the best men, and the hardest and most disinterested workers, among the surgeons in the hospitals. They are full [Page 752] of genius, too. I have seen many hundreds of them and this is my testimony. There are, however, serious deficiencies, wastes, sad want of system, in the commissions, contributions, and in all the voluntary, and a great part of the governmental nursing, edibles, medicines, stores, &c. (I do not say surgical attendance, because the surgeons cannot do more than human endurance permits.) Whatever puffing accounts there may be in the papers of the North, this is the actual fact. No thorough previous preparation, no system, no foresight, no genius. Always plenty of stores, no doubt, but never where they are needed, and never the proper application. Of all harrowing experiences, none is greater than that of the days following a heavy battle. Scores, hundreds of the noblest men on earth, uncomplaining, lie helpless, mangled, faint, alone, and so bleed to death, or die from exhaustion, either actually untouch’d at all, or merely the laying of them down and leaving them, when there ought to be means provided to save them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

THE BLUE EVERYWHERE This city, its suburbs, the capitol, the front of the White House, the places of amusement, the Avenue, and all the main streets, swarm with soldiers this winter, more than ever before. Some are out from the hospitals, some from the neighboring camps, &c. One source or another, they pour plenteously, and make, I should say, the mark’d feature in the human movement and costume-appearance of our national city. Their blue pants and overcoats are everywhere. The clump of crutches is heard up the stairs of the paymasters’ offices, and there are characteristic groups around the doors of the same, often waiting long and wearily in the cold. Toward the latter part of the afternoon, you see the furlough’d men, sometimes singly, sometimes in small squads, making their way to the Baltimore depot. At all times, except early in the morning, the patrol detachments are moving around, especially during the earlier hours of evening, examining passes, and arresting all soldiers without them. They do not question the one-legged, or men badly disabled or maim’d, but all others are stopt. They also go around evenings through the auditoriums [Page 753] of the theatres, and make officers and all show their passes, or other authority, for being there.

US CIVIL WAR

December 24, Saturday: Incidental music to Hippolyte and Théodore Cogniard’s féerie La Fille de l’air by Jacques Offenbach was performed for the initial time, at the Folies-Dramatiques, Paris.

A story by Louisa May Alcott appeared in the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, entitled “Mrs. Podgers’ Teapot, a Christmas Story.”

The first 10 copies of Louisa’s MOODS were delivered hot off the press of the firm of A.K. Loring to her and she inscribed the first one for her mother Abba Alcott’s 64th birthday on this day, Christmas Eve. This was Louisa’s favorite novel, in which her memories of Henry Thoreau were the basis for one character. Although this was her most serious work, it had had to be cut almost in half so it could be issued as a saleable one volume rather than as an unsalable two. The “happy, very happy” dutiful daughter wrote: Now if it makes a little money and opens the way for more, I shall be satisfied, and you in some measure repaid for all the sympathy, help, and love that have done so much for me in these hard years. I hope Success will sweeten me and make me what I long to become more than a great writer — a good daughter. ALCOTT FAMILY The sanctimonious publisher had insisted on the omission of a reference to a character reading Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS. Her biographer refers to this novel as “a love story about Henry Thoreau” and as a stormy, triangular love story based on her long-term, secret infatuation with Henry Thoreau. It was a story from the heart, lingering over passionate possibilities and displaying Louisa’s desire for an absorbing, erotic love. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Was it possible that Louisa was in love with Henry Thoreau? I, for one, would need to know whether she ever had even the faintest inkling of who this man had been, would need to discover that for instance she had studied WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS with sufficient perception over the years to have benefited from some of the spiritual material that is present in those books at a deep level, rather than merely utilizing the trip framework of WEEK for the framing of the romantic dialogues of one chapter in her romance! And I simply have not yet been able to see that in her.

James Thomson, an upstate New York farmer, had made no mention of any Christmas gifts in a diary which he had been keeping 1838-1840 and 1857-1864, but then we see this single entry in 1864: 26 Monday- This was a warm day thawed the snow some Snowed a little while in the morning. I went to Delhi with Bob and the Cutter. took the wool for flannel in exchange for it left 8 yards to be dressed into womans ware- paid for dressing it. it was noon when I got to Delhi. got home a little before 8 o’clock P. M. it was foggy- the Snow was drifted on the mountain- I got a Bonet for Jane Since in many years he made no mention of the Christmas holiday or celebration, it is likely that for the Thomson family this was not a significant tradition. This should not be seen as unusual, as there are other 19th- Century diaries and very few make any mention of any gift exchange at Christmas.

Note: Recently it has been reported that we have, on an archival radio tape from the 1950s, a DJ alleging that he was playing a wax cylinder of Whitman reading his poem “America” that was made a few years before the old poet died. It would be nice to get that sound bite and use it in conjunction with this multimedia textbase, especially in regard to the possibility that since Walt heard Elias Hicks deliver his farewell address, his poetic style of delivery may have been influenced by Quaker singsong cadence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1865

A youthful Henry James, Jr. reviewed Walt Whitman’s DRUMTAPS, comparing it with vomit (later he would disavow this as “a little atrocity ... perpetuated ... in the gross impudence of youth”).

Whitman would report in the Camden Post for April 16, 1891: “Memoranda”

1865 to ’71 — Had a place as clerk (till well on in ’73) in the Attorney General’s Office, Washington. (New York and Brooklyn seem more like home, as I was born near, and brought up in them, and lived, man and boy, for 30 years. But I lived some years in Washington, and have visited, and partially lived, in most of the Western and Eastern cities.)

(Rumor would have it that in this year Henry James, Jr. was being introduced to sex, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr..)

Another reminisce pertaining to this period in his life, by Whitman: “Specimen Days” STARTING NEWSPAPERS Besides starting them as aforementioned, I have had to do, [Page 921] one time or another, during my life, with a long list of papers, at divers places, sometimes under queer circumstances. During the war, the hospitals at Washington, among other means of amusement, printed a little sheet among themselves, surrounded by wounds and death, the “Armory Square Gazette,” to which I contributed. The same long afterward, casually, to a paper — I think it was call’d the “Jimplecute” — out in Colorado where I stopp’d at the time. When I was in Quebec province, in Canada, in 1880, I went into the queerest little old French printing office near Tadousac. It was far more primitive and ancient than my Camden friend William Kurtz’s place up on Federal street. I remember, as a youngster, several characteristic old printers of a kind hard to be seen these days.

John Mitchel being in prison for having aided the Rebellion, an Irish deputation asked President Andrew Johnson to release him so he could serve “the cause of Irish freedom.” Upon release, Mitchel went north to New-York and became a newspaper editor again, writing “the truth concerning the southern cause” for the Daily News, before the Fenian movement sent him to Paris to serve as their agent, charged with safe transmittal of funds for the Irish revolutionaries. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 24, Tuesday: The Upper Main Hall and primary towers of the castle of the Smithsonian Institution were destroyed by fire, along with their contents.

Walt Whitman was appointed clerk in the Indian Bureau of the Department of the Interior.

The federal government of the United States appropriated $17,000 to carry out the treaty of July 11, 1862 with Great Britain (STATUTES AT LARGE, XIII. 424). INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 29, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A MODEL HOSPITAL Have been in Armory-square this afternoon. The wards are very comfortable, new floors and plaster walls, and models of neatness. I am not sure but this is a model hospital after all, in important respects. I found several sad cases of old lingering wounds. One Delaware soldier, William H. Millis, from Bridgeville, whom I had been with after the battles of the Wilderness, last May, where he receiv’d a very bad wound in the chest, with another in the left arm, and whose case was serious (pneumonia had set in) all last June and July, I now find well enough to do light duty. For three weeks at the time mention’d he just hovered between life and death.

BOYS IN THE ARMY As I walk’d home about sunset, I saw in Fourteenth street a very young soldier, thinly clad, standing near the house I was about to enter. I stopt a moment in front of the door and call’d him to me. I knew that an old Tennessee regiment, and also an Indiana regiment, were temporarily stopping in new barracks, near Fourteenth street. This boy I found belonged to the Tennessee regiment. But I could hardly believe he carried a musket. He was but 15 years old, yet had been twelve months a soldier, and had borne his part in several battles, even historic ones. I ask’d him if he did not suffer from the cold, and if he had no overcoat. No, he did not suffer from cold, and had no overcoat, but could draw one whenever he wish’d. His father was dead, and his mother living in some part of East Tennessee; all the men were from that part of the country. The next forenoon I saw the Tennessee and Indiana regiments marching down the Avenue. My boy was with the former, stepping along with the rest. There were many other boys no older. I stood and watch’d them as they tramp’d along with slow, strong, heavy, regular steps. There did not appear to be a man over 30 years of age, [Page 754] and a large proportion were from 15 to perhaps 22 or 23. They had all the look of veterans, worn, stain’d, impassive, and a certain unbent, lounging gait, carrying in addition to their regular arms and knapsacks, frequently a frying-pan, broom, &c. They were all of pleasant physiognomy; no refinement, nor blanch’d with intellect, but as my eye pick’d them, moving along, rank by rank, there did not seem to be a single repulsive, brutal or markedly stupid face among them.

BURIAL OF A LADY NURSE Here is an incident just occurr’d in one of the hospitals. A lady named Miss or Mrs. Billings, who has long been a practical friend of soldiers, and nurse in the army, and had become attached to it in a way that no one can realize but him or her who has had experience, was taken sick, early this winter, linger’d some time, and finally died in the hospital. It was her request that she should be buried among the soldiers, and after the military method. This request was fully carried out. Her coffin was carried to the grave by soldiers, with the usual escort, buried, and a salute fired over the grave. This was at Annapolis a few days since.

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

FEMALE NURSES FOR SOLDIERS There are many women in one position or another, among the hospitals, mostly as nurses here in Washington, and among the military stations; quite a number of them young ladies acting as volunteers. They are a help in certain ways, and deserve to be mention’d with respect. Then it remains to be distinctly said that few or no young ladies, under the irresistible conventions of society, answer the practical requirements of nurses for soldiers. Middle-aged or healthy and good condition’d elderly women, mothers of children, are always best. Many of the wounded must be handled. A hundred things which cannot be gainsay’d, must occur and must be done. The presence of a good middle-aged or elderly woman, the magnetic touch of hands, the expressive features of the mother, the silent soothing of her presence, her words, her knowledge and privileges arrived at only through having had children, are precious and final qualifications. It is a natural [Page 755] faculty that is required; it is not merely having a genteel young woman at a table in a ward. One of the finest nurses I met was a red-faced illiterate old Irish woman; I have seen her take the poor wasted naked boys so tenderly up in her arms. There are plenty of excellent clean old black women that would make tip-top nurses.

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 23, Thursday: General William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops reached Middleton Place Plantation and made it a smoking ruin. The citizens of Charleston were in a panic awaiting imminent invasion, when the Union forces turned toward Columbia (the torching of Columbia would destroy many records and valuables that Charlestonians had sent there for “safekeeping”). US CIVIL WAR

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days” SOUTHERN ESCAPEES I saw a large procession of young men from the rebel army, (deserters they are call’d, but the usual meaning of the word does not apply to them,) passing the Avenue to-day. There were nearly 200, come up yesterday by boat from James river. I stood and watch’d them as they shuffled along, in a slow, tired, worn sort of way; a large proportion of light-hair’d, blonde, light gray-eyed young men among them. Their costumes had a dirt- stain’d uniformity; most had been originally gray; some had articles of our uniform, pants on one, vest or coat on another; I think they were mostly Georgia and North Carolina boys. They excited little or no attention. As I stood quite close to them, several good looking enough youths, (but O what a tale of misery their appearance told,) nodded or just spoke to me, without doubt divining pity and fatherliness out of my face, for my heart was full enough of it. Several of the couples trudg’d along with their arms about each other, some probably brothers, as if they were afraid they might somehow get separated. They nearly all look’d what one might call simple, yet intelligent, too. Some had pieces of old carpet, some blankets, and others old bags around their shoulders. Some of them here and there had fine faces, still it was a procession of misery. The two hundred had with them about half a dozen arm’d guards. Along this week I saw some such procession, more or less in numbers, every day, as they were brought up by the boat. The government does what it can for them, and sends them north and west. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 27, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Some three or four hundred more escapees from the confederate army came up on the boat. As the day has been very pleasant indeed, (after a long spell of bad weather,) I have been wandering around a good deal, without any other [Page 756] object than to be out-doors and enjoy it; have met these escaped men in all directions. Their apparel is the same ragged, long-worn motley as before described. I talk’d with a number of the men. Some are quite bright and stylish, for all their poor clothes — walking with an air, wearing their old head-coverings on one side, quite saucily. I find the old, unquestionable proofs, as all along the past four years, of the unscrupulous tyranny exercised by the secession government in conscripting the common people by absolute force everywhere, and paying no attention whatever to the men’s time being up — keeping them in military service just the same. One gigantic young fellow, a Georgian, at least six feet three inches high, broad-sized in proportion, attired in the dirtiest, drab, well-smear’d rags, tied with strings, his trousers at the knees all strips and streamers, was complacently standing eating some bread and meat. He appear’d contented enough. Then a few minutes after I saw him slowly walking along. It was plain he did not take anything to heart.

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 28, Tuesday: Richard Realf wrote to Laura B. Merritt and Marian M. Cramer, Nashville, Tennessee (depression and anxiety, aide-de-camp, health, news of victory, hopes for peace).

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

As I pass’d the military headquarters of the city, not far from the President’s house, I stopt to interview some of the crowd of escapees who were lounging there. In appearance they were the same as previously mention’d. Two of them, one about 17, and the other perhaps 25 or ’6, I talk’d with some time. They were from North Carolina, born and rais’d there, and had folks there. The elder had been in the rebel service four years. He was first conscripted for two years. He was then kept arbitrarily in the ranks. This is the case with a large proportion of the secession army. There was nothing downcast in these young men’s manners; the younger had been soldiering about a year; he was conscripted; there were six brothers (all the boys of the family) in the army, part of them as conscripts, part as volunteers; three had been kill’d; one had escaped about four months ago, and now this one had got away; he was a pleasant and well-talking lad, with the peculiar North Carolina idiom (not at all disagreeable to my ears.) He and the elder one were of the same company, and escaped together — and wish’d to remain together. They thought of getting transportation away to Missouri, and working there; but were not sure it was judicious. I advised them rather to go to some of the directly northern States, and [Page 757] get farm work for the present. The younger had made six dollars on the boat, with some tobacco he brought; he had three and a half left. The elder had nothing; I gave him a trifle. Soon after, met John Wormley, 9th Alabama, a West Tennessee rais’d boy, parents both dead — had the look of one for a long time on short allowance — said very little — chew’d tobacco at a fearful rate, spitting in proportion — large clear dark-brown eyes, very fine — didn’t know what to make of me — told me at last he wanted much to get some clean underclothes, and a pair of decent pants. Didn’t care about coat or hat fixings. Wanted a chance to wash himself well, and put on the underclothes. I had the very great pleasure of helping him to accomplish all those wholesome designs.

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 1, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Plenty more butternut or clay-color’d escapees every day. About 160 came in to- day, a large portion South Carolinians. They generally take the oath of allegiance, and are sent north, west, or extreme south-west if they wish. Several of them told me that the desertions in their army, of men going home, leave or no leave, are far more numerous than their desertions to our side. I saw a very forlorn looking squad of about a hundred, late this afternoon, on their way to the Baltimore depot.

THE CAPITOL BY GAS-LIGHT To-night I have been wandering awhile in the capitol, which is all lit up. The illuminated rotunda looks fine. I like to stand aside and look a long, long while, up at the dome; it comforts me somehow. The House and Senate were both in session till very late. I look’d in upon them, but only a few moments; they were hard at work on tax and appropriation bills. I wander’d through the long and rich corridors and apartments under the Senate; an old habit of mine, former winters, and now more satisfaction than ever. Not many persons down there, occasionally a flitting figure in the distance.

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 4, Saturday morning: Pennsylvania Avenue was an expanse of muck and standing water during Abraham Lincoln’s 2d inaugural address.

Thousands stood in this mess at the Capitol grounds in Washington DC to hear the President, on the East Portico, renew his oath of office and comment upon the nation’s predicament, with the completed Capitol dome over the President’s head a physical reminder of the resolve of his Administration throughout the years of crisis.

The actor John Wilkes Booth was able to be present through the good graces of his fiancée Bessie Lambert Hale, daughter of New Hampshire senator John Parker Hale. (The senator was endeavoring at the time to get rid of this unsuitable suitor in a roundabout manner, by getting the President to appoint him as an ambassador HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN — whereupon he would be able to take his family abroad and thus separate this daughter from her guy.) A photograph of the ceremony published at the time by the Illustrated London News, when enhanced and blown up, reveals him standing in the required beaver top hat on a balcony above and to the side of the inaugural platform from which, with pistol extended through the open railing, the muzzle of his pistol would have been about four feet, line of fire, from Lincoln’s head, an easy and accurate shot. Other of the Booth conspirators were scattered through the crowd.

Chief Justice Salmon Portland Chase administered the oath, after which Lincoln commented as follows: Fellow-Countrymen: At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending Civil War. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came. One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Not only did Frederick Douglass attend this inauguration, but also, at the Inaugural Ball, he was personally greeted by the President.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SCENE AT THE CAPITOL I must mention a strange scene at the capitol, the hall of Representatives, the morning of Saturday last, (March 4th.) The day just dawn’d, but in half-darkness, everything dim, leaden, and soaking. In that dim light, the members nervous from long drawn duty, exhausted, some asleep, and many half asleep. The gas-light, mix’d with the dingy day-break, produced an unearthly effect. The poor little sleepy, stumbling pages, the smell of the hall, the members with heads leaning on their desks, the sounds of the voices speaking, with unusual intonations — the general moral atmosphere also of the close of this important session — the strong hope that the war is approaching its close — the tantalizing dread lest the hope may be a false one — the grandeur of the hall itself, with its effect of vast shadows up toward the panels and spaces over the galleries — all made a mark’d combination. In the midst of this, with the suddenness of a thunderbolt, burst one of the most angry and crashing storms of rain and hail ever heard. It beat like a deluge on the heavy glass roof of the hall, and the wind literally howl’d and roar’d. For a moment, (and no wonder,) the nervous and sleeping Representatives were thrown into confusion. The slumberers awaked with fear, some started for the doors, some look’d up with blanch’d cheeks and lips to the roof, and the little pages [Page 762] began to cry; it was a scene. But it was over almost as soon as the drowsied men were actually awake. They recover’d themselves; the storm raged on, beating, dashing, and with loud noises at times. But the House went ahead with its business then, I think, as calmly and with as much deliberation as at any time in its career. Perhaps the shock did it good. (One is not without impression, after all, amid these members of Congress, of both the Houses, that if the flat routine of their duties should ever be broken in upon by some great emergency involving real danger, and calling for first-class personal qualities, those qualities would be found generally forthcoming, and from men not now credited with them.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Later that day: “Specimen Days”

THE INAUGURATION The President very quietly rode down to the capitol in his own carriage, by himself, on a sharp trot, about noon, either because he wish’d to be on hand to sign bills, or [Page 758] to get rid of marching in line with the absurd procession, the muslin temple of liberty, and pasteboard monitor. I saw him on his return, at three o’clock, after the performance was over. He was in his plain two-horse barouche, and look’d very much worn and tired; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows. (I never see that man without feeling that he is one to become personally attach’d to, for his combination of purest, heartiest tenderness, and native western form of manliness.) By his side sat his little boy, of ten years. There were no soldiers, only a lot of civilians on horseback, with huge yellow scarfs over their shoulders, riding around the carriage. (At the inauguration four years ago, he rode down and back again surrounded by a dense mass of arm’d cavalrymen eight deep, with drawn sabres; and there were sharpshooters station’d at every corner on the route.) I ought to make mention of the closing levee of Saturday night last. Never before was such a compact jam in front of the White House — all the grounds fill’d, and away out to the spacious sidewalks. I was there, as I took a notion to go — was in the rush inside with the crowd — surged along the passage-ways, the blue and other rooms, and through the great east room. Crowds of country people, some very funny. Fine music from the Marine band, off in a side place. I saw Mr. Lincoln, drest all in black, with white kid gloves and a claw-hammer coat, receiving, as in duty bound, shaking hands, looking very disconsolate, and as if he would give anything to be somewhere else.

On this and the following day, Confederate President Jefferson Davis would be meeting with General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia to discuss the feasibility of evacuating their capital (this would be his final known wartime meeting with General Lee). US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 6, Monday: Major General John Newton had undertaken a joint force expedition (including 2nd U.S. Colored Infantry and 99th U.S. Colored Infantry) to engage and destroy Confederate troops that had attacked at Cedar Keys and Fort Myers and were allegedly encamped somewhere around St. Marks. The Navy had trouble getting its ships up the St. Marks River. The Army force, however, had advanced and, after finding one bridge destroyed, started before dawn on March 6th to attempt to cross the river at Natural Bridge. The troops initially pushed Rebel forces back but not away from the bridge. Confederate forces, protected by breastworks, guarded all of the approaches and the bridge itself. The action at Natural Bridge lasted most of the day, but, unable to take the bridge, the Union troops retreated to the protection of the fleet. US CIVIL WAR

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

INAUGURATION BALL I have been up to look at the dance and supper-rooms, for the inauguration ball at the Patent office; and I could not help thinking, what a different scene they presented to my view a while since, fill’d with a crowded mass of the worst wounded of the war, brought in from second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburgh. To- night, beautiful women, perfumes, the violins’ sweetness, the polka and the waltz; then the amputation, the blue face, the groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clotted rag, the odor of wounds and blood, and many a mother’s son amid strangers, passing away untended there, (for the crowd of the badly hurt was great, and much for nurse to do, and much for surgeon.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 27, Monday: Major General E.R.S. Canby’s forces rendezvoused at Danley’s Ferry and besieged Spanish Fort.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s wife Varina Davis and their children departed from Richmond, Virginia with plans to travel to Charlotte, North Carolina via Danville, Virginia. US CIVIL WAR

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A YANKEE ANTIQUE Sergeant Calvin F. Harlowe, company C, 29th Massachusetts, 3d brigade, 1st division, Ninth corps — a mark’d sample of heroism and death, (some may say bravado, but I say heroism, of grandest, oldest order) — in the late attack by the rebel troops, and temporary capture by them, of fort Steadman, at night. The fort was surprised at dead of night. Suddenly awaken’d from their sleep, and rushing from their tents, Harlowe, with others, found himself in the hands of the secesh — they demanded his surrender — he answer’d, Never while I live. (Of course it was useless. The others surrender’d; the odds were too great.) Again he was ask’d to yield, this time by a rebel captain. Though surrounded, and quite calm, he again refused, call’d sternly to his comrades to fight on, and himself attempted to do so. The rebel captain then shot him — but at the same instant he shot the captain. Both fell together mortally wounded. Harlowe died almost instantly. The rebels were driven out in a very short time. The body was buried next day, but soon taken up and sent home, (Plymouth county, Mass.) Harlowe was only 22 years of age — was a tall, slim, dark-hair’d, blue-eyed young man — had come out originally with the 29th; and that is the way he met his death, after four years’ campaign. He was in the Seven Days fight before Richmond, in second Bull Run, Antietam, first Fredericksburgh, Vicksburgh, Jackson, Wilderness, and the campaigns following — was as good a soldier as [Page 763] ever wore the blue, and every old officer in the regiment will bear that testimony. Though so young, and in a common rank, he had a spirit as resolute and brave as any hero in the books, ancient or modern — It was too great to say the words “I surrender” — and so he died. (When I think of such things, knowing them well, all the vast and complicated events of the war, on which history dwells and makes its volumes, fall aside, and for the moment at any rate I see nothing but young Calvin Harlowe’s figure in the night, disdaining to surrender.)

WOUNDS AND DISEASES The war is over, but the hospitals are fuller than ever, from former and current cases. A large majority of the wounds are in the arms and legs. But there is every kind of wound, in every part of the body. I should say of the sick, from my observation, that the prevailing maladies are typhoid fever and the camp fevers generally, diarrhoea, catarrhal affections and bronchitis, rheumatism and pneumonia. These forms of sickness lead; all the rest follow. There are twice as many sick as there are wounded. The deaths range from seven to ten per cent. of those under treatment.1

1.In the U.S. Surgeon-General’s office since, there is a formal record and treatment of 253,142 cases of wounds by government surgeons. What must have been the number unofficial, indirect — to say nothing of the Southern armies?

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 16, Easter Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

DEATH OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN I find in my notes of the time, this passage on the death of Abraham Lincoln: He leaves for America’s history and biography, so far, not only its most dramatic reminiscence — he leaves, in my opinion, the greatest, best, most characteristic, artistic, moral personality. Not but that he had faults, and show’d them in the Presidency; but honesty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience, and (a new virtue, unknown to other lands, and hardly yet really known here, but the foundation and tie of all, as the future will grandly develop,) UNIONISM, in its truest and amplest sense, form’d the hard-pan of his character. These he seal’d with his life. The [Page 764] tragic splendor of his death, purging, illuminating all, throws round his form, his head, an aureole that will remain and will grow brighter through time, while history lives, and love of country lasts. By many has this Union been help’d; but if one name, one man, must be pick’d out, he, most of all, is the conservator of it, to the future. He was assassinated — but the Union is not assassinated — a ira! One falls, and another falls. The soldier drops, sinks like a wave — but the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred, a thousand — President, general, captain, private — but the Nation is immortal.

SHERMAN’S ARMY’S JUBILATION — ITS SUDDEN STOPPAGE When Sherman’s armies, (long after they left Atlanta,) were marching through South and North Carolina — after leaving Savannah, the news of Lee’s capitulation having been receiv’d — the men never mov’d a mile without from some part of the line sending up continued, inspiriting shouts. At intervals all day long sounded out the wild music of those peculiar army cries. They would be commenc’d by one regiment or brigade, immediately taken up by others, and at length whole corps and armies would join in these wild triumphant choruses. It was one of the characteristic expressions of the western troops, and became a habit, serving as a relief and outlet to the men — a vent for their feelings of victory, returning peace, &c. Morning, noon, and afternoon, spontaneous, for occasion or without occasion, these huge, strange cries, differing from any other, echoing through the open air for many a mile, expressing youth, joy, wildness, irrepressible strength, and the ideas of advance and conquest, sounded along the swamps and uplands of the South, floating to the skies. (‘There never were men that kept in better spirits in danger or defeat — what then could they do in victory?’ — said one of the 15th corps to me, afterwards.) This exuberance continued till the armies arrived at Raleigh. There the news of the President’s murder was receiv’d. Then no more shouts or yells, for a week. All the marching was comparatively muffled. [Page 765] It was very significant — hardly a loud word or laugh in many of the regiments. A hush and silence pervaded all.

NO GOOD PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN Probably the reader has seen physiognomies (often old farmers, sea-captains, and such) that, behind their homeliness, or even ugliness, held superior points so subtle, yet so palpable, making the real life of their faces almost as impossible to depict as a wild perfume or fruit-taste, or a passionate tone of the living voice — and such was Lincoln’s face, the peculiar color, the lines of it, the eyes, mouth, expression. Of technical beauty it had nothing — but to the eye of a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination. The current portraits are all failures — most of them caricatures.

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WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

RELEASE’D UNION PRISONERS FROM SOUTH The releas’d prisoners of war are now coming up from the southern prisons. I have seen a number of them. The sight is worse than any sight of battle-fields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest. There was, (as a sample,) one large boat load, of several hundreds, brought about the 25th, to Annapolis; and out of the whole number only three individuals were able to walk from the boat. The rest were carried ashore and laid down in one place or another. Can those be men — those little livid brown, ash-streak’d, monkey-looking dwarfs? — are they really not mummied, dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them, quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips (often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth.) Probably no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth. (There are deeds, crimes, that may be forgiven; but this is not among them. It steeps its perpetrators in blackest, escapeless, endless damnation. Over 50,000 have been compell’d to die the death of starvation — reader, did you ever try to realize what starvation actually is? — in those prisons — and in a land of plenty.) An indescribable meanness, tyranny, aggravating course of insults, almost incredible — was evidently the rule of treatment through all the southern military prisons. The dead there are [Page 766] not to be pitied as much as some of the living that come from there — if they can be call’d living — many of them are mentally imbecile, and will never recuperate. [TWO FOOTNOTES TO THE ABOVE, AS FOLLOWS:] * From a review of “ANDERSONVILLE, A STORY OF SOUTHERN MILITARY PRISONS,” published serially in the “Toledo Blade,” in 1879, and afterwards in book form: “There is a deep fascination in the subject of Andersonville — for that Golgotha, in which lie the whitening bones of 13,000 gallant young men, represents the dearest and costliest sacrifice of the war for the preservation of our national unity. It is a type, too, of its class. Its more than hundred hecatombs of dead represent several times that number of their brethren, for whom the prison gates of Belle Isle, Danville, Salisbury, Florence, Columbia, and Cahaba open’d only in eternity. There are few families in the North who have not at least one dear relative or friend among these 60,000 whose sad fortune it was to end their service for the Union by lying down and dying for it in a southern prison pen. The manner of their death, the horrors that cluster’d thickly around every moment of their existence, the loyal, unfaltering steadfastness with which they endured all that fate had brought them, has never been adequately told. It was not with them as with their comrades in the field, whose every act was perform’d in the presence of those whose duty it was to observe such matters and report them to the world. Hidden from the view of their friends in the north by the impenetrable veil which the military operations of the rebels drew around the so-called confederacy, the people knew next to nothing of their career or their sufferings. Thousands died there less heeded even than the hundreds who perish’d on the battle-field. Grant did not lose as many men kill’d outright, in the terrible campaign from the Wilderness to the James river — 43 days of desperate fighting — as died in July and August at Andersonville. Nearly twice as many died in that prison as fell from the day that Grant cross’d the Rapidan, till he settled down in the trenches before Petersburg. More than four times as many Union dead lie under the solemn soughing pines about that forlorn little village in southern Georgia, than mark the course of Sherman from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The nation stands aghast at the expenditure of life which attended the two bloody campaigns of 1864, which virtually crush’d the confederacy, but no one remembers that more Union soldiers died in the rear of the rebel lines than were kill’d in the front of them. The great military events which stamp’d out the rebellion drew attention away from the sad drama which starvation and disease play’d in those gloomy pens in the far recesses of sombre southern forests.” ** From a letter of “Johnny Bouquet,” in N.Y. Tribune, March 27, ’81: “I visited at Salisbury NC, the prison pen or the site of it, from which nearly 12,000 victims of southern politicians were buried, being confined in a pen without shelter, exposed to all the elements could do, to all the disease herding animals together could create, and to all the starvation and cruelty an incompetent and intense caitiff government could accomplish. From the conversation and almost from the recollection of the northern people this place has dropp’d, but not so in the gossip of the Salisbury people, nearly all of whom say that the half was never told; that such was the nature of habitual outrage here that when Federal prisoners escaped the townspeople harbor’d them in their barns, afraid the vengeance of God would fall on them, to deliver even their enemies back to such cruelty. Said one old man at the Boyden House, who join’d in the conversation one evening: ‘There were often men buried out of that prison pen still alive. I have the testimony of a surgeon that he has seen them pull’d out of the dead cart with their eyes open and taking notice, but too weak to lift a finger. There was not the least excuse for such treatment, as the confederate government had seized every sawmill in the region, and could just as well have put up shelter for these prisoners as not, wood being plentiful here. It will be hard to make any honest man in Salisbury say that there was the slightest necessity for those prisoners having to live in old tents, caves and holes half-full of water. Representations were made to the Davis government against the officers in charge of it, but no attention was paid to them. Promotion was the punishment for cruelty there. The inmates were skeletons. Hell could have no terrors for any man who died there, except the inhuman keepers.’”

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 19, Wednesday: Confederate President Jefferson Davis reached Charlotte, North Carolina to discover that his family has already left there. He received word that the other President, Abraham Lincoln, had been assassinated. US CIVIL WAR

The White House funeral of President Lincoln, followed by a funeral procession along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol building. A freeborn black Baptist minister from Boston, the Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, found the White House fence lined with blacks. At the main gate in front of the North Portico he spoke with “a poor old contraband woman” who was weeping, sharing with her his belief that “God would raise up another Moses for them.” She replied “Ah, but we had him,” he would report this conversation in the New- York antislavery weekly Independent read by Frederick Douglass, and on June 1st during his Fast Day speech at the Cooper Union in New-York, Douglass would elaborate on the incident by pretending that it had been the contraband woman rather than the minister who had produced the reference to Moses (this speech would be reported in the National Anti-Slavery Standard and along the way “Ah, but we had him” morphed into what by now has become a standardized story about the iconic significance of the martyred national leader: “We have lost our Moses”).

Black men were allowed a place to march together in the official parade while black women watched from the sidewalks. Among these black female onlookers New York Tribune reporter Charles Page found one who was willing to make a sharp contrast between the 1st President, Washington, who had stopped with freedom for the white folks, and the latest President, Lincoln, who “didn’t stop with white folks, but kept straight ahead, and took all us too.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 20, Thursday: The 2d day of laying-in-state, with the corpse of President Abraham Lincoln on display in the White House subsequent to the funeral service and the procession to the Capital building.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 7, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE ARMIES RETURNING To-day as I was walking a mile or two south of Alexandria, I fell in with several large squads of the [Page 769] returning Western army, (Sherman’s men as they call’d themselves) about a thousand in all, the largest portion of them half sick, some convalescents, on their way to a hospital camp. These fragmentary excerpts, with the unmistakable Western physiognomy and idioms, crawling along slowly — after a great campaign, blown this way, as it were, out of their latitude — I mark’d with curiosity, and talk’d with off and on for over an hour. Here and there was one very sick; but all were able to walk, except some of the last, who had given out, and were seated on the ground, faint and despondent. These I tried to cheer, told them the camp they were to reach was only a little way further over the hill, and so got them up and started, accompanying some of the worst a little way, and helping them, or putting them under the support of stronger comrades.

US CIVIL WAR

Meanwhile, on that Sunday, in Minnesota, the St. Paul Daily Press was starting a subscription fund toward the purchase of bloodhounds to use against the Indians, insisting that

The only way to defend the frontier is to hunt the Indians to their holes and to kill them there.

May 21, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Saw General Sheridan and his cavalry to-day; a strong, attractive sight; the men were mostly young, (a few middle-aged,) superb-looking fellows, brown, spare, keen, with well-worn clothing, many with pieces of water-proof cloth around their shoulders, hanging down. They dash’d along pretty fast, in wide close ranks, all spatter’d with mud; no holiday soldiers; brigade after brigade. I could have watch’d for a week. Sheridan stood on a balcony, under a big tree, coolly smoking a cigar. His looks and manner impress’d me favorably.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 22, Monday: The Northern blockade ended, for almost all Southern ports.

Jefferson Davis was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe, Virginia.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Have been taking a walk along Pennsylvania avenue and Seventh street north. The city is full of soldiers, running around loose. Officers everywhere, of all grades. All have the weather-beaten look of practical service. It is a sight I never tire of. All the armies are now here (or portions of them,) for to-morrow’s review. You see them swarming like bees everywhere.

THE GRAND REVIEW For two days now the broad spaces of Pennsylvania avenue along to Treasury hill, and so by detour around to the President’s house, and so up to Georgetown, and across the aqueduct bridge, have been alive with a magnificent sight, the returning armies. In their wide ranks stretching clear across [Page 770] the Avenue, I watch them march or ride along, at a brisk pace, through two whole days — infantry, cavalry, artillery — some 200,000 men. Some days afterwards one or two other corps; and then, still afterwards, a good part of Sherman’s immense army, brought up from Charleston, Savannah, &c.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 26, Friday: There was a Confederate Army surrender at Shreveport, Louisiana.

General Kirby Smith surrendered in Texas.

The Confederate Army of Trans-Mississippi formally surrendered at New Orleans. WINDING IT DOWN

A federal grand jury in Washington DC found indictments for treason against former United States Senator and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis and former United States vice president and former Confederate General John C. Breckinridge.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

WESTERN SOLDIERS The streets, the public buildings and grounds of Washington, still swarm with soldiers from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, and all the Western States. I am continually meeting and talking with them. They often speak to me first, and always show great sociability, and glad to have a good interchange of chat. These Western soldiers are more slow in their movements, and in their intellectual quality also; have no extreme alertness. They are larger in size, have a more serious physiognomy, are continually looking at you as they pass in the street. They are largely animal, and handsomely so. During the war I have been at times with the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Twentieth Corps. I always feel drawn toward the men, and like their personal contact when we are crowded close together, as frequently these days in the street-cars. They all think the world of General Sherman; call him “old Bill,” or sometimes “uncle Billy.”

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 28, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A SOLDIER ON LINCOLN As I sat by the bedside of a sick Michigan soldier in hospital to-day, a convalescent from the adjoining bed rose and came to me, and presently we began talking. He was a middle-aged man, belonged to the 2d Virginia regiment, but lived in Racine, Ohio, and had a family there. He spoke of President Lincoln, and said: “The war is over, and many are lost. And now we have lost the best, the fairest, the truest man in America. Take him altogether, he was the best man this country ever produced. It was quite a while I thought very different; but some time before the murder, that’s the way I have seen it.” There was deep earnestness in the soldier. (I found upon further talk he had known Mr. Lincoln personally, and quite closely, years before.) He was a veteran; was [Page 771] now in the fifth year of his service; was a cavalry man, and had been in a good deal of hard fighting.

US CIVIL WAR May 28, Sunday-29, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

TWO BROTHERS, ONE SOUTH, ONE NORTH I staid to-night a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, aged about 19 years, W. S. P., (2d Maryland, southern,) very feeble, right leg amputated, can’t sleep hardly at all — has taken a great deal of morphine, which, as usual, is costing more than it comes to. Evidently very intelligent and well bred — very affectionate — held on to my hand, and put it by his face, not willing to let me leave. As I was lingering, soothing him in his pain, he says to me suddenly, “I hardly think you know who I am — I don’t wish to impose upon you — I am a rebel soldier.” I said I did not know that, but it made no difference. Visiting him daily for about two weeks after that, while he lived, (death had mark’d him, and he was quite alone,) I loved him much, always kiss’d him, and he did me. In an adjoining ward I found his brother, an officer of rank, a Union soldier, a brave and religious man, (Col. Clifton K. Prentiss, sixth Maryland infantry, Sixth corps, wounded in one of the engagements at Petersburgh, April 2 — linger’d, suffer’d much, died in Brooklyn, Aug. 20, ’65.) It was in the same battle both were hit. One was a strong Unionist, the other Secesh; both fought on their respective sides, both badly wounded, and both brought together here after a separation of four years. Each died for his cause.

President Andrew Johnson granted amnesty to almost all who had participated in the rebellion. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 31, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SOME SAD CASES YET James H. Williams, aged 21, 3d Virginia cavalry. — About as mark’d a case of a strong man brought low by a complication of diseases, (laryngitis, fever, debility and diarrhoea,) as I have ever seen — his superb physique, remains swarthy yet, and flushed and red with fever — is altogether flighty — flesh of his great breast and arms tremulous, and pulse pounding away with treble quickness — lies a good deal of the time in a partial sleep, but with low muttering and groans — a sleep in which there is no rest. Powerful as he is, [Page 772] and so young, he will not be able to stand many more days of the strain and sapping heat of yesterday and to-day. His throat is in a bad way, tongue and lips parch’d. When I ask him how he feels, he is able just to articulate, “I feel pretty bad yet, old man,” and looks at me with his great bright eyes. Father, John Williams, Millensport, Ohio.

At the end of the war, after service of 3 years and 9 months, Luke Fisher Parsons was discharged from the 6th Kansas Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. He would return to Salina, Kansas and go on a land claim. US CIVIL WAR

A convention was signed in Tangier between the United States, Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Sweden on the one part, and the Sultan of Morocco on the other, concerning the administration and upholding of the Cape Spartel Lighthouse. READ THE FULL TEXT

June: At the age of 16, as a outlet for sales to stamp collectors, George Stewart, Jr. inaugurated the Stamp Collector’s Monthly Gazette. In successive issues this magazine would come to carry more and more materials of interest to the general public.

Francis Jackson Meriam was transfered to the 57th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Walt Whitman was discharged by Secretary James Harlan, and on the following day was employed in the Attorney General’s office. It was in about this period that he met the streetcar driver Peter Doyle while riding on a Washington streetcar.

Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was indicted for treason in US Circuit Court, District of Virginia (another such indictment would be brought later in the year in the District of Columbia). US CIVIL WAR The United States of America, District of Virginia, to wit: In the Circuit Court of the United States of America in and for the District of Virginia, at Norfolk; May Term, 1866. The grand jurors of the United States of American, in and for the District of Virginia, upon their oaths and affirmations respectively, do present that Jefferson Davis, late of the city of Richmond, in the county of Henrico, in the district of Virginia, aforesaid, yeoman, being an inhabitant of, and residing within the said United States of America, and owing allegiance and fidelity to the said United States of America, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN and owing allegiance and fidelity to the said United States of America, and not having the fear of God before his eyes, nor weighing the duty of his said allegiance, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, and wickedly devising, intending the peace and tranquillity of the said United States of America to disturb and the government of the said United States of America to subvert, and to stir, move and incite insurrection, rebellion and war against the said United States of America on the fifteenth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-four, in the city of Richmond, in the county of Henrico, in the district of Virginia aforesaid, and within the jurisdiction of the Circuit Court of the United States for the fourth circuit in and for the district of Virginia aforesaid, with force and arms, unlawfully, falsely, maliciously, and traitorously did compass, imagine, and intend to raise, levy, and carry on war, insurrection, and rebellion against the said United Stated of America, and in order to fulfill and bring to effect the said traitorous compassings, imaginations, and intentions of him, the said Jefferson Davis, ... with a great multitude of persons whose names to the jurors aforesaid are at present unknown, to the number of five hundred persons and upward, armed and arrayed in a warlike manner, that is to say, with cannon, muskets, pistols, swords, dirks, and other warlike weapons ... in pursuance of such their traitorous intensions and purposes aforesaid, he, the said Jefferson Davis, with the said persons so as aforesaid traitorously assembled and armed and arrayed in the manner aforesaid, most wickedly, maliciously, and traitorously did ordain, prepare, levy and carry on war against the said United States of America, for the subversion of the Government of the said United States of America, contrary to the duty, allegiance and fidelity of the said Jefferson Davis, against the constitution, government, peace and dignity of the said United States of America, and against the form of the statute of the said United States of America, in such case made and provided. This indictment, founded on testimony of James F. Milligan, George P. Searbury, John Good, Jr., J. Hardy Hendren, and Patrick O’Brien, sworn in open court and sent for by the grand jury. H. Chandler, United States Attorney for the district of Virginia

June 9, Friday: Charles Dickens was returning with Ellen Ternan by train from a holiday in Paris. He later wrote a friend about what happened: I was in the only carriage which did not go over into the stream. Our carriage was caught upon the turn of some of the ruin of the bridge and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible manner. I got out with great caution and stood upon the step. Looking down I saw the bridge had gone, and nothing below me but the line of rail. Some people in the two other compartments were madly trying to plunge out of the window, and had no idea that there was an open swampy field fifteen feet below them and nothing else. Suddenly I came upon a staggering man covered with blood (I think he must have been flung clean out of his carriage), with such a frightful cut across his skull that I couldn’t bear to look at him. I poured some water over HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN his face and gave him some brandy, and laid him down on the grass, and he said, “I am gone,” and died afterwards. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

The 88th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment was mustered out (its soldiers would be discharged in Chicago on June 22d).

On this day and the following one, a report from Walt Whitman:72 “Specimen Days”

I have been sitting late to-night by the bedside of a wounded captain, a special friend of mine, lying with a painful fracture of left leg in one of the hospitals, in a large ward partially vacant. The lights were put out, all but a little candle, far from where I sat. The full moon shone in through the windows, making long, slanting silvery patches on the floor. All was still, my friend too was silent, but could not sleep; so I sat there by him, slowly wafting the fan, and occupied with the musings that arose out of the scene, the long shadowy ward, the beautiful ghostly moonlight on the floor, the white beds, here and there an occupant with huddled form, the bed-clothes thrown off. The hospitals have a number of cases of sun-stroke and exhaustion by heat, from the late reviews. There are many such from the Sixth corps, from the hot parade of day before yesterday. (Some of these shows cost the lives of scores of men.)

US CIVIL WAR

72. Actually the moon had been full on the night of the 7th. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 10, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Visited Douglas and Stanton hospitals. They are quite full. Many of the cases are bad ones, lingering wounds, and old sickness. There is a more than usual look of despair on the countenances of many of the men; hope has left them. I went through the wards, talking as usual. There are several here from the confederate army whom I had seen in other hospitals, and they recognized me. Two were in a dying condition.

CALHOUN’S REAL MONUMENT In one of the hospital tents for special cases, as I sat to-day tending a new amputation, I heard a couple of neighboring soldiers talking to each other from their cots. One down with fever, but improving, had come up belated from Charleston not long before. The other was what we now call an “old veteran,” (i.e., he was a Connecticut youth, probably of less than the age of twenty-five years, the four last of which he [Page 773] had spent in active service in the war in all parts of the country.) The two were chatting of one thing and another. The fever soldier spoke of John C. Calhoun’s monument, which he had seen, and was describing it. The veteran said: “I have seen Calhoun’s monument. That you saw is not the real monument. But I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined south; nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty destroyed or maim’d; all the old families used up — the rich impoverish’d, the plantations cover’d with weeds, the slaves unloos’d and become the masters, and the name of southerner blacken’d with every shame — all that is Calhoun’s real monument.”

US CIVIL WAR

October 3, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HOSPITALS CLOSING There are two army hospitals now remaining. I went to the largest of these (Douglas) and spent the afternoon and evening. There are many sad cases, old wounds, incurable sickness, and some of the wounded from the March and April battles before Richmond. Few realize how sharp and bloody those closing battles were. Our men exposed themselves more than usual; press’d ahead without urging. Then the southerners fought with extra desperation. Both sides knew that with the successful chasing of the rebel cabal from Richmond, and the occupation of that city by the national troops, the game was up. The dead and wounded were unusually many. Of the wounded the last lingering driblets have been brought to hospital here. I find many rebel wounded here, and have been extra busy to-day ’tending to the worst cases of them with the rest.

US CIVIL WAR Edith Emerson got married with William Hathaway Forbes, a son of wealthy railroad magnate John Murray Forbes. The couple would make their home in Milton, Massachusetts and produce 6 sons and 2 daughters (this Forbes family would later finance and assist Alexander Graham Bell in developing and marketing the telephone). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

October-December: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Every Sunday of these months visited Harewood hospital out in the woods, pleasant and recluse, some two and a half or three miles north of the capitol. The situation is healthy, with broken ground, grassy slopes and patches of oak woods, the trees large and fine. It was one of the most extensive of the hospitals, now reduced to four or five partially occupied wards, the numerous others being vacant. In November, this became the last military hospital kept up by the government, all the others being closed. [Page 774] Cases of the worst and most incurable wounds, obstinate illness, and of poor fellows who have no homes to go to, are found here.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 10, Sunday: Richard Wagner was obliged to leave Bavaria. Accompanied by his servant and his dog, he left München by train for Bern, Switzerland. He was seen off by Peter Cornelius, Heinrich Porges, and Francesca Gaetana Cosima Liszt von Bülow Wagner.

King Leopold I of Belgium died in Laeken and was succeeded by his son Leopold II.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Again spending a good part of the day at Harewood. I write this about an hour before sundown. I have walk’d out for a few minutes to the edge of the woods to soothe myself with the hour and scene. It is a glorious, warm, golden-sunny, still afternoon. The only noise is from a crowd of cawing crows, on some trees three hundred yards distant. Clusters of gnats swimming and dancing in the air in all directions. The oak leaves are thick under the bare trees, and give a strong and delicious perfume. Inside the wards everything is gloomy. Death is there. As I enter’d, I was confronted by it the first thing; a corpse of a poor soldier, just dead, of typhoid fever. The attendants had just straighten’d the limbs, put coppers on the eyes, and were laying it out. The roads: A great recreation, the past three years, has been in taking long walks out from Washington, five, seven, perhaps ten miles and back; generally with my friend Peter Doyle, who is as fond of it as I am. Fine moonlight nights, over the perfect military roads, hard and smooth — or Sundays — we had these delightful walks, never to be forgotten. The roads connecting Washington and the numerous forts around the city, made one useful result, at any rate, out of the war.

TYPICAL SOLDIERS Even the typical soldiers I have been personally intimate with, — it seems to me if I were to make a list of them it would be like a city directory. Some few only have I mention’d in the foregoing pages — most are dead — a few yet living. There is Reuben Farwell, of Michigan, (little ‘Mitch’); Benton H. Wilson, color-bearer, 185th New York; Wm. Stansberry; Manvill Winterstein, Ohio; Bethuel Smith; Capt. Simms, of 51st New York, (kill’d at Petersburgh mine explosion,) Capt. Sam. Pooley and Lieut. Fred. McReady, same reg’t. Also, same reg’t., 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,) [Page 775] lieutenant, captain, major and lieut. colonel — was in the actions at Roanoke, Newbern, 2d Bull Run, Chantilly, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburgh, Vicksburgh, Jackson, the bloody conflicts of the Wilderness, and at Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, and afterwards around Petersburgh; at one of these latter was taken prisoner, and pass’d four or five months in secesh military prisons, narrowly escaping with life, from a severe fever, from starvation and half-nakedness in the winter. (What a history that 51st New York had! Went out early — march’d, fought everywhere — was in storms at sea, nearly wreck’d — storm’d forts — tramp’d hither and yon in Virginia, night and day, summer of ’62 — afterwards Kentucky and Mississippi — re-enlisted — was in all the engagements and campaigns, as above.) I strengthen and comfort myself much with the certainty that the capacity for just such regiments, (hundreds, thousands of them) is inexhaustible in the United States, and that there isn’t a county nor a township in the republic — nor a street in any city — but could turn out, and, on occasion, would turn out, lots of just such typical soldiers, whenever wanted.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1866

W.D. O’Connor’s THE GOOD GRAY POET, a prelude to his 1892 “The Carpenter” in which he would even more straightforwardly portray Walt Whitman as a Christ figure, and a prelude as well to David Warner’s 1990 “The Good G(r)ay Poet,” outing Whitman’s sexuality.

The poet Emily Dickinson, who had never bothered to read the poetry of Walt Whitman, at this point wrote to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, anent Susan’s and Austin’s vacation at the seashore, in such manner as to indicate to us that very likely she had been reading in CAPE COD: Was the sea cordial? Kiss him for Thoreau.

November 10, Saturday: John Burroughs reviewed, on the first 2 pages of the Boston Commonwealth, Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1867

John Burroughs accessed his having chummed around with his buddy Walt in Washington DC for purposes of 73 NOTES ON WALT WHITMAN AS POET AND PERSON.

73. You should understand this very clearly: for some people the legitimations offered during periods of warfare can be turned toward a whole lot of personal fun and games, and then these personal highs can later in life be transformed into “war stories.” Yes, this is shameful, but no, this is not so shameful that it is not done — instead, we simply resist perceiving its shamefulness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1868

The Times of London’s annual summary:

READ ABOUT THE YEAR

After reading “Leaves of Grass,” Mrs. Anne Burrows Gilchrist defended Walt Whitman’s use of banned words in “A woman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman” and said: “A quarrel with words is more or less a quarrel with meanings ...If the thing a word stands for exists (and what does not exist?), the word need never be ashamed of itself; the shorter and more direct the better. It is a gain to make friends with it, and see it in good company.”

(Soon Mrs. Gilchrist would move to be near Whitman.)

October 17, Saturday: Walt Whitman responded from Providence, Rhode Island to Peter Doyle, who had written him on the 14th: Dear Pete, According to announcement in my last, I have made a movement & change of base, from tumultuous, close-packed, world-like N. Y., to this half-rural, brisk, handsome, New England, third-class town. I came on here last Thursday. I came as guest of Thomas Davis, formerly M.C. from this city —arrived between 8 and 9 o’clock at night —found his carriage at the depot waiting for me —at the house (a sort of castle built of stone, on fine grounds, a mile & a half from the town) a hearty welcome from his hospitable wife, & a family of young ladies & children —a hot supper, a tip-top room &c. &c. —so you see, Pete, your old man is in clover. I have since been round the city & suburbs considerably. I am going down to Newport before I return. Invitations &c. are numerous. I am, in fact, already dividing myself between two hospitalities, part of the time with Mr. & Mrs. Davis, and part with Dr. & Mrs. Channing, old acquaintances of mine in another part of the city. I stopt last night at the house of the latter. It is on a high & pleasant hill at the side of the city, which it entirely overlooks. From the window of my room, I can look down across the city, the river, and off miles upon miles in the distance. The woods are a real spectacle, colored with all the rich colors of autumn. Yesterday it was beautiful & balmy beyond description, like the finest Indian summer. I wandered around, partly walking, partly in a carriage, a good part of the day. To-day there is an entire change of scene— As I sit writing this —what do you think, Pete? —great flakes of snow are falling, quite a thick flurry —sometimes the wind blows gusts —in fact a real snow storm has been going on all the forenoon, though without the look or feeling of actual winter as the grass & foliage are autumnal, & the cold is not severe yet. Still it [is] disagreeable & wet & damp & prevents me from going out. So I will make it up by writing a couple of HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN letters — one to mother, & one to you, telling you about things. Providence is a handsome city of about 70,000 inhabitants —has numerous manufactories in full operation —every thing looks lively. From the house up here, I can hear almost any time, night or day, the sound of factory bells & the steam whistles of locomotives half a mile distant. Then the lights at night seen from here make a curious exhibition. At both places I stop, we have plenty of ripe fresh fruit and lots of flowers. Pete, I could now send you a bouquet every morning, far better than I used to, of much choicer flowers. And how are you getting along, dearest comrade? I hope you are well, & that every thing is going on right with you. I have not heard from you for a good while, it seems. I suppose you got my last letter, 14th, from N.Y. I expect to return to N.Y. about the 22d. Should you feel to write after receiving this, you might direct to 331 East 55th st. as before. I am well as usual. I am luxuriating on excellent grapes. I wish I could send you a basket. At both places I stop they have vineyards, & the grapes are very good & plenty this year. Last night, when I went up at 11 o’clock to my room, I took up three great bunches, each as big as my fist, & sat down and eat them before I turned in. I like to eat them this way, & it agrees with me. It is quite a change here from my associations & surroundings either in Washington or New York. Evenings & meal times I find myself thrown amidst a mild, pleasant society, really intellectual, composed largely of educated women, some young, some not so young, every thing refined & polite, not disposed to small talk, conversing in earnest on profound subjects, but with a moderate rather slow tone, & in a kind & conciliatory manner — delighting in this sort of conversation, & spending their evenings till late in it. I take a hand in, for a change. I find it entertaining, as I say, for novelty’s sake, for a week or two — but I know very well that would be enough for me. It is all first-rate, good & smart, but too constrained & bookish for a free old hawk like me. I send you my love, dear Pete. So long. Will write from N.Y. soon as I return there. WW P.S. Just after 12 o’clock –noon– as I am just finishing, the storm lightens up —I am sure I see a bit of blue sky in the clouds —yes, the sun is certainly breaking out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN October 18, Sunday: In Cuba, rebel forces captured the town of Bayamo.

The Reverend William Rounseville Alger delivered a discourse on “The abuses and uses of church-going” at the 1st service of the Music-Hall Society in Boston.

Walt Whitman wrote again from Providence, Rhode Island to Peter Doyle, who had written him on the 15th: Dear boy & comrade, I sent off a letter to you yesterday noon, but towards evening Mr. Davis brought me up from the p.o. yours of the 15th, which I was so glad to get that you shall have an answer right off. After the flurry of snow I told you of yesterday morning, we had a pleasant clear afternoon. I took a long walk, partly through the woods, and enjoyed it much. The weather was pretty cold & sharp, & remains so yet. As I left my overcoat in Washington, I have been compelled to get something here —so I have bought me a great iron-grey shawl, which I find very acceptable. I always had doubts about a shawl, but have already got used to mine, & like it first rate. In the evening, I went by invitation to a party of ladies & gentlemen — mostly ladies. We had a warm, animated talk, among other things about Spiritualism. I talked too, indeed went in like a house afire. It was good exercise — for the fun of the thing. I also made love to the women, & flatter myself that I created at least one impression — wretch HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN & gay deceiver that I am. Then away late —lost my way —wandered over the city, & got home after one o’clock. The truth is, Peter, that I am here at present times mainly in the midst of female women, some of them young & jolly — & meet them most every evening in company — & the way in which this aged party comes up to the scratch & cuts out the youthful parties & fills their hearts with envy is absolutely a caution. You would be astonished, my son, to see the brass & coolness, & the capacity of flirtation & carrying on with the girls — I would never have believed it of myself. Brought here by destiny, surrounded in this way — & as I in self defence would modestly state — sought for, seized upon & ravingly devoured by these creatures — & so nice & smart some of them are, & handsome too — there is nothing left for me —is there— but to go in. Of course, young man, you understand, it is all on the square. My going in amounts to just talking & joking & having a devil of a jolly time, carrying on — that’s all. They are all as good girls as ever lived. I have already had three or four such parties here — which, you will certainly admit, considering my age & heft, to say nothing of my reputation, is doing pretty well. I go about quite a good deal — this is as handsome a city, as I ever saw. Some of the streets run up steep hills. Except in a few of the business streets, where the buildings are compact — in nine-tenths of the city, every house stands separate, & has a little or quite a deal of ground about it, for flowers, & for shade or fruit trees, or a garden. I never saw such a prosperous looking city — but of course no grand public buildings like Washington. This forenoon I have been out away down along the banks of the river & cove, & making explorations generally. All is new to me, & I returned quite tired. I have eat a hearty dinner. Then I thought I would come up & sit a while in my room. But as I did not feel like reading, I concluded to write this precious screed. Fortunate young man, to keep getting such instructive letters — aint you? It is now four o’clock & bright & cool, & I have staid in long enough. I will sally forth, on a walk, & drop this in the P.O. before supper. So long, dear Pete — & my love to you as always, always. W

October 19, Monday: Walt Whitman wrote from Providence, Rhode Island to Ellen M. O’Connor at the Treasury Department in Washington DC: Dear Nelly, I will just write you a line or two, anyhow. I am stopping the last three days here with Doctor and Jeannie & having a very pleasant time indeed — only Jeannie has had something of a bad spell — but is quite bright & comfortable this morning, & presided at breakfast. William is here — which adds much indeed to the pleasure of my visit — William has not recovered from an annoying cold, yet does pretty well — I have seen Mrs. Whitman, & like her — have seen her & talked &c. three times — have seen Miss Nora Perry — am going this afternoon to Thomas Davis’s to stay two or three days, & then return to New York — whence in two or three days more, to Washington. Mother is quite well for an old woman of 74 — speaks of you — is now in her new quarters — much roomier & pleasanter. Sister HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Martha & her two little girls have come on from St. Louis, and are now living with mother. George & Eddy are well. Mrs. Price & her girls are well & in good spirits — I am enjoying my vacation agreeably, but moderately — as becomes a gentleman of my size & age. Give my love to Mr. and Mrs. Ashton —also to Charley —also to dear little Jeannie— It will not be long, Nelly, before I shall be with you all again. Best love to you, dearest friend. Walt My last letter to William was also to you — though I suppose you did not see it yet.

October 20, Tuesday: Professor Joseph Norman Lockyer of the Royal College of Science in London, observing the spectra of the luminous gasses surrounding the sun, had inferred the existence of a gas there that is not present in the atmosphere of the planet Earth. On this day he reported his findings to the Royal Society. However, the astronomer Pierre Jules César Janssen of the Astrophysical Observatory at Meudon in France had also arrived at this conclusion, on the basis of his observation of a solar eclipse on August 18th in India, and on this day was writing to inform the French Academy of his discovery (these two scientists would therefore share the honors of primacy in the discovery of the element named “Helium” after the sun, Helios).

Walt Whitman wrote from Providence, Rhode Island to Charles W. Eldridge: Dear Charley, If the next Sunday Morning Chronicle contains a “personal” about me, would you do me the favor to get half a dozen copies, & keep for me? I shall doubtless return about the 26th — as my leave expires that day. (I wished to stay to vote, but have paired off with a vehement Seymourite, an old friend of mine.) I suppose Nelly received a letter I sent her yesterday, to your care. I am writing this in my room at Mr. & Mrs. Davis’s. I came here yesterday, after three most agreeable days with Dr. Channing & Jeannie. As I write, we are expecting a call from William O’C. as he promised yesterday to come over & see Mrs. D. and myself, & spend an hour or two. This afternoon, after dinner, Mr. Davis whom I like, & get along with first rate, is going to take me out to ride, down to the Point, as I wish to see more of the harbor & bay. I am treated on all sides with the greatest hospitality & courtesy — & yet left just as free as I wish to be. It is beautiful fall weather to-day. I go back to New York & Brooklyn on Thursday next. I am profoundly impressed with Providence, not only for its charming locality & features, but for its proof & expression of fine relations, as a city, to average human comfort, life, & family & individual independence & thrift — After all, New England for ever! — (with perhaps just one or two little reservations)— With love to you, Charley — & repeated again to dear Nelly. Yours truly Walt P.S. — Later –2 o’clock– William & Dr. Channing have been over here — staid to dinner — We had quite a gay time — indeed quite a little dinner party — William & Doctor, Mr & Mrs. Davis, Nora Perry, George Davis, Katy Hinds, & illustrious self — We are just through — Doctor has gone home, not wishing to leave Jeannie too long — William still remaining — I go presently on the drive with Mr. D. — and also to deposit this letter in P.O. W. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

October 21, Wednesday: There was a severe earthquake at 7:53AM in New-York.

Walt Whitman wrote from Providence, Rhode Island to Abby H. Price in New-York: Dear Abby, I shall return to New York to-morrow, Thursday — leaving here at ½ past 12, noon, and getting in N.Y. about 8 — & intend to go on to Washington on Monday next, 26th. I have been at the Channings’s — Jeannie is quite unwell — but bears it like the heroine she is — William O'Connor is there — I am now at Mr. & Mrs. Davis’s — Am treated with the greatest hospitality & courtesy every where. Yesterday Mr. Davis took me out riding — went down to Fields’ Point, off the bay — & thence to the domain & factories of the Spragues, & so to Olneysville &c &c — as interesting a ride & exploration as I ever had in my life— I have seen Mrs. Whitman — & like her. We had yesterday here to dinner & spend the evening Nora Perry, Wm O'Connor, Dr. Channing, &c — To-day Mrs. Davis had intended to take me out riding, but it is threatening rain, wind east, & skies dark — So it will have to be given up. I like Mr. Davis much. I am very glad I made this jaunt & visit— Love to you, Helen, Emily, & all. Walt

October 22, Thursday: The Corning Flint Glass Works began operations in Corning, New York.

In Monroe County, Arkansas, Congressman James Hinds was killed by a Ku Klux Klansman.

Walt Whitman wrote from Providence, Rhode Island to John Burroughs: Dear friend, I have been thinking about you this morning, and will write a few lines, though without any thing special to communicate. My vacation is nearly done, & in four or five days more I shall be back in Washington. I have been here in Providence the past week, as guest of Thomas Davis, a manufacturer here, & formerly M.C. — have had a good time generally, in a quiet way — am going on to New York this afternoon, & shall be back in Washington on the 27th— William O’Connor is here in Providence — I have been with him a good deal — he is not very well, but goes around— Will finish my letter in New York, & mail it thence to-morrow. Walt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1870

Walt Whitman appears to have been in distress during this period, perhaps due to faltering relations with Peter Doyle.

While writing CLAREL: A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE HOLY LAND, Herman Melville drew upon a conversation which he had heard between a Frenchman and a Swede aboard the packetship Southampton while traveling to Europe in October 1849. The conversation had been about the repudiation of Alphonse de Lamartine as a leader by the French public after the Bloody June Days of 1848. Melville identified with the repudiated French leader and considered that revolutionary activity on behalf of the common man was futile. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1872

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. put out a new edition of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST with significant changes.

Alexander Hay Japp’s MEMOIR OF N. HAWTHORNE.

In England, building the reputation of her father with the help of Robert Browning, Una Hawthorne prepared certain unfinished The Atlantic Monthly manuscripts as SEPTIMUS FELTON; OR, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. This would be prepared in Boston by James R. Osgood in terra-cotta cloth decoratively stamped in black and gilt, inside a half-morocco slipcase.

According to an “Afterward” on page 474 of the Dover Edition of Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, Henry Thoreau’s grave was moved from the New Burying Ground to

Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery “ten years or so after the original burial,” which would be at about this point. Walt Whitman would write about a visit he would make to Concord during the Fall of 1881, that he “spent a half hour at Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s graves. I got out and went up of course on foot, and stood a long while and ponder’d. They lie close together in a pleasant wooded spot well up the cemetery hill, ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ The flat surface of the first was densely cover’d by myrtle, with a border of arbor-vitae, and the other had a brown headstone, moderately elaborate, with inscriptions. By Henry’s side lies his brother John, of whom much was expected, but he died young.” Clearly, as of Whitman’s visit in 1881 at least, Henry’s grave DIGGING UP THE DEAD HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN had already been relocated to the tourist spot they were calling Authors’ Ridge, and clearly, the headstone Walt saw in 1881 was dissimilar to the severely plain and small one that is above Henry’s body now. One wonders what that inscription said. (By 1874 the old Thoreau family stones would be recycled to cover a drainage ditch, and new “neat, plain, brown” ones set in place above the graves. The cemetery association keeps spare gravestones for Henry’s grave in a shed somewhere, as these memorabilia do seem from time to time to wander away.)

The Brooks family house that stood where the Concord Free Public Library now stands, at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road, was at this point moved to 45 Hubbard Street.

Bronson Alcott’s CONCORD DAYS74 (pages 11-17):

74. Bronson Alcott. CONCORD DAYS (Boston: Roberts Brothers). Although this volume was issued in 1872, according to a date past the title page, it appears to be a series of journal entries (with some other stuff inserted) initiated between April and September of 1869. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN My friend and neighbor united these qualities of sylvan and human in a more remarkable manner than any whom it has been my happiness to know. Lover of the wild, he lived a borderer on the confines of civilization, jealous of the least encroachment upon his possessions. “Society were all but rude In his umbrageous solitude.”

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time; and had the human sentiment been as tender and pervading, would have given us pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus might have envied him the authorship had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it was, he came nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and brooks bewailed the absence of their Lycidas, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with nature, his muse breathed the spirit and voice of poetry. For when the heart is once divorced from the senses and all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled and the love that sings. The most welcome of companions was this plain countryman. One seldom meets with thoughts like his, coming so scented of mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog- days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping of pitchers,—then drink and be cool! He seemed one with things, of nature’s essence and core, knit of strong timbers,—like a wood and its inhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold,—the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self- poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he had the key to every animal’s brain, every plant; and were an Indian to flower forth and reveal the scents hidden in his cranium, it would not be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He belonged to the Homeric age,—was older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the race of heroes and one with the elements. He of all men seemed to be the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best example of an indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor, the Northman, whose name he bore. A peripatetic philosopher, and out-of-doors for the best part of his days and nights, he had manifold weather and seasons in him; the manners of an animal of probity and virtue unstained. Of all our moralists, he seemed the wholesomest, the busiest, and the best republican citizen in the world; always at home minding his own affairs. A little over-confident by genius, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, there was in him an integrity and love of justice that made possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics,—all the more welcome in his time of shuffling and pusillanimity. Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages had he lived before his day. Nor have we any so modern withal, so entirely his own HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN and ours: too purely so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birthright, and an author, his fame had not, at his decease, travelled far from the banks of the rivers he described in his books; but one hazards only the truth in affirming of his prose, that in substance and pith, it surpasses that of any naturalist of his time; and he is sure of large reading in the future. There are fairer fishes in his pages than any swimming in our streams; some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt never rivalled, a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music, and a greyhound he once had, meant for Adonis; frogs, better than any of Aristophanes; apples wilder than Adam’s. His senses seemed double, giving him access to secrets not easily read by others; in sagacity resembling that of the beaver, the bee, the dog, the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by some other, or seventh sense; dealing with objects as if they were shooting forth from his mind mythologically, thus completing the world all round to his senses; a creation of his at the moment. I am sure he knew the animals one by one, as most else knowable in his town; the plants, the geography, as Adam did in his Paradise, if indeed, he were not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces of exquisite sense, celebrations of Nature’s virginity exemplified by rare learning, delicate art, replete with observations as accurate as original; contributions of the unique to the natural history of his country, and without which it were incomplete. Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense and core of Cosmos as this footed intelligence. If one would learn the wealth of wit there was in this plain man, the information, the poetry, the piety, he should have accompanied him on an afternoon walk to Walden, or elsewhere about the skirts of his village residence. Pagan as he might outwardly appear, yet he was the hearty worshipper of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in nature,—a piece of russet probity and strong sense, that nature delighted to own and honor. His talk was suggestive, subtle, sincere, under as many masks and mimicries as the shows he might pass; as significant, substantial,—nature choosing to speak through his mouthpiece,— cynically, perhaps, and searching into the marrows of men and times he spoke of, to his discomfort mostly and avoidance. Nature, poetry, life,—not politics, not strict science, not society as it is,—were his preferred themes. The world was holy, the things seen symbolizing the things unseen, and thus worthy of worship, calling men out-of-doors and under the firmament for health and wholesomeness to be insinuated into their souls, not as idolaters, but as idealists. His religion was of the most primitive type, inclusive of all natural creatures and things, even to “the sparrow that falls to the ground,” though never by shot of his, and for whatsoever was manly in men, his worship was comparable to that of the priests and heroes of all time. I should say he inspired the sentiment of love, if, indeed, the sentiment did not seem to partake of something purer, were that possible, but nameless from its excellency. Certainly he was HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN better poised and more nearly self-reliant than other men. “The happy man who lived content With his own town, his continent, Whose chiding streams its banks did curb As ocean circumscribes its orb, Round which, when he his walk did take, Thought he performed far more than Drake; For other lands he took less thought Than this his muse and mother brought.” More primitive and Homeric than any American, his style of thinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built his sentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her own vigor and salubrity. Nothing can be spared from them; there is nothing superfluous; all is compact, concrete, as nature is. His politics were of a piece with his individualism. We must admit that he found little in political or religious establishment answering to his wants, that his attitude was defiant, if not annihilating, as if he had said to himself: — “The state is man’s pantry at most, and filled at an enormous cost,—a spoliation of the human common-wealth. Let it go. Heroes can live on nuts, and free-men sun themselves in the clefts of rocks, rather than sell their liberty for this pottage of slavery. We, the few honest neighbors, can help one another; and should the state ask any favors of us, we can take the matter into consideration leisurely, and at our convenience give a respectful answer. “But why require a state to protect one’s rights? the man is all. Let him husband himself; needs he other servant or runner? Selfkeeping is the best economy. That is a great age when the state is nothing and man is all. He founds himself in freedom, and maintains his uprightness therein; founds an empire and maintains states. Just retire from those concerns, and see how soon they must needs go to pieces, the sooner for the virtue thus withdrawn from them. All the manliness of individuals is sunk in that partnership in trade. Not only must I come out of myself, if I will be free and independent. Shall one be denied the privilege on coming of mature age of choosing whether he will be a citizen of the country he happens to be born in, or another? And what better title to a spot of ground than being a man, and having none? Is not man superior to state or country? I plead exemption from all interference by men or states with my individual prerogatives. That is mine which none can steal from me, nor is that yours which I or any man can take away.” “I am too high born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1873

Walt Whitman would report in the Camden Post for April 16, 1891, in regard to this year of 1873, that: “Memoranda”

This year lost, by death, my dear dear mother — and, just before, my sister Martha — the two best and sweetest women I have ever seen or known, or ever expect to see. Same year, February, a sudden climax and prostration from paralysis. Had been simmering inside for several years; broke out during those times temporarily, and then went over. But now a serious attack, beyond cure. Dr. Drinkard, my Washington physician, (and a first-rate one,) said it was the result of too extreme bodily and emotional strain continued at Washington and “down in front,” in 1863, ’4 and ’5. I doubt if a heartier, stronger, healthier physique, more balanced [Page 1298] upon itself, or more unconscious, more sound, ever lived, from 1835 to ’72. My greatest call (Quaker) to go around and do what I could there in those war- scenes where I had fallen, among the sick and wounded, was, that I seem’d to be so strong and well. (I consider’d myself invulnerable.) But this last attack shatter’d me completely. Quit work at Washington, and moved to Camden, New Jersey — where I have lived since, receiving many buffets and some precious caresses — and now write these lines. Since then, (1874-’91) a long stretch of illness, or half- illness, with occasional lulls. During these latter, have revised and printed over all my books — Bro’t out “November Boughs” — and at intervals leisurely and exploringly travel’d to the Prairie States, the Rocky Mountains, Canada, to New York, to my birthplace in Long Island, and to Boston. But physical disability and the war-paralysis above alluded to have settled upon me more and more, the last year or so. Am now (1891) domicil’d, and have been for some years, in this little old cottage and lot in Mickle Street, Camden, with a house-keeper and man nurse. Bodily I am completely disabled, but still write for publication. I keep generally buoyant spirits, write often as there comes any lull in physical sufferings, get in the sun and down to the river whenever I can, retain fair appetite, assimilation and digestion, sensibilities acute as ever, the strength and volition of my right arm good, eyesight dimming, but brain normal, and retain my heart’s and soul’s unmitigated faith not only in their own original literary plans, but in the essential bulk of American humanity east and west, north and south, city and country, through thick and thin, to the last. Nor must I forget, in conclusion, a special, prayerful, thankful God’s blessing to my dear firm friends and personal helpers, men and women, home and foreign, old and young.

January 23, Thursday: Walt Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke. He would have dizzy spells for more than a year.

May 23, Friday: Unable to work due to his stroke and dizzy spells, Walt Whitman moved from Washington DC to his brother George Washington Whitman’s home in Camden, New Jersey.

Incidental music to Ostrovsky’s play The Snow Maiden by Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky was performed for the initial time, at the Bolshoy Theater, Moscow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1874

November: A report from Walt Whitman in regard to the death by consumption, and the funeral, of William Alcott, a fireman of Camden, New Jersey: “Specimen Days”

Last Monday afternoon his widow, mother, relatives, mates of the fire department, and his other friends, (I was one, only lately it is true, but our love grew fast and close, the days and nights of those eight weeks by the chair of rapid decline, and the bed of death,) gather’d to the funeral of this young man, who had grown up, and was well-known here. With nothing special, perhaps, to record, I would give a word or two to his memory. He seem’d to me not an inappropriate specimen in character and elements, of that bulk of the average good American [Page 812] race that ebbs and flows perennially beneath this scum of eructations on the surface. Always very quiet in manner, neat in person and dress, good temper’d — punctual and industrious at his work, till he could work no longer — he just lived his steady, square, unobtrusive life, in its own humble sphere, doubtless unconscious of itself. (Though I think there were currents of emotion and intellect undevelop’d beneath, far deeper than his acquaintances ever suspected — or than he himself ever did.) He was no talker. His troubles, when he had any, he kept to himself. As there was nothing querulous about him in life, he made no complaints during his last sickness. He was one of those persons that while his associates never thought of attributing any particular talent or grace to him, yet all insensibly, really, liked Billy Alcott. I, too, loved him. At last, after being with him quite a good deal — after hours and days of panting for breath, much of the time unconscious, (for though the consumption that had been lurking in his system, once thoroughly started, made rapid progress, there was still great vitality in him, and indeed for four or five days he lay dying, before the close,) late on Wednesday night, Nov. 4th, where we surrounded his bed in silence, there came a lull — a longer drawn breath, a pause, a faint sigh — another — a weaker breath, another sigh — a pause again and just a tremble — and the face of the poor wasted young man (he was just 26,) fell gently over, in death, on my hand, on the pillow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1875

Walt Whitman met Harry Stafford in a Camden newspaper office (he would be spending a great deal of time at the Stafford home near Timber Creek, southeast of Camden, New Jersey).

November 16, Tuesday: Invading Egyptian forces were successfully ambushed by Abyssinian forces at Gundet.

Arthur Sullivan gave his initial performance as conductor of the Glasgow Choral Union.

A report from Walt Whitman in regard to Edgar Allan Poe, with whom in his youth he had met and conversed: “Specimen Days”

EDGAR POE’S SIGNIFICANCE The following from a report in the Washington “Star” of November 16, 1875, may afford those who care for it something further of my point of view toward this interesting figure and influence of our era. There occurr’d about that date in Baltimore a public reburial of Poe’s remains, and dedication of a monument over the grave: “Being in Washington on a visit at the time, ‘the old gray’ went over to Baltimore, and though ill from paralysis, consented to hobble up and silently take a seat on the platform, but refused to make any speech, saying, ‘I have felt a strong impulse to come over and be here to-day myself in memory of Poe, which I have obey’d, but not the slightest impulse to make a speech, which, my dear friends, must also be obeyed.’ In an informal circle, however, in conversation after the ceremonies, Whitman said: ‘For a long while, and until lately, I had a distaste for Poe’s writings. I wanted, and still want for poetry, the clear sun shining, and fresh air blowing — the strength and power of health, not of delirium, even amid the stormiest passions — with always the background of the eternal moralities. Non-complying [Page 874] with these requirements, Poe’s genius has yet conquer’d a special recognition for itself, and I too have come to fully admit it, and appreciate it and him. “‘In a dream I once had, I saw a vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm. It was no great full-rigg’d ship, nor majestic steamer, steering firmly through the gale, but seem’d one of those superb little schooner yachts I had often seen lying anchor’d, rocking so jauntily, in the waters around New York, or up Long Island sound — now flying uncontroll’d with torn sails and broken spars through the wild sleet and winds and waves of the night. On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems — themselves all lurid dreams.’” Much more may be said, but I most desired to exploit the idea put at the beginning. By its popular poets the calibres of an age, the weak spots of its embankments, its sub-currents, (often more significant than the biggest surface ones,) are unerringly indicated. The lush and the weird that have taken such extraordinary possession of Nineteenth century verse-lovers — what mean they? The inevitable tendency of poetic culture to morbidity, abnormal beauty — the sickliness of all technical thought or refinement in itself — the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth and sea, sex and the like — and the substitution of something for them at second or third hand — what bearings have they on current pathological study? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

Taking off from a remark that F. Scott Fitzgerald had made in “My Lost City,”75 that “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives,” Robert Milder, in his REIMAGINING THOREAU, comments on page 202 about Thoreau’s and Melville’s regeneration in contrast with Emerson’s and Whitman’s depletion: Paradoxically, it was Thoreau and Melville, writers commonly supposed to have burned out by their thirty-eighty year, who enjoyed that rarity in nineteenth-century American literary careers, a second act, or what Thoreau would have called a second spring. Where Emerson had completed most of his important work by 1845 and Whitman most of his by 1860, Melville and Thoreau reinvented themselves in another genre, for another age: Melville as the poet of the vastly underappreciated CLAREL, Thoreau as the poet-scientist just beginning to discover his subject and angle of vision when he died. The English widow Mrs. Anne Burrows Gilchrist, who had for some time been enamored of Walt by way of his published poetry, moved to Philadelphia in order to be near him (she would be there and in New England 3 years before giving up).

75. THE CRACK-UP AND OTHER ESSAYS, ed. Edmund Wilson. NY: New Directions, 1945, page 31. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Late Spring and Early Summer: Walt Whitman filed a report about this late spring and early summer: “Specimen Days”

I find the woods in mid-May and early June my best places for composition.1 Seated on logs or stumps there, or resting on rails, nearly all the following memoranda have been jotted down. Wherever I go, indeed, winter or summer, city or country, alone at home or traveling, I must take notes — (the ruling passion strong in age and disablement, and even the approach of — but I must not say it yet.) Then underneath the following excerpta — crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of certain moderate movements of late years — I am fain to fancy the foundations of quite a lesson learn’d. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, [Page 781] and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night. We will begin from these convictions. Literature flies so high and is so hotly spiced, that our notes may seem hardly more than breaths of common air, or draughts of water to drink. But that is part of our lesson.

Dear, soothing, healthy, restoration-hours — after three confining years of paralysis — after the long strain of the war, and its wounds and death.

ENTERING A LONG FARM-LANE As every man has his hobby-liking, mine is for a real farm-lane fenced by old chestnut-rails gray-green with dabs of moss and lichen, copious weeds and briers growing in spots athwart the heaps of stray-pick’d stones at the fence bases — irregular paths worn between, and horse and cow tracks — all characteristic accompaniments marking and scenting the neighborhood in their seasons — apple-tree blossoms in forward April — pigs, poultry, a field of August buckwheat, and in another the long flapping tassels of maize — and so to the pond, the expansion of the creek, the secluded-beautiful, with young and old trees, and such recesses and vistas.

1.Without apology for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere — after what I have put in the preceding fifty or sixty pages — temporary episodes, thank heaven! — I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life. Who knows, (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes falling fresh and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or workwoman? — or maybe in sick-room or prison — to serve as cooling breeze, or Nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent pulse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

TO THE SPRING AND BROOK So, still sauntering on, to the spring under the willows — musical as soft clinking glasses — pouring a sizeable stream, thick as my neck, pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth- roof — gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly — meaning, saying something, of course (if one could only translate it) — always gurgling there, the whole year through — never giving out — oceans of mint, blackberries in summer — choice of light and shade — just the place for my July sun-baths and water-baths too — but mainly the inimitable soft sound-gurgles of it, as I sit there hot afternoons. How they and all grow into me, day after day — everything in keeping — the wild, just-palpable [Page 782] perfume, and the dapple of leaf-shadows, and all the natural-medicinal, elemental-moral influences of the spot. Babble on, O brook, with that utterance of thine! I too will express what I have gather’d in my days and progress, native, subterranean, past — and now thee. Spin and wind thy way — I with thee, a little while, at any rate. As I haunt thee so often, season by season, thou knowest reckest not me, (yet why be so certain? who can tell?) — but I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee — receive, copy, print from thee.

AN EARLY SUMMER REVEILLLE Away then to loosen, to unstring the divine bow, so tense, so long. Away, from curtain, carpet, sofa, book — from “society” — from city house, street, and modern improvements and luxuries — away to the primitive winding, aforementioned wooded creek, with its untrimm’d bushes and turfy banks — away from ligatures, tight boots, buttons, and the whole cast-iron civilizee life — from entourage of artificial store, machine, studio, office, parlor — from tailordom and fashion’s clothes — from any clothes, perhaps, for the nonce, the summer heats advancing, there in those watery, shaded solitudes. Away, thou soul, (let me pick thee out singly, reader dear, and talk in perfect freedom, negligently, confidentially,) for one day and night at least, returning to the naked source-life of us all — to the breast of the great silent savage all-acceptive Mother. Alas! how many of us are so sodden — how many have wander’d so far away, that return is almost impossible. But to my jottings, taking them as they come, from the heap, without particular selection. There is little consecutiveness in dates. They run any time within nearly five or six years. Each was carelessly pencilled in the open air, at the time and place. The printers will learn this to some vexation perhaps, as much of their copy is from those hastily-written first notes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

BIRDS MIGRATING AT MIDNIGHT Did you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless [Page 783] armies, changing their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be forgotten. A friend called me up just after 12 last night to mark the peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating north (rather late this year.) In the silence, shadow and delicious odor of the hour, (the natural perfume belonging to the night alone,) I thought it rare music. You could hear the characteristic motion — once or twice “the rush of mighty wings,” but oftener a velvety rustle, long drawn out — sometimes quite near — with continual calls and chirps, and some song-notes. It all lasted from 12 till after 3. Once in a while the species was plainly distinguishable; I could make out the bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, white-crown’d sparrow, and occasionally from high in the air came the notes of the plover.

BUMBLE-BEES May-month — month of swarming, singing, mating birds — the bumble-bee month — month of the flowering lilac — (and then my own birth-month.) As I jot this paragraph, I am out just after sunrise, and down towards the creek. The lights, perfumes, melodies — the blue birds, grass birds and robins, in every direction — the noisy, vocal, natural concert. For undertones, a neighboring wood-pecker tapping his tree, and the distant clarion of chanticleer. Then the fresh earth smells — the colors, the delicate drabs and thin blues of the perspective. The bright green of the grass has receiv’d an added tinge from the last two days’ mildness and moisture. How the sun silently mounts in the broad clear sky, on his day’s journey! How the warm beams bathe all, and come streaming kissingly and almost hot on my face. A while since the croaking of the pond-frogs and the first white of the dogwood blossoms. Now the golden dandelions in endless profusion, spotting the ground everywhere. The white cherry and pear-blows — the wild violets, with their blue eyes looking up and saluting my feet, as I saunter the wood-edge — the rosy blush of budding apple-trees — the light-clear emerald hue of the wheat-fields — the darker green of the rye — a warm elasticity pervading the air — the cedar-bushes profusely deck’d with their little brown apples — the [Page 784] summer fully awakening — the convocation of black birds, garrulous flocks of them, gathering on some tree, and making the hour and place noisy as I sit near. Later: Nature marches in procession, in sections, like the corps of an army. All have done much for me, and still do. But for the last two days it has been the great wild bee, the humble-bee, or “bumble,” as the children call him. As I walk, or hobble, from the farm- house down to the creek, I traverse the before-mention’d lane, fenced by old rails, with many splits, splinters, breaks, holes, &c., the choice habitat of those crooning, hairy insects. Up and down and by and between these rails, they swarm and dart and fly in countless myriads. As I wend slowly along, I am often accompanied with a moving cloud of them. They play a leading part in my morning, midday or sunset rambles, and often dominate the landscape in a way I never before thought of — fill the long lane, not by scores or hundreds only, but by thousands. Large and vivacious and swift, with wonderful momentum and a loud swelling perpetual hum, varied now and then by something almost like a shriek, they dart to and fro, in rapid flashes, chasing each other, and (little things as they are,) conveying to me a new and pronounc’d sense of strength, beauty, vitality and movement. Are they in their mating season? or what is the meaning of this plenitude, swiftness, eagerness, display? As I walk’d, I thought I was follow’d by a particular swarm, but upon observation I saw that it was a rapid succession of changing swarms, one after another. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

As I write, I am seated under a big wild-cherry tree — the warm day temper’d by partial clouds and a fresh breeze, neither too heavy nor light — and here I sit long and long, envelop’d in the deep musical drone of these bees, flitting, balancing, darting to and fro about me by hundreds — big fellows with light yellow jackets, great glistening swelling bodies, stumpy heads and gauzy wings — humming their perpetual rich mellow boom. (Is there not a hint in it for a musical composition, of which it should be the background? some bumble-bee symphony?) How it all nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed; the open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards. The last two days have been faultless in sun, breeze, temperature and everything; never two more perfect days, [Page 785] and I have enjoy’d them wonderfully. My health is somewhat better, and my spirit at peace. (Yet the anniversary of the saddest loss and sorrow of my life is close at hand.) Another jotting, another perfect day: forenoon, from 7 to 9, two hours envelop’d in sound of bumble-bees and bird-music. Down in the apple-trees and in a neighboring cedar were three or four russet-back’d thrushes, each singing his best, and roulading in ways I never heard surpass’d. Two hours I abandon myself to hearing them, and indolently absorbing the scene. Almost every bird I notice has a special time in the year — sometimes limited to a few days — when it sings its best; and now is the period of these russet-backs. Meanwhile, up and down the lane, the darting, droning, musical bumble-bees. A great swarm again for my entourage as I return home, moving along with me as before. As I write this, two or three weeks later, I am sitting near the brook under a tulip tree, 70 feet high, thick with the fresh verdure of its young maturity — a beautiful object — every branch, every leaf perfect. From top to bottom, seeking the sweet juice in the blossoms, it swarms with myriads of these wild bees, whose loud and steady humming makes an undertone to the whole, and to my mood and the hour. All of which I will bring to a close by extracting the following verses from Henry A. Beers’s little volume: “As I lay yonder in tall grass A drunken bumble-bee went past Delirious with honey toddy. The golden sash about his body Scarce kept it in his swollen belly Distent with honeysuckle jelly. Rose liquor and the sweet-pea wine Had fill’d his soul with song divine; Deep had he drunk the warm night through, His hairy thighs were wet with dew. Full many an antic he had play’d While the world went round through sleep and shade. Oft had he lit with thirsty lip Some flower-cup’s nectar’d sweets to sip, When on smooth petals he would slip, [Page 786] Or over tangled stamens trip, And headlong in the pollen roll’d, Crawl out quite dusted o’er with gold; Or else his heavy feet would stumble Against some bud, and down he’d tumble Amongst the grass; there lie and grumble In low, soft bass — poor maudlin bumble!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

CEDAR-APPLES As I journey’d to-day in a light wagon ten or twelve miles through the country, nothing pleas’d me more, in their homely beauty and novelty (I had either never seen the little things to such advantage, or had never noticed them before) than that peculiar fruit, with its profuse clear-yellow dangles of inch-long silk or yarn, in boundless profusion spotting the dark-green cedar bushes — contrasting well with their bronze tufts — the flossy shreds covering the knobs all over, like a shock of wild hair on elfin pates. On my ramble afterward down by the creek I pluck’d one from its bush, and shall keep it. These cedar-apples last only a little while however, and soon crumble and fade.

June 10, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SUMMER SIGHTS AND INDOLENCIES As I write, 5 1/2 P.M., here by the creek, nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees in fulness of tender foliage — liquid, reedy, long-drawn notes of birds — based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds — and then off they swoop, with slanting wings [Page 787] and graceful flight, sometimes so near me I can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 19, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SUNDOWN PERFUME — QUAIL-NOTES — THE HERMIT-THRUSH … 4 to 6 1/2 P.M. — Sitting alone by the creek — solitude here, but the scene bright and vivid enough — the sun shining, and quite a fresh wind blowing (some heavy showers last night,) the grass and trees looking their best — the clare-obscure of different greens, shadows, half-shadows, and the dappling glimpses of the water, through recesses — the wild flageolet-note of a quail near by — the just-heard fretting of some hylas down there in the pond — crows cawing in the distance — a drove of young hogs rooting in soft ground near the oak under which I sit — some come sniffing near me, and then scamper away, with grunts. And still the clear notes of the quail — the quiver of leaf-shadows over the paper as I write — the sky aloft, with white clouds, and the sun well declining to the west — the swift darting of many sand-swallows coming and going, their holes in a neighboring marl- bank — the odor of the cedar and oak, so palpable, as evening approaches — perfume, color, the bronze-and-gold of nearly ripen’d wheat — clover-fields, with honey- scent — the well-up maize, with long and rustling leaves — the great patches of thriving potatoes, dusky green, fleck’d all over with white blossoms — the old, warty, venerable oak above me — and ever, mix’d with the dual notes of the quail, the soughing of the wind through some near-by pines. As I rise for return, I linger long to a delicious song-epilogue (is it the hermit- thrush?) from some bushy recess off there in the swamp, repeated leisurely and pensively over and over again. This, to the circle-gambols of the swallows flying by dozens in concentric rings in the last rays of sunset, like flashes of some airy wheel.

Summer: Walt Whitman heard the cicadas, “a long, chromatic, tremulous crescendo, like a brass disk whirling round and round, emitting wave after wave of notes, beginning with a certain moderate beat or measure, rapidly increasing in speed and emphasis, reaching a point of great energy and significance, and then quickly dropping down and out.”

Late during this summer Richard Wagner has an affair with Judith Gautier. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July: Walt Whitman heard the cicadas: “Specimen Days”

A JULY AFTERNOON BY THE POND The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air — the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with [Page 788] dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go) — the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color’d dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?) — the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes — occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by — the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade — the quawk of some pond duck — (the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas) — then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek — (what was the yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch’d legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?) — the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue — and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call “shoals of mackerel” — the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss’d hair, spreading, expanding — a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum — yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything — who knows? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 4, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

… 6 P.M. — Lights and shades and rare effects on tree-foliage and grass — transparent greens, grays, &c., all in sunset pomp and dazzle. The clear beams are now thrown in many new places, on the quilted, seam’d, bronze-drab, lower tree- trunks, shadow’d except at this hour — now flooding their young and old columnar ruggedness with strong light, unfolding to my sense new amazing features of silent, shaggy charm, the solid bark, the expression of harmless impassiveness, with many a bulge and gnarl unreck’d before. In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables, (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz’d extatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them — strength, which after all is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty. [Page 791] Trees I am familiar with here.

Oaks, (many kinds — one sturdy Sassafras. old fellow, vital, green, Willows. bushy, five feet thick at the Catalpas. butt, I sit under every day.) Persimmons. Cedars, plenty. Mountain-ash. Tulip trees, (Liriodendron, is Hickories. of the magnolia family — I Maples, many kinds. have seen it in Michigan and Locusts. southern Illinois, 140 feet Birches. high and 8 feet thick at the Dogwood. butt;1 Pine. does not transplant well; best the Elm. rais’d from seeds — the Chestnut. lumbermen call it yellow Linden. poplar.) Aspen. Sycamores. Spruce. Gum-trees, both sweet and sour. Hornbeam. Beeches. Laurel. Black-walnuts. Holly.

1.There is a tulip popular within sight of Woodstown, which is twenty feet around, three feet from the ground, four feet across about eighteen feet up the trunk, which is broken off about three or four feet higher up. On the south side an arm has shot out from which rise two stems, each to about ninety-one or ninety-two feet from the ground. Twenty-five (or more) years since the cavity in the butt was large enough for, and nine men at one time, ate dinner therein. It is supposed twelve to fifteen men could now, at one time, stand within its trunk. The severe winds of 1877 and 1878 did not seem to damage it, and the two stems send out yearly many blossoms, scenting the air immediately about it with their sweet perfume. It is entirely unprotected by other trees, on a hill. — Woodstown, N. J., “Register,” April 15, ’79. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 20, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

AUTUMN SIDE-BITS Under an old black oak, glossy and green, exhaling aroma — amid a grove the Albic druids might have chosen — envelop’d in the warmth and light of the noonday sun, and swarms of flitting insects — with the harsh cawing of many crows a hundred rods away — here I sit in solitude, absorbing, enjoying all. The corn, stack’d in its cone-shaped stacks, russet-color’d and sere — a large field spotted thick with scarlet-gold pumpkins — an adjoining one of cabbages, [Page 792] showing well in their green and pearl, mottled by much light and shade — melon patches, with their bulging ovals, and great silver-streak’d, ruffled, broad-edged leaves — and many an autumn sight and sound beside — the distant scream of a flock of guinea-hens — and pour’d over all the September breeze, with pensive cadence through the tree tops. Another Day: The ground in all directions strew’d with debris from a storm. Timber creek, as I slowly pace its banks, has ebb’d low, and shows reaction from the turbulent swell of the late equinoctial. As I look around, I take account of stock — weeds and shrubs, knolls, paths, occasional stumps, some with smooth’d tops, (several I use as seats of rest, from place to place, and from one I am now jotting these lines,) — frequent wild-flowers, little white, star-shaped things, or the cardinal red of the lobelia, or the cherry-ball seeds of the perennial rose, or the many-threaded vines winding up and around trunks of trees.

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “To be witty is to satisfy another’s wits by the bestowal on him of two pleasures, that of understanding one thing and that of guessing another, and so achieving a double stroke. Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his thought directly; he disguises and suggests it by imagery, allusion, hyperbole; he overlays it with light irony and feigned anger, with gentle mischief and assumed humility. The more the thing to be guessed differs from the thing said, the more pleasant surprise there is for the interlocutor or the correspondent concerned. These charming and delicate ways of expression allow a man to teach what he will without pedantry, and to venture what he will without offense. There is something Attic and aerial in them; they mingle grave and gay, fiction and truth, with a light grace of touch such as neither La Fontaine nor Alcibiades would have been ashamed of. Socratic badinage like this presupposes a free and equal mind, victorious over physical ill and inward discontents. Such delicate playfulness is the exclusive heritage of those rare natures in whom subtlety is the disguise of superiority, and taste its revelation. “What balance of faculties and cultivation it requires! What personal distinction it shows! Perhaps only a valetudinarian would have been capable of this morbidezza of touch, this marriage of virile thought and feminine caprice. If there is excess anywhere, it lies perhaps in a certain effeminacy of sentiment. Doudan can put up with nothing but what is perfect — nothing but what is absolutely harmonious; all that is rough, harsh, powerful, brutal, and unexpected, throws him into convulsions. Audacity — boldness of all kinds — repels him. This Athenian of the Roman time is a true disciple of Epicurus in all matters of sight, hearing, and intelligence — a crumpled rose-leaf disturbs him. ”Une ombre, un souffle, un rien, tout lui donnait la fièvre.” What all this softness wants is strength, creative and muscular force. His range is not as wide as I thought it at first. The classical world and the Renaissance — that is to say, the horizon of La Fontaine — is his horizon. He is out of his element in the German or Slav literatures. He knows nothing of Asia. Humanity for him is not much larger than France, and he has never made a bible of Nature. In music and painting he is more or less exclusive. In philosophy he stops at Kant. To sum up: he is a man of exquisite and ingenious taste, but he is not a first-rate critic, still less a poet, philosopher, or artist. He was an admirable talker, a delightful letter HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN writer, who might have become an author had he chosen to concentrate himself. I must wait for the second volume in order to review and correct this preliminary impression. Midday: I have now gone once more through the whole volume, lingering over the Attic charm of it, and meditating on the originality and distinction of the man’s organization. Doudan was a keen penetrating psychologist, a diviner of aptitudes, a trainer of minds, a man of infinite taste and talent, capable of every nuance and of every delicacy; but his defect was a want of persevering energy of thought, a lack of patience in execution. Timidity, unworldliness, indolence, indifference, confined him to the role of the literary counsellor and made him judge of the field in which he ought rather to have fought. But do I mean to blame him? — no indeed! In the first place, it would be to fire on my allies; in the second, very likely he chose the better part. Was it not Goethe who remarked that in the neighborhood of all famous men we find men who never achieve fame, and yet were esteemed by those who did, as their equals or superiors? Descartes, I think, said the same thing. Fame will not run after the men who are afraid of her. She makes mock of those trembling and respectful lovers who deserve but cannot force her favors. The public is won by the bold, imperious talents — by the enterprising and the skillful. It does not believe in modesty, which it regards as a device of impotence. The golden book contains but a section of the true geniuses; it names those only who have taken glory by storm.”

October 4, Wednesday: Johannes Rebmann died of pneumonia at the age of 56.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Cloudy and coolish; signs of incipient winter. Yet pleasant here, the leaves thick- falling, the ground brown with them already; rich coloring, yellows of all hues, pale and dark-green, shades from lightest to richest red — all set in and toned down by the prevailing brown of the earth and gray of the sky. So, winter is coming; and I yet in my sickness. I sit here amid all these fair sights and vital influences, and abandon myself to that thought, with its wandering trains of speculation. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Early November: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

At its farther end the lane already described opens into a broad grassy upland field of over twenty acres, slightly sloping to the south. Here I am accustom’d to walk for sky views and effects, either morning or sundown. To-day from this field my soul is calm’d and expanded beyond description, the whole forenoon by the clear blue arching over all, cloudless, nothing particular, only sky and daylight. Their soothing accompaniments, autumn leaves, the cool dry air, the faint aroma — crows cawing in the distance — two great buzzards wheeling gracefully and slowly far up there — the occasional murmur of the wind, sometimes quite gently, then threatening through the trees — a gang of farm-laborers loading corn-stalks in a field in sight, and the patient horses waiting.

COLORS — A CONTRAST Such a play of colors and lights, different seasons, different hours of the day — the lines of the far horizon where the faint-tinged edge of the landscape loses itself in the sky. As I slowly hobble up the lane toward day-close, an incomparable sunset shooting in molten sapphire and gold, shaft after shaft, through the ranks of the long-leaved corn, between me and the west. Another day: The rich dark green of the tulip-trees and the oaks, the gray of the swamp-willows, the dull hues of the sycamores and black-walnuts, the emerald of the cedars (after rain,) and the light yellow of the beeches.

November 8, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

The forenoon leaden and cloudy, not cold or wet, but indicating both. As I hobble down here and sit by the silent pond, how different from the excitement amid which, in the [Page 795] cities, millions of people are now waiting news of yesterday’s Presidential election, or receiving and discussing the result — in this secluded place uncared-for, unknown.

November 14, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

CROWS AND CROWS As I sit here by the creek, resting after my walk, a warm languor bathes me from the sun. No sound but a cawing of crows, and no motion but their black flying figures from overhead, reflected in the mirror of the pond below. Indeed a principal feature of the scene to-day is these crows, their incessant cawing, far or near, and their countless flocks and processions moving from place to place, and at times almost darkening the air with their myriads. As I sit a moment writing this by the bank, I see the black, clear-cut reflection of them far below, flying through the watery looking-glass, by ones, twos, or long strings. All last night I heard the noises from their great roost in a neighboring wood. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1877

January 28, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman of what he said at the celebration of the 140th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s birthday (“T.P.’s birth-day”) at Lincoln Hall in Philadelphia PA: “Specimen Days”

IN MEMORY OF THOMAS PAINE Some thirty-five years ago, in New York city, at Tammany hall, of which place I was then a frequenter, I happen’d to become quite well acquainted with Thomas Paine’s perhaps most intimate chum, and certainly his later years’ very frequent companion, a remarkably fine old man, Col. Fellows, who may yet be remember’d by some stray relics of that period and spot. If you will allow me, I will first give a description of the Colonel himself. He was tall, of military bearing, aged about 78 I should think, hair white as snow, clean-shaved on the face, dress’d very neatly, a tail-coat of blue cloth with metal buttons, buff vest, pantaloons of drab color, and his neck, breast and wrists showing the whitest of linen. Under all circumstances, fine manners; a good but not profuse talker, his wits still fully about him, balanced and live and undimm’d as ever. He kept pretty fair health, though so old. For employment — for he was poor — he had a post as constable of some of the upper courts. I used to think him very [Page 798] picturesque on the fringe of a crowd holding a tall staff, with his erect form, and his superb, bare, thick-hair’d, closely-cropt white head. The judges and young lawyers, with whom he was ever a favorite, and the subject of respect, used to call him Aristides. It was the general opinion among them that if manly rectitude and the instincts of absolute justice remain’d vital anywhere about New York City Hall, or Tammany, they were to be found in Col. Fellows. He liked young men, and enjoy’d to leisurely talk with them over a social glass of toddy, after his day’s work, (he on these occasions never drank but one glass,) and it was at reiterated meetings of this kind in old Tammany’s back parlor of those days, that he told me much about Thomas Paine. At one of our interviews he gave me a minute account of Paine’s sickness and death. In short, from those talks, I was and am satisfied that my old friend, with his mark’d advantages, had mentally, morally and emotionally gauged the author of “Common Sense,” and besides giving me a good portrait of his appearance and manners, had taken the true measure of his interior character. Paine’s practical demeanor, and much of his theoretical belief, was a mixture of the French and English schools of a century ago, and the best of both. Like most old-fashion’d people, he drank a glass or two every day, but was no tippler, nor intemperate, let alone being a drunkard. He lived simply and economically, but quite well — was always cheery and courteous, perhaps occasionally a little blunt, having very positive opinions upon politics, religion, and so forth. That he labor’d well and wisely for the States in the trying period of their parturition, and in the seeds of their character, there seems to me no question. I dare not say how much of what our Union is owning and enjoying to-day — its independence — its ardent belief in, and substantial practice of, radical human rights — and the severance of its government from all ecclesiastical and superstitious dominion — I dare not say how much of all this is owing to Thomas Paine, but I am inclined to think a good portion of it decidedly is. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

IN MEMORY OF THOMAS PAINE [CONCLUDED] But I was not going either into an analysis or eulogium of the man. I wanted to carry you back a generation or two, and give you by indirection a moment’s glance — and also to ventilate a very earnest and I believe authentic opinion, nay conviction, [Page 799] of that time, the fruit of the interviews I have mention’d, and of questioning and cross-questioning, clench’d by my best information since, that Thomas Paine had a noble personality, as exhibited in presence, face, voice, dress, manner, and what may be call’d his atmosphere and magnetism, especially the later years of his life. I am sure of it. Of the foul and foolish fictions yet told about the circumstances of his decease, the absolute fact is that as he lived a good life, after its kind, he died calmly and philosophically, as became him. He served the embryo Union with most precious service — a service that every man, woman and child in our thirty-eight States is to some extent receiving the benefit of to-day — and I for one here cheerfully, reverently throw my pebble on the cairn of his memory. As we all know, the season demands — or rather, will it ever be out of season? — that America learn to better dwell on her choicest possession, the legacy of her good and faithful men — that she well preserve their fame, if unquestion’d — or, if need be, that she fail not to dissipate what clouds have intruded on that fame, and burnish it newer, truer and brighter, continually.

February 3, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A TWO HOURS’ ICE-SAIL From 4 to 6 P.M. crossing the Delaware, (back again at my Camden home,) unable to make our landing, through the ice; our boat stanch and strong and skilfully piloted, but old and sulky, and poorly minding her helm. (Power, so important in poetry and war, is also first point of all in a winter steamboat, with long stretches of ice- packs to tackle.) For over two hours we bump’d and beat about, the invisible ebb, sluggish but irresistible, often carrying us long distances against our will. In the first tinge of dusk, as I look’d around, I thought there could not be presented a more chilling, arctic, grim-extended, depressing scene. Everything was yet plainly visible; for miles north and south, ice, ice, ice, mostly broken, but some big cakes, and no clear water in sight. The shores, piers, surfaces, roofs, shipping, mantled with snow. A faint winter vapor hung a fitting accompaniment around and over the endless whitish spread, and gave it just a tinge of steel and brown. [Page 800] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 6, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

As I cross home in the 6 P.M. boat again, the transparent shadows are filled everywhere with leisurely falling, slightly slanting, curiously sparse but very large, flakes of snow. On the shores, near and far, the glow of just-lit gas- clusters at intervals. The ice, sometimes in hummocks, sometimes floating fields, through which our boat goes crunching. The light permeated by that peculiar evening haze, right after sun-set, which sometimes renders quite distant objects so distinctly.

Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “I spent the evening with the ——, and we talked of the anarchy of ideas, of the general want of culture, of what it is which keeps the world going, and of the assured march of science in the midst of universal passion and superstition. What is rarest in the world is fair-mindedness, method, the critical view, the sense of proportion, the capacity for distinguishing. The common state of human thought is one of confusion, incoherence, and presumption, and the common state of human hearts is a state of passion, in which equity, impartiality, and openness to impressions are unattainable. Men’s wills are always in advance of their intelligence, their desires ahead of their will, and accident the source of their desires; so that they express merely fortuitous opinions which are not worth the trouble of taking seriously, and which have no other account to give of themselves than this childish one: I am, because I am. The art of finding truth is very little practiced; it scarcely exists, because there is no personal humility, nor even any love of truth among us. We are covetous enough of such knowledge as may furnish weapons to our hand or tongue, as may serve our vanity or gratify our craving for power; but self- knowledge, the criticism of our own appetites and prejudices, is unwelcome and disagreeable to us. Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares nothing for truth, who rebels against personal discipline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of self- education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see himself as he is. The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, imperfect keyboards, so many specimens of restless or stagnant chaos — and what makes their situation almost hopeless is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There is no curing a sick man who believes himself in health.”

February 10, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SPRING OVERTURES — RECREATIONS The first chirping, almost singing, of a bird to-day. Then I noticed a couple of honey-bees spirting and humming about the open window in the sun. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 11, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

In the soft rose and pale gold of the declining light, this beautiful evening, I heard the first hum and preparation of awakening spring — very faint — whether in the earth or roots, or starting of insects, I know not — but it was audible, as I lean’d on a rail (I am down in my country quarters awhile,) and look’d long at the western horizon. Turning to the east, Sirius, as the shadows deepen’d, came forth in dazzling splendor. And great Orion; and a little to the north-east the big Dipper, standing on end.

February 20, Tuesday: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New-York opened.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A solitary and pleasant sundown hour at the pond, exercising arms, chest, my whole body, by a tough oak sapling thick as my wrist, twelve feet high — pulling and pushing, inspiring the good air. After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine. Then for addition and variety I launch forth in my vocalism; shout declamatory pieces, sentiments, sorrow, anger, &c., from the stock poets or plays — or inflate my lungs and sing the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs I learn’d in the army. I make the echoes ring, I tell you! As the twilight fell, in a pause of these ebullitions, an owl somewhere the other side of the creek sounded too-oo-oo-oo-oo, soft and pensive (and I fancied a little sarcastic) repeated four or five times. Either to applaud the negro songs — or perhaps an ironical comment on the sorrow, anger, or style of the stock poets. [Page 801]

ONE OF THE HUMAN KINKS How is it that in all the serenity and lonesomeness of solitude, away off here amid the hush of the forest, alone, or as I have found in prairie wilds, or mountain stillness, one is never entirely without the instinct of looking around, (I never am, and others tell me the same of themselves, confidentially,) for somebody to appear, or start up out of the earth, or from behind some tree or rock? Is it a lingering, inherited remains of man’s primitive wariness, from the wild animals? or from his savage ancestry far back? It is not at all nervousness or fear. Seems as if something unknown were possibly lurking in those bushes, or solitary places. Nay, it is quite certain there is — some vital unseen presence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 22, Thursday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

AN AFTERNOON SCENE Last night and to-day rainy and thick, till mid-afternoon, when the wind chopp’d round, the clouds swiftly drew off like curtains, the clear appear’d, and with it the fairest, grandest, most wondrous rainbow I ever saw, all complete, very vivid at its earth-ends, spreading vast effusions of illuminated haze, violet, yellow, drab-green, in all directions overhead, through which the sun beam’d — an indescribable utterance of color and light, so gorgeous yet so soft, such as I had never witness’d before. Then its continuance: a full hour pass’d before the last of those earth-ends disappear’d. The sky behind was all spread in translucent blue, with many little white clouds and edges. To these a sunset, filling, dominating the esthetic and soul senses, sumptuously, tenderly, full. I end this note by the pond, just light enough to see, through the evening shadows, the western reflections in its water-mirror surface, with inverted figures of trees. I hear now and then the flup of a pike leaping out, and rippling the water.

Despite gains on the battlefield the Satsuma Samurai were unable to defeat the Imperial Japanese troops. They therefore dug in to besiege Kumamoto Castle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 6, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE GATES OPENING Palpable spring indeed, or the indications of it. I am sitting in bright sunshine, at the edge of the creek, the [Page 802] surface just rippled by the wind. All is solitude, morning freshness, negligence. For companions my two kingfishers sailing, winding, darting, dipping, sometimes capriciously separate, then flying together. I hear their guttural twittering again and again; for awhile nothing but that peculiar sound. As noon approaches other birds warm up. The reedy notes of the robin, and a musical passage of two parts, one a clear delicious gurgle, with several other birds I cannot place. To which is join’d, (yes, I just hear it,) one low purr at intervals from some impatient hylas at the pond-edge. The sibilant murmur of a pretty stiff breeze now and then through the trees. Then a poor little dead leaf, long frost-bound, whirls from somewhere up aloft in one wild escaped freedom-spree in space and sunlight, and then dashes down to the waters, which hold it closely and soon drown it out of sight. The bushes and trees are yet bare, but the beeches have their wrinkled yellow leaves of last season’s foliage largely left, frequent cedars and pines yet green, and the grass not without proofs of coming fulness. And over all a wonderfully fine dome of clear blue, the play of light coming and going, and great fleeces of white clouds swimming so silently.

THE COMMON EARTH, THE SOIL The soil, too — let others pen-and-ink the sea, the air, (as I sometimes try) — but now I feel to choose the common soil for theme — naught else. The brown soil here, (just between winter-close and opening spring and vegetation) — the rain- shower at night, and the fresh smell next morning — the red worms wriggling out of the ground — the dead leaves, the incipient grass, and the latent life underneath — the effort to start something — already in shelter’d spots some little flowers — the distant emerald show of winter wheat and the rye-fields — the yet naked trees, with clear interstices, giving prospects hidden in summer — the tough fallow and the plow-team, and the stout boy whistling to his horses for encouragement — and there the dark fat earth in long slanting stripes upturn’d. [Page 803] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

BIRDS AND BIRDS AND BIRDS A little later — bright weather: An unusual melodiousness, these days, (last of April and first of May) from the blackbirds; indeed all sorts of birds, darting, whistling, hopping or perch’d on trees. Never before have I seen, heard, or been in the midst of, and got so flooded and saturated with them and their performances, as this current month. Such oceans, such successions of them. Let me make a list of those I find here: Black birds (plenty,) Meadow-larks (plenty,) Ring doves, Cat-birds (plenty,) Owls, Cuckoos, Woodpeckers, Pond snipes (plenty,) King-birds, Cheewinks, Crows (plenty,) Quawks, Wrens, Ground robins, Kingfishers, Ravens, Quails, Gray Snipes, Turkey-buzzards, Eagles, Hen-hawks, High-holes, Yellow birds, Herons, Thrushes, Tits, Reed birds, Woodpigeons.

Early came the Blue birds, Meadow lark, Killdeer, White-bellied swallow, Plover, Sandpiper, Robin, Wilson’s thrush Woodcock, Flicker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 21, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

FULL-STARR’D NIGHTS Back in Camden. Again commencing one of those unusually transparent, full-starr’d, blue-black nights, as if to show that however lush and pompous the day may be, there is something left in the not-day that can outvie it. The rarest, finest sample of long-drawn-out clear-obscure, from sundown to 9 o’clock. I went down to the Delaware, and cross’d and cross’d. Venus like blazing silver well up in the west. The large pale thin crescent of the new moon, half an hour high, sinking languidly under a bar-sinister of cloud, and then [Page 804] emerging. Arcturus right overhead. A faint fragrant sea-odor wafted up from the south. The gloaming, the temper’d coolness, with every feature of the scene, indescribably soothing and tonic — one of those hours that give hints to the soul, impossible to put in a statement. (Ah, where would be any food for spirituality without night and the stars?) The vacant spaciousness of the air, and the veil’d blue of the heavens, seem’d miracles enough. As the night advanc’d it changed its spirit and garments to ampler stateliness. I was almost conscious of a definite presence, Nature silently near. The great constellation of the Water-Serpent stretch’d its coils over more than half the heavens. The Swan with outspread wings was flying down the Milky Way. The northern Crown, the Eagle, Lyra, all up there in their places. From the whole dome shot down points of light, rapport with me, through the clear blue-black. All the usual sense of motion, all animal life, seem’d discarded, seem’d a fiction; a curious power, like the placid rest of Egyptian gods, took possession, none the less potent for being impalpable. Earlier I had seen many bats, balancing in the luminous twilight, darting their black forms hither and yon over the river; but now they altogether disappear’d. The evening star and the moon had gone. Alertness and peace lay calmly couching together through the fluid universal shadows. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 29, Saturday: A verbatim extract by Walt Whitman from a letter to him from his friend John Burroughs at Esopus-on-Hudson, in the Hudson River valley, in regard to the death of Charles Caswell: “Specimen Days”

... S. was away when your picture came, attending his sick brother, Charles — who has since died — an event that has sadden’d me much. Charlie was younger than S., and a most attractive young fellow. He work’d at my father’s, and had done so for two years. He was about the best specimen of a young country farm-hand I ever knew. You would have loved him. He was like one of your poems. With his great strength, his blond hair, his cheerfulness and contentment, his universal good will, and his silent manly ways, he was a youth hard to match. He was murder’d by an old doctor. He had typhoid fever, and the old fool bled him twice. He lived to wear out [Page 813] the fever, but had not strength to rally. He was out of his head nearly all the time. In the morning, as he died in the afternoon, S. was standing over him, when Charlie put up his arms around S.’s neck, and pull’d his face down and kiss’d him. S. said he knew then the end was near. (S. stuck to him day and night to the last.) When I was home in August, Charlie was cradling on the hill, and it was a picture to see him walk through the grain. All work seem’d play to him. He had no vices, any more than Nature has, and was belov’d by all who knew him.

I have written thus to you about him, for such young men belong to you; he was of your kind. I wish you could have known him. He had the sweetness of a child, and the strength and courage and readiness of a young Viking. His mother and father are poor; they have a rough, hard farm. His mother works in the field with her husband when the work presses. She has had twelve children.

October 6, sunrise: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE FIRST FROST — MEMS Where I was stopping I saw the first palpable frost, on my sunrise walk, October 6; all over the yet-green spread a light blue-gray veil, giving a new show to the entire landscape. I had but little time to notice it, for the sun rose cloudless and mellow-warm, and as I returned along the lane it had turn’d to glittering patches of wet. As I walk I notice the bursting pods of wild-cotton, (Indian hemp they call it here,) with flossy-silky contents, and dark red-brown seeds — a startled rabbit — I pull a handful of the balsamic life-everlasting and stuff it down in my trowsers-pocket for scent. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN December 20, Thursday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THREE YOUNG MEN’S DEATHS Somehow I got thinking to-day of young men’s deaths — not at all sadly or sentimentally, but gravely, realistically, perhaps a little artistically. Let me give the following three cases from budgets of personal memoranda, which I have been turning over, alone in my room, and resuming and dwelling on, this rainy afternoon. Who is there to whom the theme does not come home? Then I don’t know how it may be to others, but to me not only is there nothing gloomy or depressing in such cases — on the contrary, as reminiscences, I find them soothing, bracing, tonic.

ERASTUS HASKELL. — [I just transcribe verbatim from a letter written by myself in one of the army hospitals, 16 years ago, during the secession war.]

In Mexico, José Martí got married with another Cuban, Carmen Zayas Bazán. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1878

February: Former Governor of the Kansas Territory Robinson wrote: “I never had much doubt that Capt. John Brown was the author of the blow at Pottawatomie, for the reason that he was the only man who comprehended the situation, and saw the absolute necessity of some such blow, and had the nerve to strike it.”

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

FEBRUARY DAYS Mid-afternoon. — One of my nooks is south of the barn, and here I am sitting now, on a log, still basking in the sun, shielded from the wind. Near me are the cattle, feeding on corn-stalks. Occasionally a cow or the young bull (how handsome and bold he is!) scratches and munches the far end of the log on which I sit. The fresh milky odor is quite perceptible, also the perfume of hay from the barn. The perpetual rustle of dry corn-stalks, the low sough of the wind round the barn gables, the grunting of pigs, the distant whistle of a locomotive, and occasional crowing of chanticleers, are the sounds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 19, Tuesday: Mr. Thomas Alva Edison another US patent for a “phonograph.”

Ballstrauschen op.380, a polka schnell by Johann Strauss, was performed for the initial time, in the Sophiensaal, Vienna.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Cold and sharp last night — clear and not much wind — the full moon shining, and a fine spread of constellations and little and big stars — Sirius very bright, rising early, preceded by many-orb’d Orion, glittering, vast, sworded, and chasing with his dog. The earth hard frozen, and a stiff glare of ice over the pond. Attracted by the calm splendor of the night, I attempted a short walk, but was driven back by the cold. Too severe for me also at 9 o’clock, when I came out this morning, so I turn’d back again. But now, near noon, I have walk’d down the lane, basking all the way in the sun (this farm has a pleasant southerly exposure,) and here I am, seated under the lee of a bank, close by the water. There are blue-birds already flying about, and I hear much chirping and twittering and two or three real songs, sustain’d quite awhile, in the mid-day brilliance and warmth. (There! that is a true carol, coming out boldly and repeatedly, as if the singer meant it.) Then as the noon strengthens, the reedy trill of the robin — to my ear the most cheering of bird-notes. At intervals, like bars and breaks (out of the low murmur that in any scene, however quiet, is never entirely absent to a delicate ear,) the occasional crunch and cracking of the ice-glare congeal’d over the creek, as it gives way to the sunbeams — sometimes [Page 815] with low sigh — sometimes with indignant, obstinate tug and snort.

(Robert Burns says in one of his letters: “There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more — I do not know if I should call it pleasure — but something which exalts me — something which enraptures me — than to walk in the shelter’d side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season of devotion.” Some of his most characteristic poems were composed in such scenes and seasons.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 16, Friday: The Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy was transferred by Sweden to French control.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A MEADOW LARK Fine, clear, dazzling morning, the sun an hour high, the air just tart enough. What a stamp in advance my whole day receives from the song of that meadow lark perch’d on a fence-stake twenty rods distant! Two or three liquid-simple notes, repeated at intervals, full of careless happiness and hope. With its peculiar shimmering slow progress and rapid-noiseless action of the wings, it flies on a ways, lights on another stake, and so on to another, shimmering and singing many minutes.

May 6, Monday, 5 P.M: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SUNDOWN LIGHTS This is the hour for strange effects in light and shade — enough to make a colorist go delirious — long spokes of molten silver sent horizontally through the trees (now in their brightest tenderest green,) each leaf and branch of endless foliage a lit-up miracle, then lying all prone on the youthful-ripe, interminable grass, and giving the blades not only aggregate but individual splendor, in ways unknown to any other hour. I have particular spots where I get these effects in their perfection. One broad splash lies on the water, with many a rippling twinkle, offset by the rapidly deepening black-green murky-transparent shadows behind, and at intervals all along the banks. These, with great shafts of horizontal fire thrown among the trees and along the grass as the sun lowers, give effects more and more peculiar, more and more superb, unearthly, rich and dazzling. [Page 816] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 2, Sunday: Dr. Karl Nobiling of Posen (Poznan) attacked and severely wounded Kaiser Wilhelm. The assassin then attempted to kill himself, but would linger from his self-inflicted wounds for 3 months. Chancellor Bismarck used the event to suppress the Social Democrats, although no-one had a clue as to this assassin’s motives.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THOUGHTS UNDER AN OAK — A DREAM This is the fourth day of a dark northeast storm, wind and rain. Day before yesterday was my birthday. I have now enter’d on my 60th year. Every day of the storm, protected by overshoes and a waterproof blanket, I regularly come down to the pond, and ensconce myself under the lee of the great oak; I am here now writing these lines. The dark smoke-color’d clouds roll in furious silence athwart the sky; the soft green leaves dangle all round me; the wind steadily keeps up its hoarse, soothing music over my head — Nature’s mighty whisper. Seated here in solitude I have been musing over my life — connecting events, dates, as links of a chain, neither sadly nor cheerily, but somehow, to-day here under the oak, in the rain, in an unusually matter-of-fact spirit. But my great oak — sturdy, vital, green — five feet thick at the butt. I sit a great deal near or under him. Then the tulip tree near by — the Apollo of the woods — tall and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could walk, if it only would. (I had a sort of dream-trance the other day, in which I saw my favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around, very curiously — with a whisper from one, leaning down as he pass’d me, We do all this on the present occasion, exceptionally, just for you.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 15, Saturday: In a 1st attempt at motion pictures a dozen cameras were lined up one after another, each snapping one image (this was being done in order to settle once and for all for the benefit of Leland Stanford in California the hotly debated issue of whether or not a horse that is in full gallop always has at least one hoof touching the ground, as is depicted in all artistic representations of the gallop).

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

AN UNKNOWN To-day I noticed a new large bird, size of a nearly grown hen — a haughty, white- bodied dark-wing’d hawk — I suppose a hawk from his bill and general look — only he had a clear, loud, quite musical, sort of bell-like call, which he repeated again and again, at intervals, from a lofty dead tree-top, overhanging the water. Sat there a long time, and I on the opposite bank watching him. Then he darted down, skimming pretty close to the stream — rose slowly, a magnificent sight, and sail’d with steady wide-spread wings, no flapping at all, up and down the pond two or three times, near me, in circles in clear sight, as if for my delectation. Once he came quite close over my head; I saw plainly his hook’d bill and hard restless eyes.

BIRD-WHISTLING How much music (wild, simple, savage, doubtless, but so tart-sweet,) there is in mere whistling. It is four-fifths of the utterance of birds. There are all sorts and styles. For the last half-hour, now, while I have been sitting here, some feather’d fellow away off in the bushes has been repeating over and over again what I may call a kind of throbbing whistle. And now a bird about the robin size has just appear’d, all mulberry red, flitting among the bushes — head, wings, body, deep red, not very bright — no song, as I have heard.

4 o’clock: There is a real concert going on around me — a dozen different birds pitching in with a will. There have been occasional rains, and the growths all show its vivifying influences. As I finish this, seated on a log close by the pond-edge, much chirping and trilling in the distance, and a feather’d recluse in the woods near by is singing deliciously — not many notes, but full of music of almost human sympathy — continuing for a long, long while. [Page 818] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 20, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman:76 “Specimen Days”

JAUNT UP THE HUDSON On the “Mary Powell,” enjoy’d everything beyond precedent. The delicious tender summer day, just warm enough — the constantly changing but ever beautiful panorama on both sides of the river — (went up near a hundred miles) — the high straight walls of the stony Palisades — beautiful Yonkers, and beautiful Irvington — the never-ending hills, mostly in rounded lines, swathed with verdure, — the distant turns, like great shoulders in blue veils — the frequent gray and brown of the tall-rising rocks — the river itself, now narrowing, now expanding — the white sails of the many sloops, yachts, &c., some near, some in the distance — the rapid succession of handsome villages and cities, (our boat is a swift traveler, and makes few stops) — the Race — picturesque West Point, and indeed all along — the costly and often turreted mansions forever showing in some cheery light color, through the woods — make up the scene.

June 21, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HAPPINESS AND RASPBERRIES Here I am, on the west bank of the Hudson, 80 miles north of New York, near Esopus, at the handsome, roomy, honeysuckle-and-rose-embower’d cottage of John Burroughs. The place, the perfect June days and nights, (leaning toward crisp and cool,) the hospitality of J. and Mrs. B., the air, the fruit, (especially my favorite dish, currants and raspberries, mixed, sugar’d, fresh and ripe from the bushes — I pick ’em myself) — the room I occupy at night, the perfect bed, the window giving an ample view of the Hudson and the opposite shores, so wonderful toward sunset, and the rolling music of the RR. trains, far over there — the peaceful rest — the early Venus-heralded dawn — the noiseless splash of sunrise, the light and warmth indescribably glorious, in which, (soon as the sun is well up,) I have a capital rubbing and rasping with the flesh-brush — with an extra scour on the back by Al. J., who is here with us — all inspiriting my invalid frame with new life, for the day. Then, after some whiffs of morning air, the delicious coffee of Mrs. B., with the cream, strawberries, and many substantials, for breakfast.

76. Whitman refers here to Irvington, New York, a village near Tarrytown on the Hudson associated with the memory of Washington Irving, not to the industrial city of Irvington, New Jersey, which has been renamed from “Camptown” in his honor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 22, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A SPECIMEN TRAMP FAMILY This afternoon we went out (J. B., Al. and I) on quite a drive around the country. The scenery, the perpetual stone fences, (some venerable old fellows, dark-spotted with lichens) — the many fine locust-trees — the runs of brawling water, often over descents of rock — these, and lots else. It is lucky the roads are first-rate here, (as they are,) for it is up or down hill everywhere, and sometimes steep enough. B. has a tip-top horse, strong, young, and both gentle and fast. There is a great deal of waste land and hills on the river edge of Ulster county, with a wonderful luxuriance of wild flowers and bushes — and it seems to me I never saw more vitality of trees — eloquent hemlocks, plenty of locusts andfine maples, and the balm of Gilead, giving out aroma. In the fields and along the road-sides unusual crops of the tall-stemm’d wild daisy, white as milk and yellow as gold. We pass’d quite a number of tramps, singly or in couples — one squad, a family in a rickety one-horse wagon, with some baskets evidently their work and trade — the man seated on a low board, in front, driving — the gauntish woman by his side, with a baby well bundled in her arms, its little red feet and lower legs sticking out right towards us as we pass’d — and in the wagon behind, we saw two (or three) crouching little children. It was a queer, taking, rather sad picture. If I had been alone and on foot, I should have stopp’d and held [Page 822] confab. But on our return nearly two hours afterward, we found them a ways further along the same road, in a lonesome open spot, haul’d aside, unhitch’d, and evidently going to camp for the night. The freed horse was not far off, quietly cropping the grass. The man was busy at the wagon, the boy had gather’d some dry wood, and was making a fire — and as we went a little further we met the woman afoot. I could not see her face, in its great sun-bonnet, but somehow her figure and gait told misery, terror, destitution. She had the rag-bundled, half-starv’d infant still in her arms, and in her hands held two or three baskets, which she had evidently taken to the next house for sale. A little barefoot five-year old girl-child, with fine eyes, trotted behind her, clutching her gown. We stopp’d, asking about the baskets, which we bought. As we paid the money, she kept her face hidden in the recesses of her bonnet. Then as we started, and stopp’d again, Al., (whose sympathies were evidently arous’d,) went back to the camping group to get another basket. He caught a look of her face, and talk’d with her a little. Eyes, voice and manner were those of a corpse, animated by electricity. She was quite young — the man she was traveling with, middle-aged. Poor woman — what story was it, out of her fortunes, to account for that inexpressibly scared way, those glassy eyes, and that hollow voice? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 25, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

MANHATTAN FROM THE BAY Returned to New York last night. Out to-day on the waters for a sail in the wide bay, southeast of Staten island — a rough, tossing ride, and a free sight — the long stretch of Sandy Hook, the highlands of Navesink, and the many vessels outward and inward bound. We came up through the midst of all, in the full sun. I especially enjoy’d the last hour or two. A moderate sea-breeze had set in; yet over the city, and the waters adjacent, was a thin haze, concealing nothing, only adding to the beauty. From my point of view, as I write amid the soft breeze, with a sea- temperature, surely nothing on earth of its kind can go beyond this show. To the left the North river with its far vista — nearer, three or four war-ships, anchor’d peacefully — the Jersey side, the banks of Weehawken, the Palisades, and the gradually receding [Page 823] blue, lost in the distance — to the right the East river — the mast-hemm’d shores — the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side, in haze, yet plainly defin’d, giant brothers twain, throwing free graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled tumultuous current below — (the tide is just changing to its ebb) — the broad water-spread everywhere crowded — no, not crowded, but thick as stars in the sky — with all sorts and sizes of sail and steam vessels, plying ferry-boats, arriving and departing coasters, great ocean Dons, iron-black, modern, magnificent in size and power, fill’d with their incalculable value of human life and precious merchandise — with here and there, above all, those daring, careening things of grace and wonder, those white and shaded swift-darting fish-birds, (I wonder if shore or sea elsewhere can outvie them,) ever with their slanting spars, and fierce, pure, hawk-like beauty and motion — first-class New York sloop or schooner yachts, sailing, this fine day, the free sea in a good wind. And rising out of the midst, tall-topt, ship-hemm’d, modern, American, yet strangely oriental, V-shaped Manhattan, with its compact mass, its spires, its cloud-touching edifices group’d at the centre — the green of the trees, and all the white, brown and gray of the architecture well blended, as I see it, under a miracle of limpid sky, delicious light of heaven above, and June haze on the surface below. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

HUMAN AND HEROIC NEW YORK The general subjective view of New York and Brooklyn — (will not the time hasten when the two shall be municipally united in one, and named Manhattan?) — what I may call the human interior and exterior of these great seething oceanic populations, as I get it in this visit, is to me best of all. After an absence of many years, (I went away at the outbreak of the secession war, and have never been back to stay since,) again I resume with curiosity the crowds, the streets I knew so well, Broadway, the ferries, the west side of the city, democratic Bowery — human appearances and manners as seen in all these, and along the wharves, and in the perpetual travel of the horse-cars, or the crowded excursion steamers, or in Wall and Nassau streets by day — in the places of amusement at [Page 824] night — bubbling and whirling and moving like its own environment of waters — endless humanity in all phases — Brooklyn also — taken in for the last three weeks. No need to specify minutely — enough to say that (making all allowances for the shadows and side-streaks of a million-headed-city) the brief total of the impressions, the human qualities, of these vast cities, is to me comforting, even heroic, beyond statement. Alertness, generally fine physique, clear eyes that look straight at you, a singular combination of reticence and self-possession, with good nature and friendliness — a prevailing range of according manners, taste and intellect, surely beyond any elsewere upon earth — and a palpable outcropping of that personal comradeship I look forward to as the subtlest, strongest future hold of this many- item’d Union — are not only constantly visible here in these mighty channels of men, but they form the rule and average. To-day, I should say — defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions — an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger for this republic of ours — fully aware of all that can be said on the other side — I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken — the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land and water the globe affords — namely, Manhattan island and Brooklyn, which the future shall join in one city — city of superb democracy, amid superb surroundings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 3, Wednesday-5, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

CLOVER AND HAY PERFUME Clear, hot, favorable weather — has been a good summer — the growth of clover and grass now generally mow’d. The familiar delicious perfume fills the barns and lanes. As you go along you see the fields of grayish white slightly tinged with yellow, the loosely stack’d grain, the slow-moving wagons passing, and farmers in the fields with stout boys pitching and loading the sheaves. The corn is about beginning to tassel. All over the middle and southern states the spear-shaped battalia, multitudinous, curving, flaunting — long, glossy, dark-green plumes for the great horseman, earth. I hear the cheery notes of my old acquaintance Tommy quail; but too late for the whip-poor-will, (though I heard one solitary lingerer night before last.) I [Page 817] watch the broad majestic flight of a turkey- buzzard, sometimes high up, sometimes low enough to see the lines of his form, even his spread quills, in relief against the sky. Once or twice lately I have seen an eagle here at early candle-light flying low. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 14, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THREE OF US My two kingfishers still haunt the pond. In the bright sun and breeze and perfect temperature of to-day, noon, I am sitting here by one of the gurgling brooks, dipping a French water-pen in the limpid crystal, and using it to write these lines, again watching the feather’d twain, as they fly and sport athwart the water, so close, almost touching into its surface. Indeed there seem to be three of us. For nearly an hour I indolently look and join them while they dart and turn and take their airy gambols, sometimes far up the creek disappearing for a few moments, and then surely returning again, and performing most of their flight within sight of me, as if they knew I appreciated and absorb’d their vitality, spirituality, faithfulness, and the rapid, vanishing, delicate lines of moving yet quiet electricity they draw for me across the spread of the grass, the trees, and the blue sky. While the brook babbles, babbles, and the shadows of the boughs dapple in the sunshine around me, and the cool west by-nor’-west wind faintly soughs in the thick bushes and tree tops. Among the objects of beauty and interest now beginning to appear quite plentifully in this secluded spot, I notice the humming-bird, the dragon-fly with its wings of slate-color’d gauze, and many varieties of beautiful and plain butterflies, idly flapping among the plants and wild posies. The mullein has shot up out of its nest of broad leaves, to a tall stalk towering sometimes five or six feet high, now studded with [Page 819] knobs of golden blossoms. The milk-weed, (I see a great gorgeous creature of gamboge and black lighting on one as I write,) is in flower, with its delicate red fringe; and there are profuse clusters of a feathery blossom waving in the wind on taper stems. I see lots of these and much else in every direction, as I saunter or sit. For the last half hour a bird has persistently kept up a simple, sweet, melodious song, from the bushes. (I have a positive conviction that some of these birds sing, and others fly and flirt about here, for my especial benefit.)

DEATH OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT I gazed upon the glorious sky, And the green mountains round, And thought that when I came to lie At rest within the ground, ’Twere pleasant that in flowery June, When brooks send up a joyous tune, And groves a cheerful sound, The sexton’s hand, my grave to make, The rich green mountain turf should break. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 22, Thursday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

HORSE-MINT Not a human being, and hardly the evidence of one, in sight. After my brief semi- daily bath, I sit here for a bit, the brook musically brawling, to the chromatic tones of a fretful cat-bird somewhere off in the bushes. On my walk hither two hours since, through fields and the old lane, I stopt to view, now the sky, now the mile-off woods on the hill, and now the apple orchards. What a contrast from New York’s or Philadelphia’s streets! Everywhere great patches of dingy-blossom’d horse-mint wafting a spicy odor through the air, (especially evenings.) Everywhere the flowering boneset, and the rose-bloom of the wild bean.

September 17, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Another presentation — same theme — just before sunrise again, (a favorite hour with me.) The clear gray sky, a faint glow in the dull liver-color of the east, the cool fresh odor and the moisture — the cattle and horses off there grazing in the fields — the star Venus again, two hours high. For sounds, the chirping of crickets in the grass, the clarion of chanticleer, and the distant cawing of an early crow. Quietly over the dense fringe of cedars and pines rises that dazzling, red, transparent disk of flame, and the low sheets of white vapor roll and roll into dissolution.

October: Returning from his European tour, Thomas Wentworth Higginson settled permanently in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After organizing the Cuban Revolutionary Committee (Comité Revolucionario Cubano), Major General Calixto García Iñiguez issued a manifesto inviting all Cubans to unite in the fight against Spanish rule.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Walt Whitman” appeared in New Quarterly Magazine. WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1879

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s WORKS appeared in 24 volumes.

Henry James, Jr.’s biography of Hawthorne was the 1st book-length critical study ever made of an American author. This author’s contribution to American letters was pronounced by this critic, who had known him personally, to have been a modest one (which, actually, was a considerably more favorable evaluation than what he had opinioned about the poetry of Walt Whitman). READ THIS BIOGRAPHY

Walt Whitman reported on Western jurisprudence: “Specimen Days”

ON TO DENVER — A FRONTIER INCIDENT The jaunt of five or six hundred miles from Topeka to Denver took me through a variety of country, but all unmistakably prolific, western, American, and on the largest scale. For a long distance we follow the line of the Kansas river, (I like better the old name, Kaw,) a stretch of very rich, dark soil, famed for its wheat, and call’d the Golden Belt — then plains and plains, hour after hour — Ellsworth county, the centre of the State — where I must stop a moment to tell a characteristic story of early days — scene the very spot where I am passing — time 1868. In a scrimmage at some public gathering in the town, A. had shot B. quite badly, but had not kill’d him. The sober men of Ellsworth conferr’d with one another and decided that A. deserv’d punishment. As they wished to set a good example and establish their reputation the reverse of a Lynching town, they open an informal court and bring both [Page 855] men before them for deliberate trial. Soon as this trial begins the wounded man is led forward to give his testimony. Seeing his enemy in durance and unarm’d, B. walks suddenly up in a fury and shoots A. through the head — shoots him dead. The court is instantly adjourn’d, and its unanimous members, without a word of debate, walk the murderer B. out, wounded as he is, and hang him. In due time we reach Denver, which city I fall in love with from the first, and have that feeling confirm’d, the longer I stay there. One of my pleasantest days was a jaunt, via Platte cañon, to Leadville. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 12, Sunday: José Martí was appointed as Secretary of the Literary Section of the Guanabacoa Lyceum in Havana.

An early purchaser of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, the Boston lawyer Horatio Woodman, seems to have been unsuccessful in learning from this advice book how to live a life of simplicity and straightforwardness. At this point it would appear that, in considerable stress due to self-induced financial and legal difficulties, he committed suicide, dropping from a steamboat into the Long Island Sound:

TIMELINE OF WALDEN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A January night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Fine trips across the wide Delaware to-night. Tide pretty high, and a strong ebb. River, a little after 8, full of ice, mostly broken, but some large cakes making our strong-timber’d steamboat hum and quiver as she strikes them. In the clear moonlight they spread, strange, unearthly, silvery, faintly glistening, as far as I can see. Bumping, trembling, sometimes hissing like a thousand snakes, the tide- procession, as we wend with or through it, affording a grand undertone, in keeping with the scene. Overhead, the splendor indescribable; yet something haughty, almost supercilious, in the night. Never did I realize more latent sentiment, almost passion, in those silent interminable stars up there. One can understand, such a night, why, from the days of the Pharaohs or Job, the dome of heaven, sprinkled with planets, has supplied the subtlest, deepest criticism on human pride, glory, ambition.

Another Winter night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

I don’t know anything more filling than to be on the wide firm deck of a powerful boat, a clear, cool, extra-moonlight night, crushing proudly and resistlessly through this thick, marbly, glistening ice. The whole river is now spread with it — some immense cakes. There is such weirdness about the scene — partly the quality of the light, with its tinge of blue, the lunar twilight — only the large stars holding their own in the radiance of the moon. Temperature sharp, comfortable for motion, dry, full of oxygen. But the sense of power — the steady, scornful, imperious urge of our strong new engine, as she ploughs her way through the big and little cakes.

Another Winter night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days” For two hours I cross’d and recross’d, merely for pleasure — for a still excitement. Both sky and river went through several changes. The first for awhile held two vast fan-shaped echelons of light clouds, through which the moon waded, now radiating, carrying with her an aureole of tawny transparent brown, and now flooding the whole vast with clear vapory light-green, through which, as through an illuminated veil, she moved with measur’d womanly motion. Then, another trip, the heavens would be absolutely clear, and Luna in all her effulgence. The big Dipper in the north, with the double star in the handle much plainer than common. Then the sheeny track of light in the water, dancing and rippling. Such transformations; such pictures and poems, inimitable. [Page 836] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Another Winter night: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

I am studying the stars, under advantages, as I cross to-night. (It is late in February, and again extra clear.) High toward the west, the Pleiades, tremulous with delicate sparkle, in the soft heavens. Aldebaran, leading the V-shaped Hyades — and overhead Capella and her kids. Most majestic of all, in full display in the high south, Orion, vast-spread, roomy, chief histrion of the stage, with his shiny yellow rosette on his shoulder, and his three Kings — and a little to the east, Sirius, calmly arrogant, most wondrous single star. Going late ashore, (I couldn’t give up the beauty and soothingness of the night,) as I staid around, or slowly wander’d, I heard the echoing calls of the railroad men in the West Jersey depot yard, shifting and switching trains, engines, &c.; amid the general silence otherways, and something in the acoustic quality of the air, musical, emotional effects, never thought of before. I linger’d long and long, listening to them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 5, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

DELAWARE RIVER — DAYS AND NIGHTS With the return of spring to the skies, airs, waters of the Delaware, return the sea-gulls. I never tire of watching their broad and easy flight, in spirals, or as they oscillate with slow unflapping wings, or look down with curved beak, or dipping to the water after food. The crows, plenty enough all through the winter, have vanish’d with the ice. Not one of them now to be seen. The steamboats have again come forth — bustling up, handsome, freshly painted, for summer work — the Columbia, the Edwin Forrest, (the Republic not yet out,) the Reybold, the Nelly White, the Twilight, the Ariel, the Warner, the Perry, the Taggart, the Jersey Blue — even the hulky old Trenton — not forgetting those saucy little bull-pups of the current, the steamtugs. But let me bunch and catalogue the affair — the river itself, all the way from the sea — cape Island on one side and Henlopen light on the other — up the broad bay north, and so to Philadelphia, and on further to Trenton; — the sights I am most familiar with, (as I live a good part of the time in Camden, I view matters from that outlook) — the great arrogant, black, full-freighted ocean steamers, inward or outward bound — the ample width here between the two cities, intersected by Windmill island — an occasional man-of-war, sometimes a foreigner, at anchor, with her guns and port-holes, and the boats, and the brown-faced sailors, and the regular oar-strokes, and the gay crowds of “visiting day” — the frequent large and handsome three-masted schooners, (a favorite style of marine build, hereabout of late years,) some of them new and very jaunty, with their white-gray sails and yellow pine spars — the sloops dashing along in a fair wind — (I see one now, coming up, under broad canvas, her gaff-topsail shining in the sun, high and picturesque — what a thing of beauty amid the sky and waters!) — the crowded wharf-slips along the city — the flags of different nationalities, the sturdy English cross on its ground of blood, the French tricolor, the banner of the great North German empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors — sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole scene enliven’d by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester; — the neat, rakish, [Page 833] revenue steamer “Hamilton” in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting aft — and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally across from the Kensington or Richmond shores, in the west-by-south-west wind. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

SCENES ON FERRY AND RIVER — LAST WINTER’S NIGHTS Then the Camden ferry. What exhilaration, change, people, business, by day. What soothing, silent, wondrous hours, at night, crossing on the boat, most all to myself — pacing the deck, alone, forward or aft. What communion with the waters, the air, the exquisite chiaroscuro — the sky and stars, that speak no word, nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so communicative to the soul. And the ferry men — little they know how much they have been to me, day and night — how many spells of listlessness, ennui, debility, they and their hardy ways have dispell’d. And the pilots — captains Hand, Walton, and Giberson by day, and captain Olive at night; Eugene Crosby, with his strong young arm so often supporting, circling, convoying me over the gaps of the bridge, through impediments, safely aboard. Indeed all my ferry friends — captain Frazee the superintendent, Lindell, Hiskey, Fred Rauch, Price, Watson, and a dozen more. And the ferry itself, with its queer scenes — sometimes children suddenly born in the waiting- houses (an actual fact — and more than once) — sometimes a masquerade party, going over at night, with a band of music, dancing and whirling like mad on the broad deck, in their fantastic dresses; sometimes the astronomer, Mr. Whitall, (who posts me up in points about the stars by a living lesson there and then, and answering every question) — sometimes a prolific family group, eight, nine, ten, even twelve! (Yesterday, as I cross’d, a mother, father, and eight children, waiting in the ferry-house, bound westward somewhere.) I have mention’d the crows. I always watch them from the boats. They play quite a part in the winter scenes on the river, by day. Their black splatches are seen in relief against the snow and ice everywhere at that season — sometimes flying [Page 834] and flapping — sometimes on little or larger cakes, sailing up or down the stream. One day the river was mostly clear — only a single long ridge of broken ice making a narrow stripe by itself, running along down the current for over a mile, quite rapidly. On this white stripe the crows were congregated, hundreds of them — a funny procession — (“half mourning” was the comment of some one.) Then the reception room, for passengers waiting — life illustrated thoroughly. Take a March picture I jotted there two or three weeks since. Afternoon, about 3 1/2 o’clock, it begins to snow. There has been a matinee performance at the theater — from 4 1/4 to 5 comes a stream of homeward bound ladies. I never knew the spacious room to present a gayer, more lively scene — handsome, well-drest Jersey women and girls, scores of them, streaming in for nearly an hour — the bright eyes and glowing faces, coming in from the air — a sprinkling of snow on bonnets or dresses as they enter — the five or ten minutes’ waiting — the chatting and laughing — (women can have capital times among themselves, with plenty of wit, lunches, jovial abandon) — Lizzie, the pleasant-manner’d waiting room woman — for sound, the bell-taps and steam-signals of the departing boats with their rhythmic break and undertone — the domestic pictures, mothers with bevies of daughters, (a charming sight) — children, countrymen — the railroad men in their blue clothes and caps — all the various characters of city and country represented or suggested. Then outside some belated passenger frantically running, jumping after the boat. Towards six o’clock the human stream gradually thickening — now a pressure of vehicles, drays, piled railroad crates — now a drove of cattle, making quite an excitement, the drovers with heavy sticks, belaboring the steaming sides of the frighten’d brutes. Inside the reception room, business bargains, flirting, love-making, eclaircissements, proposals — pleasant, sober-faced Phil coming in with his burden of afternoon papers — or Jo, or Charley (who jump’d in the dock last week, and saved a stout lady from drowning,) to replenish the stove, after clearing it with long crow-bar poker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

April 23, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

UP THE HUDSON TO ULSTER COUNTY Off to New York on a little tour and visit. Leaving the hospitable, home-like quarters of my valued friends, [Page 839] Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston — took the 4 P.M. boat, bound up the Hudson, 100 miles or so. Sunset and evening fine. Especially enjoy’d the hour after we passed Cozzens’s landing — the night lit by the crescent moon and Venus, now swimming in tender glory, and now hid by the high rocks and hills of the western shore, which we hugg’d close. (Where I spend the next ten days is in Ulster county and its neighborhood, with frequent morning and evening drives, observations of the river, and short rambles.)

April 24, Thursday, noon: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A little more and the sun would be oppressive. The bees are out gathering their bread from willows and other trees. I watch them returning, darting through the air or lighting on the hives, their thighs covered with the yellow forage. A solitary robin sings near. I sit in my shirt sleeves and gaze from an open bay- window on the indolent scene — the thin haze, the Fishkill hills in the distance — off on the river, a sloop with slanting mainsail, and two or three little shad- boats. Over on the railroad opposite, long freight trains, sometimes weighted by cylinder-tanks of petroleum, thirty, forty, fifty cars in a string, panting and rumbling along in full view, but the sound soften’d by distance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 26, Saturday: Richard Wagner completed an instrumental score for Act III of his libretto Parsifal. LISTEN TO IT NOW

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

DAYS AT J.B.’S TURF-FIRES — SPRING SONGS At sunrise, the pure clear sound of the meadow lark. An hour later, some notes, few and simple, yet delicious and perfect, from the bush-sparrow — towards noon the reedy trill of the robin. To-day is the fairest, sweetest yet — penetrating warmth — a lovely veil in the air, partly heat-vapor and partly from the turf-fires everywhere in patches on the farms. A group of soft maples near by silently bursts out in crimson tips, buzzing all day with busy bees. The white sails of sloops and schooners glide up or down the river; and long trains of cars, with ponderous roll, or faint bell notes, almost constantly on the opposite shore. The earliest wild flowers in the woods and fields, spicy arbutus, blue liverwort, frail anemone, and the pretty white blossoms of the bloodroot. I launch out in slow rambles, discovering them. As I go along the roads I like to see the farmers’ fires in patches, burning the dry brush, turf, debris. How the smoke crawls along, flat to the ground, slanting, slowly rising, reaching away, and at last dissipating. [Page 840] I like its acrid smell — whiffs just reaching me — welcomer than French perfume. The birds are plenty; of any sort, or of two or three sorts, curiously, not a sign, till suddenly some warm, gushing, sunny April (or even March) day — lo! there they are, from twig to twig, or fence to fence, flirting, singing, some mating, preparing to build. But most of them en passant — a fortnight, a month in these parts, and then away. As in all phases, Nature keeps up her vital, copious, eternal procession. Still, plenty of the birds hang around all or most of the season — now their love- time, and era of nest-building. I find flying over the river, crows, gulls and hawks. I hear the afternoon shriek of the latter, darting about, preparing to nest. The oriole will soon be heard here, and the twanging meoeow of the cat-bird; also the king-bird, cuckoo and the warblers. All along, there are three peculiarly characteristic spring songs — the meadow-lark’s, so sweet, so alert and remonstrating (as if he said, “don’t you see?” or, “can’t you understand?”) — the cheery, mellow, human tones of the robin — (I have been trying for years to get a brief term, or phrase, that would identify and describe that robin-call) — and the amorous whistle of the high-hole. Insects are out plentifully at midday. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 29, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

As we drove lingering along the road we heard, just after sundown, the song of the wood-thrush. We stopp’d without a word, and listen’d long. The delicious notes — a sweet, artless, voluntary, simple anthem, as from the flute-stops of some organ, wafted through the twilight — echoing well to us from the perpendicular high rock, where, in some thick young trees’ recesses at the base, sat the bird — fill’d our senses, our souls.

MEETING A HERMIT I found in one of my rambles up the hills a real hermit, living in a lonesome spot, hard to get at, rocky, the view fine, with a little patch of land two rods square. A man of youngish middle age, city born and raised, had been to school, had travel’d in Europe and California. I first met him once or twice on the road, and pass’d the time of day, with some small talk; then, the third time, he ask’d me to go along a bit [Page 841] and rest in his hut (an almost unprecedented compliment, as I heard from others afterwards.) He was of Quaker stock, I think; talk’d with ease and moderate freedom, but did not unbosom his life, or story, or tragedy, or whatever it was.

AN ULSTER COUNTY WATERFALL I jot this mem. in a wild scene of woods and hills, where we have come to visit a waterfall. I never saw finer or more copious hemlocks, many of them large, some old and hoary. Such a sentiment to them, secretive, shaggy — what I call weather- beaten and let-alone — a rich underlay of ferns, yew sprouts and mosses, beginning to be spotted with the early summer wild-flowers. Enveloping all, the monotone and liquid gurgle from the hoarse impetuous copious fall — the greenish-tawny, darkly transparent waters, plunging with velocity down the rocks, with patches of milk- white foam — a stream of hurrying amber, thirty feet wide, risen far back in the hills and woods, now rushing with volume — every hundred rods a fall, and sometimes three or four in that distance. A primitive forest, druidical, solitary and savage — not ten visitors a year — broken rocks everywhere — shade overhead, thick underfoot with leaves — a just palpable wild and delicate aroma.

WALTER DUMONT AND HIS MEDAL As I saunter’d along the high road yesterday, I stopp’d to watch a man near by, ploughing a rough stony field with a yoke of oxen. Usually there is much geeing and hawing, excitement, and continual noise and expletives, about a job of this kind. But I noticed how different, how easy and wordless, yet firm and sufficient, the work of this young ploughman. His name was Walter Dumont, a farmer, and son of a farmer, working for their living. Three years ago, when the steamer “Sunnyside” was wreck’d of a bitter icy night on the west bank here, Walter went out in his boat — was the first man on hand with assistance — made a way through the ice to shore, connected a line, perform’d work of first-class readiness, daring, danger, and saved numerous lives. Some weeks after, one evening when he was up at Esopus, among the [Page 842] usual loafing crowd at the country store and post-office, there arrived the gift of an unexpected official gold medal for the quiet hero. The impromptu presentation was made to him on the spot, but he blush’d, hesitated HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

HUDSON RIVER SIGHTS It was a happy thought to build the Hudson river railroad right along the shore. The grade is already made by nature; you are sure of ventilation one side — and you are in nobody’s way. I see, hear, the locomotives and cars, rumbling, roaring, flaming, smoking, constantly, away off there, night and day — less than a mile distant, and in full view by day. I like both sight and sound. Express trains thunder and lighten along; of freight trains, most of them very long, there cannot be less than a hundred a day. At night far down you see the headlight approaching, coming steadily on like a meteor. The river at night has its special character- beauties. The shad fishermen go forth in their boats and pay out their nets — one sitting forward, rowing, and one standing up aft dropping it properly — marking the line with little floats bearing candles, conveying, as they glide over the water, an indescribable sentiment and doubled brightness. I like to watch the tows at night, too, with their twinkling lamps, and hear the husky panting of the steamers; or catch the sloops’ and schooners’ shadowy forms, like phantoms, white, silent, indefinite, out there. Then the Hudson of a clear moonlight night. But there is one sight the very grandest. Sometimes in the fiercest driving storm of wind, rain, hail or snow, a great eagle will appear over the river, now soaring with steady and now overhended wings — always confronting the gale, or perhaps cleaving into, or at times literally sitting upon it. It is like reading some first- class natural tragedy or epic, or hearing martial trumpets. The splendid bird enjoys the hubbub — is adjusted and equal to it — finishes it so artistically. His pinions just oscillating — the position of his head and neck — his resistless, occasionally varied flight — now a swirl, now an upward movement — the black clouds driving — the angry wash below — the hiss of rain, the wind’s piping (perhaps the ice colliding, grunting) — [Page 843] he tacking or jibing — now, as it were, for a change, abandoning himself to the gale, moving with it with such velocity — and now, resuming control, he comes up against it, lord of the situation and the storm — lord, amid it, of power and savage joy. Sometimes (as at present writing,) middle of sunny afternoon, the old “Vanderbilt” steamer stalking ahead — I plainly hear her rhythmic, slushing paddles — drawing by long hawsers an immense and varied following string, (“an old sow and pigs,” the river folks call it.) First comes a big barge, with a house built on it, and spars towering over the roof; then canal boats, a lengthen’d, clustering train, fasten’d and link’d together — the one in the middle, with high staff, flaunting a broad and gaudy flag — others with the almost invariable lines of new-wash’d clothes, drying; two sloops and a schooner aside the tow — little wind, and that adverse — with three long, dark, empty barges bringing up the rear. People are on the boats: men lounging, women in sun-bonnets, children, stovepipes with streaming smoke. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 10, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman “Commencement of a gossipy travelling letter in a New York city paper”: “Memoranda”

My month’s visit is about up; but before I get back to Camden let me print some jottings of the last four weeks. Have you not, reader dear, among your intimate friends, some one, temporarily absent, whose letters to you, avoiding all the big topics and disquisitions, give only minor, gossipy sights and scenes — just as they come — subjects disdain’d by solid writers, but interesting to you because they were such as happen to everybody, and were the moving entourage to your friend — to his or her steps, eyes, mentality? Well, with an idea something of that kind, I suppose, I set out on the following hurrygraphs of a breezy early-summer visit to New-York City and up the North River — especially at present of some hours along Broadway.

“What I came to New York for:” “Memoranda”

To try the experiment of a lecture — to see whether I could stand it, and whether an audience could — was my specific object. Some friends had invited me — it was by no means clear how it would end — I stipulated that they should get only a third- rate hall, and not sound the advertising trumpets a bit — and so I started. I much wanted something to do for occupation, consistent with my limping and paralyzed state. And now, since it came off, and since neither my hearers nor I myself really collaps’d at the aforesaid lecture, I intend to go up and down the land (in moderation,) seeking whom I may devour, with lectures, and reading of my own poems — short pulls, however — never exceeding an hour. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Crossing from Jersey City, 5 to 6 p. m: “Memoranda”

The city part of the North River with its life, breadth, peculiarities — the amplitude of sea and wharf, cargo and commerce — one don’t realize them till one has been away a long time and, as now returning, (crossing from Jersey City to Desbrosses-st.,) gazes on the unrivall’d panorama, and far down the thin-vapor’d vistas of the bay, toward the Narrows — or northward up the Hudson — or on the ample spread and infinite variety, free and floating, of the more immediate views — a countless river series — everything moving, yet so easy, and such plenty of room! Little, I say, do folks here appreciate the most ample, [Page 1278] eligible, picturesque bay and estuary surroundings in the world! This is the third time such a conviction has come to me after absence, returning to New-York, dwelling on its magnificent entrances — approaching the city by them from any point. More and more, too, the old name absorbs into me — MANNAHATTA, “the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters.” How fit a name for America’s great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal! how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action! HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 15, Thursday: An International Canal Congress convened in Paris and chose as its president the Ferdinand de Lesseps who had been in charge of Egypt’s Suez Canal.

AMANAPLANACANALSUEZ

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

DEPARTING OF THE BIG STEAMERS A three hours’ bay-trip from 12 to 3 this afternoon, accompanying “the City of Brussels” down as far as the Narrows, in behoof of some Europe-bound friends, to give them a good send off. Our spirited little tug, the “Seth Low,” kept close to the great black “Brussels,” sometimes one side, sometimes the other, always up to her, or even pressing ahead, (like the blooded pony accompanying the royal elephant.) The whole affair, from the first, was an animated, quick-passing, characteristic New York scene; the large, good-looking, well dress’d crowd on the wharf-end — men and women come to see their friends depart, and bid them God-speed — the ship’s sides swarming with passengers — groups of bronze-faced sailors, with uniform’d officers at their posts — the quiet directions, as she quickly unfastens and moves out, prompt to a minute — the emotional faces, adieus and fluttering handkerchiefs, and many smiles and some tears on the wharf — the answering faces, smiles, tears and fluttering handkerchiefs, [Page 847] from the ship — (what can be subtler and finer than this play of faces on such occasions in these responding crowds? — what go more to one’s heart?) — the proud, steady, noiseless cleaving of the grand oceaner down the bay — we speeding by her side a few miles, and then turning, wheeling, amid a babel of wild hurrahs, shouted partings, ear-splitting steam whistles, kissing of hands and waving of handkerchiefs. This departing of the big steamers, noons or afternoons — there is no better medicine when one is listless or vapory. I am fond of going down Wednesdays and Saturdays — their more special days — to watch them and the crowds on the wharves, the arriving passengers, the general bustle and activity, the eager looks from the faces, the clear-toned voices, (a travel’d foreigner, a musician, told me the other day she thinks an American crowd has the finest voices in the world,) the whole look of the great, shapely black ships themselves, and their groups and lined sides — in the setting of our bay with the blue sky overhead. Two days after the above I saw the “Britannic,” the “Donau,” the “Helvetia” and the “Schiedam” steam out, all off for Europe — a magnificent sight. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

TWO HOURS ON THE MINNESOTA From 7 to 9, aboard the United States school-ship Minnesota, lying up the North river. Captain Luce sent his gig for us about sundown, to the foot of Twenty-third street, and receiv’d us aboard with officer-like hospitality and sailor heartiness. There are several hundred youths on the Minnesota to be train’d for efficiently manning the government navy. I like the idea much; and, so far as I have seen to- night, I like the way it is carried out on this huge vessel. Below, on the gun- deck, were gather’d nearly a hundred of the boys, to give us some of their singing exercises, with a melodeon accompaniment, play’d by one of their number. They sang with a will. The best part, however, was the sight of the young fellows themselves. I went over among them before the singing began, and talk’d a few minutes informally. They are from all the States; I asked for the Southerners, but could only find one, a lad from Baltimore. In age, apparently, they range from about fourteen years to nineteen or twenty. They are all [Page 848] of American birth, and have to pass a rigid medical examination; well-grown youths, good flesh, bright eyes, looking straight at you, healthy, intelligent, not a slouch among them, nor a menial — in every one the promise of a man. I have been to many public aggregations of young and old, and of schools and colleges, in my day, but I confess I have never been so near satisfied, so comforted, (both from the fact of the school itself, and the splendid proof of our country, our composite race, and the sample- promises of its good average capacities, its future,) as in the collection from all parts of the United States on this navy training ship. (“Are there going to be any men there?” was the dry and pregnant reply of Emerson to one who had been crowding him with the rich material statistics and possibilities of some western or Pacific region.)

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Walt Whitman “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 16, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

CENTRAL PARK WALKS AND TALKS I visit Central Park now almost every day, sitting, or slowly rambling, or riding around. The whole place presents its very best appearance this current month — the full flush of the trees, the plentiful white and pink of the flowering shrubs, the emerald green of the grass spreading everywhere, yellow dotted still with dandelions — the specialty of the plentiful gray rocks, peculiar to these grounds, cropping out, miles and miles — and over all the beauty and purity, three days out of four, of our summer skies. As I sit, placidly, early afternoon, off against Ninetieth street, the policeman, C. C., a well-form’d sandy-complexion’d young fellow, comes over and stands near me. We grow quite friendly and chatty forthwith. He is a New Yorker born and raised, and in answer to my questions tells me about the life of a New York Park policeman, (while he talks keeping his eyes and ears vigilantly open, occasionally pausing and moving where he can get full views of the vistas of the road, up and down, and the spaces around.) The pay is $2.40 a day (seven days to a week) — the men come on and work eight hours straight ahead, which is all that is required of them out of the twenty-four. [Page 845] The position has more risks than one might suppose — for instance if a team or horse runs away (which happens daily) each man is expected not only to be prompt, but to waive safety and stop wildest nag or nags — (do it, and don’t be thinking of your bones or face) — give the alarm-whistle too, so that other guards may repeat, and the vehicles up and down the tracks be warn’d. Injuries to the men are continually happening. There is much alertness and quiet strength. (Few appreciate, I have often thought, the Ulyssean capacity, derring do, quick readiness in emergencies, practicality, unwitting devotion and heroism, among our American young men and working-people — the firemen, the railroad employs, the steamer and ferry men, the police, the conductors and drivers — the whole splendid average of native stock, city and country.) It is good work, though; and upon the whole, the Park force members like it. They see life, and the excitement keeps them up. There is not so much difficulty as might be supposed from tramps, roughs, or in keeping people “off the grass.” The worst trouble of the regular Park employ is from malarial fever, chills, and the like.

MALARIA HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

A FINE AFTERNOON, 4 to 6 Ten thousand vehicles careering through the Park this perfect afternoon. Such a show! and I have seen all — watch’d it narrowly, and at my leisure. Private barouches, cabs and coups, some fine horseflesh — lapdogs, footmen, fashions, foreigners, cockades on hats, crests on panels — the full oceanic tide of New York’s wealth and “gentility.” It was an impressive, rich, interminable circus on a grand scale, full of action and color in the beauty of the day, under the clear sun and moderate breeze. Family groups, couples, single drivers — of course dresses generally elegant — much “style,” (yet perhaps little or nothing, even in that direction, that fully justified itself.) Through the windows of two or three of the richest carriages I saw faces almost corpse-like, so ashy and listless. Indeed the whole affair exhibited less of sterling America, either in spirit or countenance, than I had counted on from such a select mass-spectacle. I suppose, as a proof of [Page 846] limitless wealth, leisure, and the aforesaid “gentility,” it was tremendous. Yet what I saw those hours (I took two other occasions, two other afternoons to watch the same scene,) confirms a thought that haunts me every additional glimpse I get of our top-loftical general or rather exceptional phases of wealth and fashion in this country — namely, that they are ill at ease, much too conscious, cased in too many cerements, and far from happy — that there is nothing in them which we who are poor and plain need at all envy, and that instead of the perennial smell of the grass and woods and shores, their typical redolence is of soaps and essences, very rare may be, but suggesting the barber shop — something that turns stale and musty in a few hours anyhow. Perhaps the show on the horseback road was prettiest. Many groups (threes a favorite number,) some couples, some singly — many ladies — frequently horses or parties dashing along on a full run — fine riding the rule — a few really first-class animals. As the afternoon waned, the wheel’d carriages grew less, but the saddle- riders seemed to increase. They linger’d long — and I saw some charming forms and faces. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 24, Saturday: William Lloyd Garrison died in New-York.

The USS Constitution sailed back into New York harbor.

It would be serving as a training ship for our apprentice boys, into 1881, persuading them that killing people is an honourable occupation, and a worthy basis for one’s life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN A report from Walt Whitman in New-York: “Specimen Days”

TWO CITY AREAS, CERTAIN HOURS Perhaps no quarters of this city (I have return’d again for awhile,) make more brilliant, animated, crowded, spectacular human presentations these fine May afternoons than the two I am now going to describe from personal observation. First: that area comprising Fourteenth street (especially the short range between Broadway and Fifth avenue) with Union square, its adjacencies, and so retrostretching down Broadway for half a mile. All the walks here are wide, and the spaces ample and free — now flooded with liquid gold from the last two hours of powerful sunshine. The whole area at 5 o’clock, the days of my observations, must have contain’d from thirty to forty thousand finely-dress’d people, all in motion, plenty of them good- looking, many beautiful women, often youths and children, the latter in groups with their nurses — the trottoirs everywhere close-spread, thick-tangled, (yet no collision, no trouble,) with masses of bright color, action, and tasty toilets; (surely the women dress better than ever before, and the men [Page 844] do too.) As if New York would show these afternoons what it can do in its humanity, its choicest physique and physiognomy, and its countless prodigality of locomotion, dry goods, glitter, magnetism, and happiness. Second: also from 5 to 7 P.M. the stretch of Fifth avenue, all the way from the Central Park exits at Fifty-ninth street, down to Fourteenth, especially along the high grade by Fortieth street, and down the hill. A Mississippi of horses and rich vehicles, not by dozens and scores, but hundreds and thousands — the broad avenue filled and cramm’d with them — a moving, sparkling, hurrying crush, for more than two miles. (I wonder they don’t get block’d, but I believe they never do.) Altogether it is to me the marvel sight of New York. I like to get in one of the Fifth avenue stages and ride up, stemming the swift-moving procession. I doubt if London or Paris or any city in the world can show such a carriage carnival as I have seen here five or six times these beautiful May afternoons.

May 26, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Aboard the Minnesota again. Lieut. Murphy kindly came for me in his boat. Enjoy’d specially those brief trips to and fro — the sailors, tann’d, strong, so bright and able-looking, pulling their oars in long side-swing, man-of-war style, as they row’d me across. I saw the boys in companies drilling with small arms; had a talk with Chaplain Rawson. At 11 o’clock all of us gathered to breakfast around a long table in the great ward room — I among the rest — a genial, plentiful, hospitable affair every way — plenty to eat, and of the best; became acquainted with several new officers. This second visit, with its observations, talks, (two or three at random with the boys,) confirm’d my first impressions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 4, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

MATURE SUMMER DAYS AND NIGHTS Forenoon — as I sit under the willow shade, (have retreated down in the country again,) a little bird is leisurely dousing and flirting himself amid the brook almost within reach of me. He evidently fears me not — takes me for some concomitant of the neighboring earthy banks, free bushery and wild weeds. 6 P.M: The last three days have been perfect ones for the season, (four nights ago copious rains, with vehement thunder and lightning.) I write this sitting by the creek watching my two kingfishers at their sundown sport. The strong, beautiful, joyous creatures! Their wings glisten in the slanted sunbeams as they circle and circle around, occasionally [Page 849] dipping and dashing the water, and making long stretches up and down the creek. Wherever I go over fields, through lanes, in by-places, blooms the white-flowering wild-carrot, its delicate pat of snow-flakes crowning its slender stem, gracefully oscillating in the breeze.

“Specimen Days”

STRAW-COLOR’D AND OTHER PSYCHES A pretty sight! Where I sit in the shade — a warm day, the sun shining from cloudless skies, the forenoon well advanc’d — I look over a ten-acre field of luxuriant clover-hay, (the second crop) — the livid-ripe red blossoms and dabs of August brown thickly spotting the prevailing dark-green. Over all flutter myriads of light-yellow butterflies, mostly skimming along the surface, dipping and oscillating, giving a curious animation to the scene. The beautiful, spiritual insects! straw-color’d Psyches! Occasionally one of them leaves his mates, and mounts, perhaps spirally, perhaps in a straight line in the air, fluttering up, up, till literally out of sight. In the lane as I came along just now I noticed one spot, ten feet square or so, where more than a hundred had collected, holding a revel, a gyration-dance, or butterfly good-time, winding and circling, down and across, but always keeping within the [Page 829] limits. The little creatures have come out all of a sudden the last few days, and are now very plentiful. As I sit outdoors, or walk, I hardly look around without somewhere seeing two (always two) fluttering through the air in amorous dalliance. Then their inimitable color, their fragility, peculiar motion — and that strange, frequent way of one leaving the crowd and mounting up, up in the free ether, and apparently never returning. As I look over the field, these yellow-wings everywhere mildly sparkling, many snowy blossoms of the wild carrot gracefully bending on their tall and taper stems — while for sounds, the distant guttural screech of a flock of guinea-hens comes shrilly yet somehow musically to my ears. And now a faint growl of heat-thunder in the north — and ever the low rising and falling wind-purr from the tops of the maples and willows. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 20, Wednesday:John Humphrey Noyes sent his followers in Oneida, New York a message, renouncing in part the notion of “complex marriage.”

I should’ve kept it in my pants.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Butterflies and butterflies, (taking the place of the bumble-bees of three months since, who have quite disappear’d,) continue to flit to and fro, all sorts, white, yellow, brown, purple — now and then some gorgeous fellow flashing lazily by on wings like artists’ palettes dabb’d with every color. Over the breast of the pond I notice many white ones, crossing, pursuing their idle capricious flight. Near where I sit grows a tall-stemm’d weed topt with a profusion of rich scarlet blossoms, on which the snowy insects alight and dally, sometimes four or five of them at a time. By-and-by a humming-bird visits the same, and I watch him coming and going, daintily balancing and shimmering about. These white butterflies give

After August 20, Wednesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A grand twelve-acre field of ripe cabbages with their prevailing hue of malachite green, and floating-flying over and among them in all directions myriads of these same white butterflies. As I came up the lane to-day I saw a living globe of the same, two to three feet in diameter, many scores cluster’d together and rolling along in the air, adhering to their ball-shape, six or eight feet above the ground. [Page 830] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 25, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A NIGHT REMEMBRANCE 9-10AM: I sit by the edge of the pond, everything quiet, the broad polish’d surface spread before me — the blue of the heavens and the white clouds reflected from it — and flitting across, now and then, the reflection of some flying bird. Last night I was down here with a friend till after midnight; everything a miracle of splendor — the glory of the stars, and the completely rounded moon — the passing clouds, silver and luminous-tawny — now and then masses of vapory illuminated scud — and silently by my side my dear friend. The shades of the trees, and patches of moonlight on the grass — the softly blowing breeze, and just-palpable odor of the neighboring ripening corn — the indolent and spiritual night, inexpressibly rich, tender, suggestive — something altogether to filter through one’s soul, and nourish and feed and soothe the memory long afterwards.

WILD FLOWERS This has been and is yet a great season for wild flowers; oceans of them line the roads through the woods, border the edges of the water-runlets, grow all along the old fences, and are scatter’d in profusion over the fields. An eight-petal’d blossom of gold-yellow, clear and bright, with a brown tuft in the middle, nearly as large as a silver half-dollar, is very common; yesterday on a long drive I noticed it thickly lining the borders of the brooks everywhere. Then there is a beautiful weed cover’d with blue flowers, (the blue of the old Chinese teacups treasur’d by our grand-aunts,) I am continually stopping to admire — a little larger than a dime, and very plentiful. White, however, is the prevailing color. The wild carrot I have spoken of; also the fragrant life-everlasting. But there are all hues and beauties, especially on the frequent tracts of half-open scrub-oak and dwarf- cedar hereabout — wild asters of all colors. Notwithstanding the frost-touch the hardy little chaps maintain themselves in all their bloom. The tree-leaves, too, some of them are beginning to turn yellow or drab or dull green. The deep wine- color of the sumachs and gum-trees is already visible, and the straw-color of the [Page 831] dogwood and beech. Let me give the names of some of these perennial blossoms and friendly weeds I have made acquaintance with hereabout one season or another in my walks: wild azalea, dandelions, wild honeysuckle, yarrow, wild roses, coreopsis, golden rod, wild pea, larkspur, woodbine, early crocus, elderberry, sweet flag, (great patches of it,) poke-weed, creeper, trumpet-flower, sun-flower, scented marjoram, chamomile, snakeroot, violets, Solomon’s seal, clematis, sweet balm, bloodroot, mint, (great plenty,) swamp magnolia, wild geranium, milk-weed, wild heliotrope, wild daisy, (plenty,) burdock, wild chrysanthemum. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

A CIVILITY TOO LONG NEGLECTED The foregoing reminds me of something. As the individualities I would mainly portray have certainly been slighted by folks who make pictures, volumes, poems, out of them — as a faint testimonial of my own gratitude for many hours of peace and comfort in half-sickness, (and not by any means sure but they will somehow get wind of the compliment,) I hereby dedicate the last half of these Specimen Days to the bees, water snakes, black-birds, crows, dragon-flies, millers, pond-turtles, mosquitoes, mulleins, tansy, peppermint, butterflies, moths (great and little, some wasps and hornets, splendid fellows,) cat birds (and all other birds,) glow-worms, (swarming cedars, millions of them tulip-trees (and all other trees,) indescribably strange and and to the spots and memories beautiful at night over the of those days, and of the pond and creek,) creek. [Page 832] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 26, Tuesday: The Little War (La Guerra Chiquita) began prematurely with hundreds of slaves and farmers attacking a Spanish strongpoint in Santiago de Cuba. (Some historians consider this to be Cuba’s 2d war of independence while others ignore it, referring to the struggle that would begin in 1895 as the 2d.) The effort was led by Major General Calixto García Iñiguez.

A report from Walt Whitman in Philadelphia: “Specimen Days”

EXPOSITION BUILDING — NEW CITY HALL — RIVER TRIP Last night and to-night of unsurpass’d clearness, after two days’ rain; moon splendor and star splendor. Being out toward the great Exposition building, West Philadelphia, I saw it lit up, and thought I would go in. There was a ball, democratic but nice; plenty of young couples waltzing and quadrilling — music by a good string-band. To the sight and hearing of these — to moderate strolls up and down the roomy spaces — to getting off aside, resting in an arm-chair and looking up a long while at the grand high roof with its graceful and multitudinous work of iron rods, angles, gray colors, plays of light and shade, receding into dim outlines — to absorbing (in the intervals of the string band,) some capital voluntaries and rolling caprices from the big organ at the other end of the building — to sighting a shadow’d figure or group or couple of lovers every now and then passing some near or farther aisle — I abandon’d myself for over an hour. Returning home, riding down Market street in an open summer car, something detain’d us between Fifteenth and Broad, and I got out to view better the new, three-fifths- built marble edifice, the City Hall, of magnificent proportions — a majestic and lovely show there in the moonlight — flooded all over, faades, myriad silver-white lines and carv’d heads and mouldings, with the soft dazzle — silent, weird, beautiful — well, I know that never when finish’d will that magnificent pile impress one as it impress’d me those fifteen minutes. To-night, since, I have been long on the river. I watch the C-shaped Northern Crown, (with the star Alshacca that blazed out so suddenly, alarmingly, one night a few years ago.) The moon in her third quarter, and up nearly all night. And there, as I look eastward, my long-absent Pleiades, welcome [Page 850] again to sight. For an hour I enjoy the soothing and vital scene to the low splash of waves — new stars steadily, noiselessly rising in the east. As I cross the Delaware, one of the deck-hands, F. R., tells me how a woman jump’d overboard and was drown’d a couple of hours since. It happen’d in mid-channel — she leap’d from the forward part of the boat, which went over her. He saw her rise on the other side in the swift running water, throw her arms and closed hands high up, (white hands and bare forearms in the moonlight like a flash,) and then she sank. (I found out afterwards that this young fellow had promptly jump’d in, swam after the poor creature, and made, though unsuccessfully, the bravest efforts to rescue her; but he didn’t mention that part at all in telling me the story.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 3, Wednesday: The 41st anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s freedom, which we may well elect to celebrate in lieu of an unknown slave birthday.

Here is a Daguerreotype, by an unidentified photographer in the 1850-1855 timeframe.

“It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday.”

We have a report from Walt Whitman on this day: “Specimen Days”

SWALLOWS ON THE RIVER Cloudy and wet, and wind due east; air without palpable fog, but very heavy with moisture — welcome for a change. Forenoon, crossing the Delaware, I noticed unusual numbers of swallows in flight, circling, darting, graceful beyond description, close to the water. Thick, around the bows of the ferry-boat as she lay tied in her slip, they flew; and as we went out I watch’d beyond the pier-heads, and across the broad stream, their swift-winding loop-ribands of motion, down close to it, cutting and intersecting. Though I had seen swallows all my life, seem’d as though I never before realized their peculiar beauty and character in the landscape. (Some time ago, for an hour, in a huge old country barn, watching these birds flying, recall’d the 22d book of the Odyssey, where Ulysses slays the suitors, bringing things to eclaircissement, and Minerva, swallow-bodied, darts up through the spaces of the hall, sits high on a beam, looks complacently on the show of slaughter, and feels in her element, exulting, joyous.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

BEGIN A LONG JAUNT WEST The following three or four months (Sept. to Dec. ’79) I made quite a western journey, fetching up at Denver, Colorado, and penetrating the Rocky Mountain region enough to [Page 851] get a good notion of it all. Left West Philadelphia after 9 o’clock one night, middle of September, in a comfortable sleeper. Oblivious of the two or three hundred miles across Pennsylvania; at Pittsburgh in the morning to breakfast. Pretty good view of the city and Birmingham — fog and damp, smoke, coke- furnaces, flames, discolor’d wooden houses, and vast collections of coal-barges. Presently a bit of fine region, West Virginia, the Panhandle, and crossing the river, the Ohio. By day through the latter State — then Indiana — and so rock’d to slumber for a second night, flying like lightning through Illinois. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

IN THE SLEEPER What a fierce weird pleasure to lie in my berth at night in the luxurious palace- car, drawn by the mighty Baldwin — embodying, and filling me, too, full of the swiftest motion, and most resistless strength! It is late, perhaps midnight or after — distances join’d like magic — as we speed through Harrisburg, Columbus, Indianapolis. The element of danger adds zest to it all. On we go, rumbling and flashing, with our loud whinnies thrown out from time to time, or trumpet-blasts, into the darkness. Passing the homes of men, the farms, barns, cattle — the silent villages. And the car itself, the sleeper, with curtains drawn and lights turn’d down — in the berths the slumberers, many of them women and children — as on, on, on, we fly like lightning through the night — how strangely sound and sweet they sleep! (They say the French Voltaire in his time designated the grand opera and a ship of war the most signal illustrations of the growth of humanity’s and art’s advance beyond primitive barbarism. Perhaps if the witty philosopher were here these days, and went in the same car with perfect bedding and feed from New York to San Francisco, he would shift his type and sample to one of our American sleepers.)

“Specimen Days”

MISSOURI STATE We should have made the run of 960 miles from Philadelphia to St. Louis in thirty- six hours, but we had a collision and bad locomotive smash about two-thirds of the way, [Page 852] which set us back. So merely stopping over night that time in St. Louis, I sped on westward. As I cross’d Missouri State the whole distance by the St. Louis and Kansas City Northern Railroad, a fine early autumn day, I thought my eyes had never looked on scenes of greater pastoral beauty. For over two hundred miles successive rolling prairies, agriculturally perfect view’d by Pennsylvania and New Jersey eyes, and dotted here and there with fine timber. Yet fine as the land is, it isn’t the finest portion; (there is a bed of impervious clay and hard- pan beneath this section that holds water too firmly, “drowns the land in wet weather, and bakes it in dry,” as a cynical farmer told me.) South are some richer tracts, though perhaps the beauty-spots of the State are the northwestern counties. Altogether, I am clear, (now, and from what I have seen and learn’d since,) that Missouri, in climate, soil, relative situation, wheat, grass, mines, railroads, and every important materialistic respect, stands in the front rank of the Union. Of Missouri averaged politically and socially I have heard all sorts of talk, some pretty severe — but I should have no fear myself of getting along safely and comfortably anywhere among the Missourians. They raise a good deal of tobacco. You see at this time quantities of the light greenish-gray leaves pulled and hanging out to dry on temporary frameworks or rows of sticks. Looks much like the mullein familiar to eastern eyes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

LAWRENCE AND TOPEKA, KANSAS We thought of stopping in Kansas City, but when we got there we found a train ready and a crowd of hospitable Kansians to take us on to Lawrence, to which I proceeded. I shall not soon forget my good days in L., in company with Judge Usher and his sons, (especially John and Linton,) true westerners of the noblest type. Nor the similar days in Topeka. Nor the brotherly kindness of my RR. friends there, and the city and State officials. Lawrence and Topeka are large, bustling, half-rural, handsome cities. I took two or three long drives about the latter, drawn by a spirited team over smooth roads. [Page 853] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

THE PRAIRIES And an Undeliver’d Speech. At a large popular meeting at Topeka — the Kansas State Silver Wedding, fifteen or twenty thousand people — I had been erroneously bill’d to deliver a poem. As I seem’d to be made much of, and wanted to be good-natured, I hastily pencill’d out the following little speech. Unfortunately, (or fortunately,) I had such a good time and rest, and talk and dinner, with the U. boys, that I let the hours slip away and didn’t drive over to the meeting and speak my piece. But here it is just the same: “My friends, your bills announce me as giving a poem; but I have no poem — have composed none for this occasion. And I can honestly say I am now glad of it. Under these skies resplendent in September beauty — amid the peculiar landscape you are used to, but which is new to me — these interminable and stately prairies — in the freedom and vigor and sane enthusiasm of this perfect western air and autumn sunshine — it seems to me a poem would be almost an impertinence. But if you care to have a word from me, I should speak it about these very prairies; they impress me most, of all the objective shows I see or have seen on this, my first real visit to the West. As I have roll’d rapidly hither for more than a thousand miles, through fair Ohio, through bread-raising Indiana and Illinois — through ample Missouri, that contains and raises everything; as I have partially explor’d your charming city during the last two days, and, standing on Oread hill, by the university, have launch’d my view across broad expanses of living green, in every direction — I have again been most impress’d, I say, and shall remain for the rest of my life most impress’d, with that feature of the topography of your western central world — that vast Something, stretching out on its own unbounded scale, unconfined, which there is in these prairies, combining the real and ideal, and beautiful as dreams. “I wonder indeed if the people of this continental inland West know how much of first-class art they have in these prairies — how original and all your own — how much of [Page 854] the influences of a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they are to the soul? “Then is it not subtly they who have given us our leading modern Americans, Lincoln and Grant? — vast- spread, average men — their foregrounds of character altogether practical and real, yet (to those who have eyes to see) with finest backgrounds of the ideal, towering high as any. And do we not see, in them, foreshadowings of the future races that shall fill these prairies? “Not but what the Yankee and Atlantic States, and every other part — Texas, and the States flanking the south-east and the Gulf of Mexico — the Pacific shore empire — the Territories and Lakes, and the Canada line (the day is not yet, but it will come, including Canada entire) — are equally and integrally and indissolubly this Nation, the sine qua non of the human, political and commercial New World. But this favor’d central area of (in round numbers) two thousand miles square seems fated to be the home both of what I would call America’s distinctive ideas and distinctive realities.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

AN HOUR ON KENOSHA SUMMIT Jottings from the Rocky Mountains, mostly pencill’d during a day’s trip over the South Park RR., returning from Leadville, and especially the hour we were detain’d, (much to my satisfaction,) at Kenosha summit. As afternoon advances, novelties, far-reaching splendors, accumulate under the bright sun in this pure air. But I had better commence with the day. The confronting of Platte cañon just at dawn, after a ten miles’ ride in early darkness on the rail from Denver — the seasonable stoppage at the entrance of the cañon, and good breakfast of eggs, trout, and nice griddle-cakes — then as we travel on, and get well in the gorge, all the wonders, beauty, savage power of the scene — the wild stream of water, from sources of snows, brawling continually in sight one side — the dazzling sun, and the morning lights on the rocks — such turns and grades in the track, squirming around corners, or up and down hills — far glimpses of a hundred peaks, titanic necklaces, stretching north and south — the huge rightly-named Dome-rock — and as we dash along, others similar, simple, monolithic, elephantine.

“Specimen Days”

AN EGOTISTICAL “FIND” “I have found the law of my own poems,” was the unspoken but more-and-more decided feeling that came to me as I pass’d, hour after hour, amid all this grim yet joyous elemental abandon — this plenitude of material, entire absence of art, untrammel’d play of primitive Nature — the chasm, the gorge, [Page 856] the crystal mountain stream, repeated scores, hundreds of miles — the broad handling and absolute uncrampedness — the fantastic forms, bathed in transparent browns, faint reds and grays, towering sometimes a thousand, sometimes two or three thousand feet high — at their tops now and then huge masses pois’d, and mixing with the clouds, with only their outlines, hazed in misty lilac, visible. (“In Nature’s grandest shows,” says an old Dutch writer, an ecclesiastic, “amid the ocean’s depth, if so might be, or countless worlds rolling above at night, a man thinks of them, weighs all, not for themselves or the abstract, but with reference to his own personality, and how they may affect him or color his destinies.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

NEW SENSES — NEW JOYS We follow the stream of amber and bronze brawling along its bed, with its frequent cascades and snow-white foam. Through the cañon we fly — mountains not only each side, but seemingly, till we get near, right in front of us — every rood a new view flashing, and each flash defying description — on the almost perpendicular sides, clinging pines, cedars, spruces, crimson sumach bushes, spots of wild grass — but dominating all, those towering rocks, rocks, rocks, bathed in delicate vari-colors, with the clear sky of autumn overhead. New senses, new joys, seem develop’d. Talk as you like, a typical Rocky Mountain cañon, or a limitless sea-like stretch of the great Kansas or Colorado plains, under favoring circumstances, tallies, perhaps expresses, certainly awakes, those grandest and subtlest element emotions in the human soul, that all the marble temples and sculptures from Phidias to Thorwaldsen — all paintings, poems, reminiscences, or even music, probably never can.

“Specimen Days”

STEAM-POWER, TELEGRAPHS, &C. I get out on a ten minutes’ stoppage at Deer creek, to enjoy the unequal’d combination of hill, stone and wood. As we speed again, the yellow granite in the sunshine, with natural spires, minarets, castellated perches far aloft — then long stretches of straight-upright palisades, rhinoceros color — then gamboge and tinted chromos. Ever the best of my pleasures [Page 857] the cool-fresh Colorado atmosphere, yet sufficiently warm. Signs of man’s restless advent and pioneerage, hard as Nature’s face is — deserted dug-outs by dozens in the side-hills — the scantling hut, the telegraph-pole, the smoke of some impromptu chimney or outdoor fire — at intervals little settlements of log-houses, or parties of surveyors or telegraph builders, with their comfortable tents. Once, a canvas office where you could send a message by electricity anywhere around the world! Yes, pronounc’d signs of the man of latest dates, dauntlessly grappling with these grisliest shows of the old kosmos. At several places steam saw-mills, with their piles of logs and boards, and the pipes puffing. Occasionally Platte cañon expanding into a grassy flat of a few acres. At one such place, toward the end, where we stop, and I get out to stretch my legs, as I look skyward, or rather mountain-topward, a huge hawk or eagle (a rare sight here) is idly soaring, balancing along the ether, now sinking low and coming quite near, and then up again in stately-languid circles — then higher, higher, slanting to the north, and gradually out of sight. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

AMERICA’S BACK-BONE I jot these lines literally at Kenosha summit, where we return, afternoon, and take a long rest, 10,000 feet above sea-level. At this immense height the South Park stretches fifty miles before me. Mountainous chains and peaks in every variety of perspective, every hue of vista, fringe the view, in nearer, or middle, or far-dim distance, or fade on the horizon. We have now reach’d, penetrated the Rockies, (Hayden calls it the Front Range,) for a hundred miles or so; and though these chains spread away in every direction, specially north and south, thousands and thousands farther, I have seen specimens of the utmost of them, and know henceforth at least what they are, and what they look like. Not themselves alone, for they typify stretches and areas of half the globe — are, in fact, the vertebrae or back- bone of our hemisphere. As the anatomists say a man is only a spine, topp’d, footed, breasted and radiated, so the whole Western world is, in a sense, but an expansion of these mountains. In South America they are the Andes, in Central America and Mexico the Cordilleras, [Page 858] and in our States they go under different names — in California the Coast and Cascade ranges — thence more eastwardly the Sierra Nevadas — but mainly and more centrally here the Rocky Mountains proper, with many an elevation such as Lincoln’s, Grey’s, Harvard’s, Yale’s, Long’s and Pike’s peaks, all over 14,000 feet high. (East, the highest peaks of the Alleghanies, the Adirondacks, the Cattskills, and the White Mountains, range from 2000 to 5500 feet — only Mount Washington, in the latter, 6300 feet.)

“Specimen Days”

THE PARKS In the midst of all here, lie such beautiful contrasts as the sunken basins of the North, Middle, and South Parks, (the latter I am now on one side of, and overlooking,) each the size of a large, level, almost quandrangular, grassy, western county, wall’d in by walls of hills, and each park the source of a river. The ones I specify are the largest in Colorado, but the whole of that State, and of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and western California, through their sierras and ravines, are copiously mark’d by similar spreads and openings, many of the small ones of paradisiac loveliness and perfection, with their offsets of mountains, streams, atmosphere and hues beyond compare. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

ART FEATURES Talk, I say again, of going to Europe, of visiting the ruins of feudal castles, or Coliseum remains, or kings’ palaces — when you can come here. The alternations one gets, too; after the Illinois and Kansas prairies of a thousand miles — smooth and easy areas of the corn and wheat of ten million democratic farms in the future — here start up in every conceivable presentation of shape, these non-utilitarian piles, coping the skies, emanating a beauty, terror, power, more than Dante or Angelo ever knew. Yes, I think the chyle of not only poetry and painting, but oratory, and even the metaphysics and music fit for the New World, before being finally assimilated, need first and feeding visits here. Mountain streams: The spiritual contrast and etheriality of the whole region consist largely to me in its never-absent peculiar [Page 859] streams — the snows of inaccessible upper areas melting and running down through the gorges continually. Nothing like the water of pastoral plains, or creeks with wooded banks and turf, or anything of the kind elsewhere. The shapes that element takes in the shows of the globe cannot be fully understood by an artist until he has studied these unique rivulets. Aerial effects: But perhaps as I gaze around me the rarest sight of all is in atmospheric hues. The prairies — as I cross’d them in my journey hither — and these mountains and parks, seem to me to afford new lights and shades. Everywhere the aerial gradations and sky-effects inimitable; nowhere else such perspectives, such transparent lilacs and grays. I can conceive of some superior landscape painter, some fine colorist, after sketching awhile out here, discarding all his previous work, delightful to stock exhibition amateurs, as muddy, raw and artificial. Near one’s eye ranges an infinite variety; high up, the bare whitey-brown, above timber line; in certain spots afar patches of snow any time of year; (no trees, no flowers, no birds, at those chilling altitudes.) As I write I see the Snowy Range through the blue mist, beautiful and far off. I plainly see the patches of snow. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

DENVER IMPRESSIONS Through the long-lingering half-light of the most superb of evenings we return’d to Denver, where I staid several days leisurely exploring, receiving impressions, with which I may as well taper off this memorandum, itemizing what I saw there. The best was the men, three-fourths of them large, able, calm, alert, American. And cash! why they create it here. Out in the smelting works, (the biggest and most improv’d ones, for the precious metals, in the world,) I saw long rows of vats, pans, cover’d by bubbling-boiling water, and fill’d with pure silver, four or five inches thick, many thousand dollars’ worth in a pan. The foreman who was showing me shovel’d it carelessly up with a little wooden shovel, as one might toss beans. Then large silver bricks, worth $2000 a brick, dozens of piles, twenty in a pile. In one place in the mountains, at a mining camp, I had a few days before seen rough bullion on the ground [Page 860] in the open air, like the confectioner’s pyramids at some swell dinner in New York. (Such a sweet morsel to roll over with a poor author’s pen and ink — and appropriate to slip in here — that the silver product of Colorado and Utah, with the gold product of California, New Mexico, Nevada and Dakota, foots up an addition to the world’s coin of considerably over a hundred millions every year.) A city, this Denver, well-laid out — Laramie street, and 15th and 16th and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine — some with tall storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass — all the streets with little canals of mountain water running along the sides — plenty of people, “business,” modernness — yet not without a certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some starting out, very picturesque. One of the papers here interview’d me, and reported me as saying off-hand: “I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the Atlantic third of the republic — Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New Orleans, Baltimore, stately Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty years in that wonder, wash’d by hurried and glittering tides, my own New York, not only the New World’s but the world’s city — but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and threading its streets, breathing its air, warm’d by its sunshine, and having what there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash’d upon me now for only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels sometimes toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and hardly knows why. I, too, can hardly tell why, but as I enter’d the city in the slight haze of a late September afternoon, and have breath’d its air, and slept well o’ nights, and have roam’d or rode leisurely, and watch’d the comers and goers at the hotels, and absorb’d the climatic magnetism of this curiously attractive region, there has steadily grown upon me a feeling of affection for the spot, which, sudden as it is, has become so definite and strong that I must put it on record.” So much for my feeling toward the Queen city of the plains and peaks, where she sits in her delicious rare atmosphere, [Page 861] over 5000 feet above sea-level, irrigated by mountain streams, one way looking east over the prairies for a thousand miles, and having the other, westward, in constant view by day, draped in their violet haze, mountain tops innumerable. Yes, I fell in love with Denver, and even felt a wish to spend my declining and dying days there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

I TURN SOUTH — AND THEN EAST AGAIN Leave Denver at 8 A.M. by the Rio Grande RR. going south. Mountains constantly in sight in the apparently near distance, veil’d slightly, but still clear and very grand — their cones, colors, sides, distinct against the sky — hundreds, it seem’d thousands, interminable necklaces of them, their tops and slopes hazed more or less slightly in that blue-gray, under the autumn sun, for over a hundred miles — the most spiritual show of objective Nature I ever beheld, or ever thought possible. Occasionally the light strengthens, making a contrast of yellow-tinged silver on one side, with dark and shaded gray on the other. I took a long look at Pike’s peak, and was a little disappointed. (I suppose I had expected something stunning.) Our view over plains to the left stretches amply, with corrals here and there, the frequent cactus and wild ange, and herds of cattle feeding. Thus about 120 miles to Pueblo. At that town we board the comfortable and well-equipt Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe RR., now striking east.

“Specimen Days”

UNFULFILL’D WANTS — THE ARKANSAS RIVER I had wanted to go to the Yellowstone river region — wanted specially to see the National Park, and the geysers and the “hoo-doo” or goblin land of that country; indeed, hesitated a little at Pueblo, the turning point — wanted to thread the Veta pass — wanted to go over the Santa Fe trail away southwestward to New Mexico — but turn’d and set my face eastward — leaving behind me whetting glimpse-tastes of southeastern Colorado, Pueblo, Bald mountain, the Spanish peaks, Sangre de Christos, Mile-Shoe-curve (which my veteran friend on the locomotive told me was “the boss railroad curve of the universe,”) fort Garland on the plains, Veta, and the three great peaks of the Sierra Blancas. [Page 862] The Arkansas river plays quite a part in the whole of this region — I see it, or its high-cut rocky northern shore, for miles, and cross and recross it frequently, as it winds and squirms like a snake. The plains vary here even more than usual — sometimes a long sterile stretch of scores of miles — then green, fertile and grassy, an equal length. Some very large herds of sheep. (One wants new words in writing about these plains, and all the inland American West — the terms, far, large, vast, &c., are insufficient.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

A SILENT LITTLE FOLLOWER — THE COREOPSIS Here I must say a word about a little follower, present even now before my eyes. I have been accompanied on my whole journey from Barnegat to Pike’s Peak by a pleasant floricultural friend, or rather millions of friends — nothing more or less than a hardy little yellow five petal’d September and October wild flower, growing I think everywhere in the middle and northern United States. I had seen it on the Hudson and over Long Island, and along the banks of the Delaware and through New Jersey, (as years ago up the Connecticut, and one fall by Lake Champlain.) This trip it follow’d me regularly, with its slender stem and eyes of gold, from Cape May to the Kaw valley, and so through the cañons and to these plains. In Missouri I saw immense fields all bright with it. Toward western Illinois I woke up one morning in the sleeper and the first thing when I drew the curtain of my berth and look’d out was its pretty countenance and bending neck. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 25, Thursday: José Martí was accused of conspiracy against the Spanish crown, and ordered to be deported from Cuba. Initially he would travel to Spain.

According to Walt Whitman: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

Early morning — still going east after we leave Sterling, Kansas, where I stopp’d a day and night. The sun up about half an hour; nothing can be fresher or more beautiful than this time, this region. I see quite a field of my yellow flower in full bloom. At intervals dots of nice two-story houses, as we ride swiftly by. Over the immense area, flat as a floor, visible for twenty miles in every direction in the clear air, a prevalence of autumn-drab and reddish-tawny herbage — sparse stacks of hay and enclosures, breaking the landscape — as we rumble by, flocks of prairie-hens starting up. Between Sterling and Florence a fine country. (Remembrances to E.L., my old-young soldier friend of war times, and his wife and boy at S.)

“Specimen Days”

THE SPANISH PEAKS — EVENING ON THE PLAINS Between Pueblo and Bent’s fort, southward, in a clear afternoon sun-spell I catch exceptionally good glimpses of the [Page 864] Spanish peaks. We are in southeastern Colorado — pass immense herds of cattle as our first-class locomotive rushes us along — two or three times crossing the Arkansas, which we follow many miles, and of which river I get fine views, sometimes for quite a distance, its stony, upright, not very high, palisade banks, and then its muddy flats. We pass Fort Lyon — lots of adobie houses — limitless pasturage, appropriately fleck’d with those herds of cattle — in due time the declining sun in the west — a sky of limpid pearl over all — and so evening on the great plains. A calm, pensive, boundless landscape — the perpendicular rocks of the north Arkansas, hued in twilight — a thin line of violet on the southwestern horizon — the palpable coolness and slight aroma — a belated cow-boy with some unruly member of his herd — an emigrant wagon toiling yet a little further, the horses slow and tired — two men, apparently father and son, jogging along on foot — and around all the indescribable chiaroscuro and sentiment, (profounder than anything at sea,) athwart these endless wilds. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN “Specimen Days”

THE PRAIRIES AND GREAT PLAINS IN POETRY (After traveling Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado.) Grand as the thought that doubtless the child is already born who will see a hundred millions of people, the most prosperous and advanc’d of the world, inhabiting these Prairies, the great Plains, and the valley of the Mississippi, I could not help thinking it would be grander still to see all those inimitable American areas fused in the alembic of a perfect poem, or other esthetic work, entirely western, fresh and limitless — altogether our own, without a trace or taste of Europe’s soil, reminiscence, technical letter or spirit. My days and nights, as I travel here — what an exhilaration! — not the air alone, and the sense of vastness, but every local sight and feature. Everywhere something characteristic — the cactuses, pinks, buffalo grass, wild sage — the receding perspective, and the far circle-line of the horizon all times of day, especially forenoon — the clear, pure, cool, rarefied nutriment for the lungs, previously quite unknown — the black patches and streaks left by surface-conflagrations — the deep-plough’d furrow of the “fire-guard” — the slanting snow-racks built all along to shield the railroad from winter drifts — the prairie-dogs and the herds of antelope — the curious “dry rivers” — occasionally a “dug-out” or corral — Fort Riley and Fort Wallace — those towns of the northern plains, (like ships on the sea,) Eagle-Tail, Coyote, Cheyenne, Agate, Monotony, Kit Carson — with ever the ant-hill and the buffalo-wallow — ever the herds of cattle and the cow-boys (“cow-punchers”) to me a strangely interesting class, bright-eyed as hawks, with their swarthy complexions and their broad-brimm’d hats — apparently always on horseback, with loose arms slightly raised and swinging as they ride.

“Specimen Days”

AMERICA’S CHARACTERISTIC LANDSCAPE Speaking generally as to the capacity and sure future destiny of that plain and prairie area (larger than any European kingdom) it is the inexhaustible land of wheat, maize, wool, flax, coal, iron, beef and pork, butter and cheese, apples and grapes — land of ten million virgin farms — to the eye at present wild and unproductive — yet experts say that upon it when irrigated may easily be grown enough wheat to feed the world. Then as to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling,) while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara falls, the upper Yellowstone and the like, afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the Prairies and Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape. Indeed through the whole of this journey, with all its shows and varieties, what most impress’d me, and will longest remain with me, are these same prairies. Day after day, and night after night, to my eyes, to all my senses — the esthetic [Page 865] one most of all — they silently and broadly unfolded. Even their simplest statistics are sublime. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

PRAIRIE ANALOGIES — THE TREE QUESTION The word Prairie is French, and means literally meadow. The cosmical analogies of our North American plains are the [Page 866] Steppes of Asia, the Pampas and Llanos of South America, and perhaps the Saharas of Africa. Some think the plains have been originally lake-beds; others attribute the absence of forests to the fires that almost annually sweep over them — (the cause, in vulgar estimation, of Indian summer.) The tree question will soon become a grave one. Although the Atlantic slope, the Rocky mountain region, and the southern portion of the Mississippi valley, are well wooded, there are here stretches of hundreds and thousands of miles where either not a tree grows, or often useless destruction has prevail’d; and the matter of the cultivation and spread of forests may well be press’d upon thinkers who look to the coming generations of the prairie States. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

EARTH’S MOST IMPORTANT STREAM The valley of the Mississippi river and its tributaries, (this stream and its adjuncts involve a big part of the question,) comprehends more than twelve hundred thousand square miles, the greater part prairies. It is by far the most important stream on the globe, and would seem to have been marked out by design, slow-flowing from north to south, through a dozen climates, all fitted for man’s healthy occupancy, its outlet unfrozen all the year, and its line forming a safe, cheap continental avenue for commerce and passage from the north temperate to the torrid zone. Not even the mighty Amazon (though larger in volume) on its line of east and west — not the Nile in Africa, nor the Danube in Europe, nor the three great rivers of China, compare with it. Only the Mediterranean sea has play’d some such part in history, and all through the past, as the Mississippi is destined to play in the future. By its demesnes, water’d and welded by its branches, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red, the Yazoo, the St. Francis and others, it already compacts twenty-five millions of people, not merely the most peaceful and money- making, but the most restless and warlike on earth. Its valley, or reach, is rapidly concentrating the political power of the American Union. One almost thinks it is the Union — or soon will be. Take it out, with its radiations, and what would be left? From the car windows through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, or stopping some days along the Topeka and Santa Fe road, in southern Kansas, and indeed wherever I went, hundreds and thousands of miles through this region, my eyes feasted on primitive and rich meadows, some of them partially inhabited, but far, immensely far more untouch’d, unbroken — and much of it more lovely and fertile in its unplough’d innocence than the fair and valuable fields of New York’s, Pennsylvania’s, Maryland’s or Virginia’s richest farms. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

MISSISSIPPI VALLEY LITERATURE Lying by one rainy day in Missouri to rest after quite a long exploration — first trying a big volume I found there of “Milton, Young, Gray, Beattie and Collins,” but giving it up for a bad job — enjoying however for awhile, as often before, the reading of Walter Scott’s poems, “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” “Marmion,” and so on — I stopp’d and laid down the book, and ponder’d the thought of a poetry that should in due time express and supply the teeming region I was in the midst of, and have briefly touch’d upon. One’s mind needs but a moment’s deliberation anywhere in the United States to see clearly enough that all the prevalent book and library poets, either as imported from Great Britain, or follow’d and doppel-gang’d here, are foreign to our States, copiously as they are read by us all. But to fully understand not only how absolutely in opposition to our times and lands, and how little and cramp’d, and what anachronisms and absurdities many of their pages are, for American purposes, one must dwell or travel awhile in Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, and get rapport with their people and country. Will the day ever come — no matter how long deferr’d — when those models and lay- figures from the British islands — and even the precious traditions of the classics — will be reminiscences, studies only? The pure breath, primitiveness, boundless prodigality and amplitude, strange mixture of delicacy [Page 867] and power, of continence, of real and ideal, and of all original and first-class elements, of these prairies, the Rocky mountains, and of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers — will they ever appear in, and in some sort form a standard for our poetry and art? (I sometimes think that even the ambition of my friend Joaquin Miller to put them in, and illustrate them, places him ahead of the whole crowd.) Not long ago I was down New York bay, on a steamer, watching the sunset over the dark green heights of Navesink, and viewing all that inimitable spread of shore, shipping and sea, around Sandy hook. But an intervening week or two, and my eyes catch the shadowy outlines of the Spanish peaks. In the more than two thousand miles between, though of infinite and paradoxical variety, a curious and absolute fusion is doubtless steadily annealing, compacting, identifying all. But subtler and wider and more solid, (to produce such compaction,) than the laws of the States, or the common ground of Congress or the Supreme Court, or the grim welding of our national wars, or the steel ties of railroads, or all the kneading and fusing processes of our material and business history, past or present, would in my opinion be a great throbbing, vital, imaginative work, or series of works, or literature, in constructing which the Plains, the Prairies, and the Mississippi river, with the demesnes of its varied and ample valley, should be the concrete background, and America’s humanity, passions, struggles, hopes, there and now — an eclaircissement as it is and is to be, on the stage of the New World, of all Time’s hitherto drama of war, romance and evolution — should furnish the lambent fire, the ideal. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 30, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

PRESIDENT HAYES’S SPEECHES I see President Hayes has come out West, passing quite informally from point to point, with his wife and a small cortege of big officers, receiving ovations, and making daily and sometimes double-daily addresses to the people. To these addresses — all impromptu, and some would call them ephemeral — I feel to devote a memorandum. They are shrewd, good-natur’d, face-to-face speeches, on easy topics not too deep; but they give me some revised ideas of oratory — of a new, opportune theory and practice of that art, quite changed from the classic rules, and adapted to our days, our occasions, to American democracy, and to the swarming populations of the West. I hear them criticised as wanting in dignity, but to me they are just what they should be, considering all the circumstances, who they come from, and who they are address’d to. Underneath, his objects are to compact and fraternize the States, encourage their materialistic and industrial development, soothe and expand their self-poise, and tie all and each with resistless double ties not only of inter- trade barter, but human comradeship. From Kansas city I went on to St. Louis, where I remain’d nearly three months, with my brother T. J. W., and my dear nieces.

October 17, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

AN INTERVIEWER’S ITEM To-day one of the newspapers of St. Louis prints the following informal remarks of mine on American, especially Western literature: “We called on Mr. Whitman yesterday and after a somewhat desultory conversation abruptly asked him: ‘Do you think we are to have a distinctively American literature?’ ‘It seems to me,’ said he, ‘that our work at present is to lay the foundations of a great nation in [Page 868] products, in agriculture, in commerce, in networks of intercommunication, and in all that relates to the comforts of vast masses of men and families, with freedom of speech, ecclesiasticism, &c. These we have founded and are carrying out on a grander scale than ever hitherto, and Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado, seem to me to be the seat and field of these very facts and ideas. Materialistic prosperity in all its varied forms, with those other points that I mentioned, intercommunication and freedom, are first to be attended to. When those have their results and get settled, then a literature worthy of us will begin to be defined. Our American superiority and vitality are in the bulk of our people, not in a gentry like the old world. The greatness of our army during the secession war, was in the rank and file, and so with the nation. Other lands have their vitality in a few, a class, but we have it in the bulk of the people. Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN After October 17, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman as he passed through Kansas City: “Specimen Days”

THE WOMEN OF THE WEST I am not so well satisfied with what I see of the women of the prairie cities. I am writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main street, Kansas city, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably drest, and have the look of “gentility” in face, manner and action, but they do not have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are “intellectual” and fashionable, but dyspeptic- looking and generally doll-like; their ambition evidently is to copy their eastern sisters. Something far different and in advance must appear, to tally and complete the superb masculinity of the West, and maintain and continue it. [Page 869]

October-December: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

ST. LOUIS MEMORANDA The points of St. Louis are its position, its absolute wealth, (the long accumulations of time and trade, solid riches, probably a higher average thereof than any city,) the unrivall’d amplitude of its well-laid out environage of broad plateaus, for future expansion — and the great State of which it is the head. It fuses northern and southern qualities, perhaps native and foreign ones, to perfection, rendezvous the whole stretch of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and its American electricity goes well with its German phlegm. Fourth, Fifth and Third streets are store-streets, showy, modern, metropolitan, with hurrying crowds, vehicles, horse-cars, hubbub, plenty of people, rich goods, plate-glass windows, iron fronts often five or six stories high. You can purchase anything in St. Louis (in most of the big western cities for the matter of that) just as readily and cheaply as in the Atlantic marts. Often in going about the town you see reminders of old, even decay’d civilization. The water of the [Page 871] west, in some places, is not good, but they make it up here by plenty of very fair wine, and inexhaustible quantities of the best beer in the world. There are immense establishments for slaughtering beef and pork — and I saw flocks of sheep, 5000 in a flock. (In Kansas city I had visited a packing establishment that kills and packs an average of 2500 hogs a day the whole year round, for export. Another in Atchison, Kansas, same extent; others nearly equal elsewhere. And just as big ones here.)

October 20 The reading room of the British Museum was 1st lighted with electricity.

October 21 Thomas Alva Edison created the 1st practical incandescent lamp. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN October 26, Sunday: Angelina Emily Grimké Weld died in Hyde Park, Massachusetts.

October 29, Wednesday-31, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

NIGHTS ON THE MISSISSIPPI Wonderfully fine, with the full harvest moon, dazzling and silvery. I have haunted the river every night lately, where I could get a look at the bridge by moonlight. It is indeed a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable, and I never tire of it. The river at present is very low; I noticed to-day it had much more of a blue-clear look than usual. I hear the slight ripples, the air is fresh and cool, and the view, up or down, wonderfully clear, in the moonlight. I am out pretty late: it is so fascinating, dreamy. The cool night-air, all the influences, the silence, with those far-off eternal stars, do me good. I have been quite ill of late. And so, well-near the centre of our national demesne, these night views of the Mississippi. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1880

January 1, Thursday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

EDGAR POE’S SIGNIFICANCE In diagnosing this disease called humanity — to assume for the nonce what seems a chief mood of the personality and writings of my subject — I have thought that poets, somewhere or other on the list, present the most mark’d indications. Comprehending artists in a mass, musicians, painters, actors, and so on, and considering each and all of them as radiations or flanges of that furious whirling wheel, poetry, the centre and axis of the whole, where else indeed may we so well investigate the causes, growths, tally-marks of the time — the age’s matter and malady?

By common consent there is nothing better for man or woman than a perfect and noble life, morally without flaw, happily balanced in activity, physically sound and pure, giving its due proportion, and no more, to the sympathetic, the human emotional element — a life, in all these, unhasting, unresting, untiring to the end. And yet there is another shape of personality dearer far to the artist-sense, (which likes the play of strongest lights and shades,) where the perfect character, the good, the heroic, although never attain’d, is never lost sight of, but through failures, sorrows, temporary downfalls, is return’d to again and again, and while often violated, is passionately adhered to as long as mind, muscles, voice, obey the power we call volition. This sort of personality we see more or less in Burns, Byron, Schiller, and George Sand. But we do not see it in Edgar Poe. (All this is the result of reading at intervals the last three days a new volume of his poems — I took it on my rambles down by the pond, and by degrees read it all through there.) While to the character first outlined [Page 873] the service Poe renders is certainly that entire contrast and contradiction which is next best to fully exemplifying it.

Almost without the first sign of moral principle, or of the concrete or its heroisms, or the simpler affections of the heart, Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page — and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems. To one who could work out their subtle retracing and retrospect, the latter would make a close tally no doubt between the author’s birth and antecedents, his childhood and youth, his physique, his so-call’d education, his studies and associates, the literary and social Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, of those times — not only the places and circumstances in themselves, but often, very often, in a strange spurning of, and reaction from them all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 5, Monday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

UPON OUR OWN LAND “Always, after supper, take a walk half a mile long,” says an old proverb, dryly adding, “and if convenient let it be upon your own land.” I wonder does any other nation but ours afford opportunity for such a jaunt as this? Indeed has any previous period afforded it? No one, I discover, begins to know the real geographic, democratic, indissoluble American Union in the present, or suspect it in the future, until he explores these Central States, and dwells awhile observantly on their prairies, or amid their busy towns, and the mighty father of waters. A ride of two or three thousand miles, “on one’s own land,” with hardly a disconnection, could certainly be had in no other place than the United States, and at no period before this. If you want to see what the railroad is, and [Page 872] how civilization and progress date from it — how it is the conqueror of crude nature, which it turns to man’s use, both on small scales and on the largest — come hither to inland America. I return’d home, east, Jan. 5, 1880, having travers’d, to and fro and across, 10,000 miles and more. I soon resumed my seclusions down in the woods, or by the creek, or gaddings about cities, and an occasional disquisition, as will be seen following. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 11, Wednesday: Professor Henri-Frédéric Amiel, who would be referred to as the “Swiss Thoreau,” wrote in his JOURNAL INTIME: “Victor de Laprade has elevation, grandeur, nobility, and harmony. What is it, then, that he lacks? Ease, and perhaps humor. Hence the monotonous solemnity, the excess of emphasis, the over- intensity, the inspired air, the statue-like gait, which annoy one in him. His is a muse which never lays aside the cothurnus, and a royalty which never puts off its crown, even in sleep. The total absence in him of playfulness, simplicity, familiarity, is a great defect. De Laprade is to the ancients as the French tragedy is to that of Euripides, or as the wig of Louis XIV. to the locks of Apollo. His majestic airs are wearisome and factitious. If there is not exactly affectation in them, there is at least a kind of theatrical and sacerdotal posing, a sort of professional attitudinizing. Truth is not as fine as this, but it is more living, more pathetic, more varied. Marble images are cold. Was it not Musset who said, “If De Laprade is a poet, then I am not one?””

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

BEETHOVEN’S SEPTETTE At a good concert to-night in the foyer of the opera house, Philadelphia — the band a small but first-rate one. Never did music more sink into and soothe and fill me — never so prove its soul-rousing power, its impossibility of statement. Especially in the rendering of one of Beethoven’s master septettes by the well-chosen and perfectly-combined instruments (violins, viola, clarionet, horn, ’cello and contrabass,) was I carried away, seeing, absorbing many wonders. [Page 875] Dainty abandon, sometimes as if Nature laughing on a hillside in the sunshine; serious and firm monotonies, as of winds; a horn sounding through the tangle of the forest, and the dying echoes; soothing floating of waves, but presently rising in surges, angrily lashing, muttering, heavy; piercing peals of laughter, for interstices; now and then weird, as Nature herself is in certain moods — but mainly spontaneous, easy, careless — often the sentiment of the postures of naked children playing or sleeping. It did me good even to watch the violinists drawing their bows so masterly — every motion a study. I allow’d myself, as I sometimes do, to wander out of myself. The conceit came to me of a copious grove of singing birds, and in their midst a simple harmonic duo, two human souls, steadily asserting their own pensiveness, joyousness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 13, Friday: In his workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Alva Edison observed what would come to be known as the “Edison Effect” — he would use it to invent a voltage regulator in 1883, and it would later be used in the invention of the diode tube (this would be his one significant contribution to science, rather than to technology and engineering). THE SCIENCE OF 1880

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A HINT OF WILD NATURE As I was crossing the Delaware to-day, saw a large flock of wild geese, right overhead, not very high up, ranged in V-shape, in relief against the noon clouds of light smoke-color. Had a capital though momentary view of them, and then of their course on and on southeast, till gradually fading — (my eyesight yet first rate for the open air and its distances, but I use glasses for reading.) Queer thoughts melted into me the two or three minutes, or less, seeing these creatures cleaving the sky — the spacious, airy realm — even the prevailing smoke-gray color everywhere, (no sun shining) — the waters below — the rapid flight of the birds, appearing just for a minute — flashing to me such a hint of the whole spread of Nature, with her eternal unsophisticated freshness, her never-visited recesses of sea, sky, shore — and then disappearing in the distance.

LOAFING IN THE WOODS I write this down in the country again, but in a new spot, seated on a log in the woods, warm, sunny, midday. Have been loafing here deep among the trees, shafts of tall pines, oak, hickory, with a thick undergrowth of laurels and grapevines — the ground cover’d everywhere by debris, [Page 876] dead leaves, breakage, moss — everything solitary, ancient, grim. Paths (such as they are) leading hither and yon — (how made I know not, for nobody seems to come here, nor man nor cattle- kind.) Temperature to-day about 60, the wind through the pine-tops; I sit and listen to its hoarse sighing above (and to the stillness) long and long, varied by aimless rambles in the old roads and paths, and by exercise-pulls at the young saplings, to keep my joints from getting stiff. Blue-birds, robins, meadow-larks begin to appear. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 19, Thursday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

Furthermore.…: Just before 10 P.M. cold and entirely clear again, the show overhead, bearing southwest, of wonderful and crowded magnificence. The moon in her third quarter — the clusters of the Hyades and Pleiades, with the planet Mars between — in full crossing sprawl in the sky the great Egyptian X, (Sirius, Procyon, and the main stars in the constellations of the Ship, the Dove, and of Orion) just north of east Bootes, and in his knee Arcturus, an hour high, mounting the heaven, ambitiously large and sparkling, as if he meant to challenge with Sirius the stellar supremacy.

With the sentiment of the stars and moon such nights I get all the free margins and indefiniteness of music or poetry, fused in geometry’s utmost exactness.

March 9, Tuesday: Consular Convention Between the United States of America and Belgium. READ THE FULL TEXT

Engelbert Humperdinck met Richard Wagner for the 1st time, in Naples.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A snowstorm in the morning, and continuing most of the day. But I took a walk over two hours, the same woods and paths, amid the falling flakes. No wind, yet the musical low murmur through the pines, quite pronounced, curious, like waterfalls, now still’d, now pouring again. All the senses, sight, sound, smell, delicately gratified. Every snowflake lay where it fell on the evergreens, holly-trees, laurels, &c., the multitudinous leaves and branches piled, bulging-white, defined by edge-lines of emerald — the tall straight columns of the plentiful bronze-topt pines — a slight resinous odor blending with that of the snow. (For there is a scent to everything, even the snow, if you can only detect it — no two places, hardly any two hours, anywhere, exactly alike. How different the odor of noon from midnight, or winter from summer, or a windy spell from a still one.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 9, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A CONTRALTO VOICE Visit this evening to my friends the J.’s — good supper, to which I did justice — lively chat with Mrs. J. and I. and J. As I sat out front on the walk afterward, in the evening air, the church-choir and organ on the corner opposite gave Luther’s hymn, Ein feste berg, very finely. The air was borne by a rich contralto. For nearly half an hour there in the dark, (there was a good string of English stanzas,) came the music, firm and unhurried, with long pauses. The full silver star-beams of Lyra rose silently over the church’s dim roof-ridge. Varicolor’d lights from the stain’d glass windows broke through the tree-shadows. And under all — under the Northern Crown up there, and in the fresh breeze below, and the chiaroscuro of the night, that liquid-full contralto. [Page 877] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 4, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SEEING NIAGARA TO ADVANTAGE For really seizing a great picture or book, or piece of music, or architecture, or grand scenery — or perhaps for the first time even the common sunshine, or landscape, or may be even the mystery of identity, most curious mystery of all — there comes some lucky five minutes of a man’s life, set amid a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, and bringing in a brief flash the culmination of years of reading and travel and thought. The present case about two o’clock this afternoon, gave me Niagara, its superb severity of action and color and majestic grouping, in one short, indescribable show. We were very slowly crossing the Suspension bridge — not a full stop anywhere, but next to it — the day clear, sunny, still — and I out on the platform. The falls were in plain view about a mile off, but very distinct, and no roar — hardly a murmur. The river tumbling green and white, far below me; the dark high banks, the plentiful umbrage, many bronze cedars, in shadow; and tempering and arching all the immense materiality, a clear sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid, spiritual, silent. Brief, and as quiet as brief, that picture — a remembrance always afterwards. Such are the things, indeed, I lay away with my life’s rare and blessed bits of hours, reminiscent, past — the wild sea-storm I once saw one winter day, off Fire island — the elder Booth in Richard, that famous night forty years ago in the old Bowery — or Alboni in the children’s scene in Norma — or night-views, I remember, on the field, after battles in Virginia — or the peculiar sentiment of moonlight and stars over the great Plains, western Kansas — or scooting up New York bay, with a stiff breeze and a good yacht, off Navesink. With these, I say, I henceforth place that view, that afternoon, that combination complete, that five minutes’ perfect absorption of Niagara — not the great majestic gem alone by itself, but set complete in all its varied, full, indispensable surroundings.

“Specimen Days”

JAUNTING TO CANADA To go back a little, I left Philadelphia, 9th and Green streets, at 8 o’clock P.M., June 3, on a first-class sleeper, by [Page 878] the Lehigh Valley (North Pennsylvania) route, through Bethlehem, Wilkesbarre, Waverly, and so (by Erie) on through Corning to Hornellsville, where we arrived at 8, morning, and had a bounteous breakfast. I must say I never put in such a good night on any railroad track — smooth, firm, the minimum of jolting, and all the swiftness compatible with safety. So without change to Buffalo, and thence to Clifton, where we arrived early afternoon; then on to London, Ontario, Canada, in four more — less than twenty-two hours altogether. I am domiciled at the hospitable house of my friends Dr. and Mrs. Bucke, in the ample and charming garden and lawns of the asylum. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 6, Sunday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SUNDAY WITH THE INSANE Went over to the religious services (Episcopal) main Insane asylum, held in a lofty, good-sized hall, third story. Plain boards, whitewash, plenty of cheap chairs, no ornament or color, yet all scrupulously clean and sweet. Some three hundred persons present, mostly patients. Everything, the prayers, a short sermon, the firm, orotund voice of the minister, and most of all, beyond any portraying or suggesting, that audience, deeply impress’d me. I was furnish’d with an arm-chair near the pulpit, and sat facing the motley, yet perfectly well-behaved and orderly congregation. The quaint dresses and bonnets of some of the women, several very old and gray, here and there like the heads in old pictures. O the looks that came from those faces! There were two or three I shall probably never forget. Nothing at all markedly repulsive or hideous — strange enough I did not see one such. Our common humanity, mine and yours, everywhere: “The same old blood — the same red, running blood;”

yet behind most, an inferr’d arriere of such storms, such wrecks, such mysteries, fires, love, wrong, greed for wealth, religious problems, crosses — mirror’d from those crazed faces (yet now temporarily so calm, like still waters,) all the woes and sad happenings of life and death — now from every one the devotional element radiating — was it not, indeed, the peace of God that passeth all understanding, strange as it may [Page 879] sound? I can only say that I took long and searching eye-sweeps as I sat there, and it seem’d so, rousing unprecedented thoughts, problems unanswerable. A very fair choir, and melodeon accompaniment. They sang “Lead, kindly light,” after the sermon. Many join’d in the beautiful hymn, to which the minister read the introductory text, “In the daytime also He led them with a cloud, and all the night with a light of fire.” Then the words: Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead thou me on. The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on. Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me. I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that thou Should’st lead me on; I lov’d to choose and see my path; but now Lead thou me on. I loved the garish day, and spite of fears Pride ruled my will; remember not past years.

A couple of days after, I went to the “Refractory building,” under special charge of Dr. Beemer, and through the wards pretty thoroughly, both the men’s and women’s. I have since made many other visits of the kind through the asylum, and around among the detach’d cottages. As far as I could see, this is among the most advanced, perfected, and kindly and rationally carried on, of all its kind in America. It is a town in itself, with many buildings and a thousand inhabitants. I learn that Canada, and especially this ample and populous province, Ontario, has the very best and plentiest benevolent institutions in all departments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 8, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

GRAND NATIVE GROWTH In a few days I go to lake Huron, and may have something to say of that region and people. From what I already see, I should say the young native population of Canada was growing up, forming a hardy, democratic, intelligent, radically sound, and just as American, good-natured and individualistic race, as the average range of best specimens among us. As among us, too, I please myself by considering that this element, though it may not be the majority, promises to be the leaven which must eventually leaven the whole lump.

A ZOLLVEREIN BETWEEN U.S. AND CANADA Some of the more liberal of the presses here are discussing the question of a zollverein between the United States and Canada. It is proposed to form a union for commercial purposes — to altogether abolish the frontier tariff line, with its double sets of custom house officials now existing between the two countries, and to agree upon one tariff for both, the proceeds of this tariff to be divided between the two governments on the basis of population. It is said that a large proportion of the merchants of Canada are in favor of this step, as they believe it would materially add to the business of the country, by removing the restrictions that now exist on trade between Canada and the States. Those persons who are opposed to the measure believe that it would increase the material welfare of the country, but it would loosen the bonds between Canada and England; and this sentiment overrides the desire for commercial prosperity. Whether the sentiment can continue to bear the strain put upon it is a question. It is [Page 881] thought by many that commercial considerations must in the end prevail. It seems also to be generally agreed that such a zollverein, or common customs union, would bring practically more benefits to the Canadian provinces than to the United States. (It seems to me a certainty of time, sooner or later, that Canada shall form two or three grand States, equal and independent, with the rest of the American Union. The St. Lawrence and lakes are not for a frontier line, but a grand interior or mid-channel.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 20, Friday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

THE ST. LAWRENCE LINE Premising that my three or four months in Canada were intended, among the rest, as an exploration of the line of the St. Lawrence, from lake Superior to the sea, (the engineers here insist upon considering it as one stream, over 2000 miles long, including lakes and Niagara and all) — that I have only partially carried out my programme; but for the seven or eight hundred miles so far fulfill’d, I find that the Canada question is absolutely control’d by this vast water line, with its first- class features and points of trade, humanity, and many more — here I am writing this nearly a thousand miles north of my Philadelphia starting-point (by way of Montreal and Quebec) in the midst of regions that go to a further extreme of grimness, wildness of beauty, and a sort of still and pagan scaredness, while yet Christian, inhabitable, and partially fertile, than perhaps any other on earth. The weather remains perfect; some might call it a little cool, but I wear my old gray overcoat and find it just right. The days are full of sunbeams and oxygen. Most of the forenoons and afternoons I am on the forward deck of the steamer.

“Specimen Days”

THE SAVAGE SAGUENAY Up these black waters, over a hundred miles — always strong, deep, (hundreds of feet, sometimes thousands,) ever with high, rocky hills for banks, green and gray — at times a little like some parts of the Hudson, but much more pronounc’d and defiant. The hills rise higher — keep their ranks more unbroken. The river is straighter and of more resolute flow, and its hue, though dark as ink, exquisitely polish’d and [Page 882] sheeny under the August sun. Different, indeed, this Saguenay from all other rivers — different effects — a bolder, more vehement play of lights and shades. Of a rare charm of singleness and simplicity. (Like the organ- chant at midnight from the old Spanish convent, in “Favorita” — one strain only, simple and monotonous and unornamented — but indescribably penetrating and grand and masterful.) Great place for echoes: while our steamer was tied at the wharf at Tadousac (taj-oo-sac) waiting, the escape-pipe letting off steam, I was sure I heard a band at the hotel up in the rocks — could even make out some of the tunes. Only when our pipe stopp’d, I knew what caused it. Then at cape Eternity and Trinity rock, the pilot with his whistle producing similar marvellous results, echoes indescribably weird, as we lay off in the still bay under their shadows. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1881

Houghton, Mifflin was touting its editions of

• Charles Dudley Warner’s IN THE WILDERNESS which would be found to be “as fresh and fragrant of the woods as anything that Thoreau ever wrote,” and • Frank Bolles’s THE LAND OF LINGERING SNOW which revealed “a power of minute observation as remarkable as Thoreau’s.” (Meanwhile this corporation was promoting John Burroughs as “the same breed as Gilbert White of Selborne, as John James Audubon, as Thoreau” and John Muir as “the Thoreau of the Far West.”

Houghton, Mifflin’s Horace Scudder began to anthologize their properties in Henry Thoreau’s literary corpus, in AMERICAN PROSE. They included “Sounds” and “Brute Neighbors” from WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and “The Highland Light” from CAPE COD, pieces of descriptive portraiture characterized by a noncombatative authorial persona. (The comparable materials included from their Waldo Emerson properties were “Behavior” and “Books.”) Also, Thoreau’s “A Winter Walk” was positioned as one of their “Emerson Little Classics” volumes. Lawrence Buell comments, on page 347 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN that In short, Houghton, Mifflin used its name-droppable authors to market the works of newer authors, who if all went well became name-droppable themselves. The publishers thereby built the image of an emerging canon of literary nature writing with Thoreau at its head.

Burroughs would attempt to distance himself from this advertising, by pointing out that “There is really little or no resemblance between us,” by pointing out for instance that “Thoreau’s aim is mainly ethical, as much so as Emerson’s is,” by pointing out that “The aim of White of Selbourne [sic] was mainly scientific” whereas his own aim “so far as I have any, is entirely artistic. I care little for the merely scientific aspects of things, and nothing for the ethical. I will not preach one word. I will have a pure result, or nothing. I paint the bird, or the trout, or the scene, for its own sake.” “I do not take readers to nature to give them a lesson, but to have a good time.” Characterizing Henry Thoreau, whom he had never met, as having been “grim, uncompromising, almost heartless,” he proclaimed “I don’t owe him any great debt.” Why should he owe him any great debt? – “Thoreau was not a great philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he was not a great poet … His philosophy begins and ends with himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and nearly always illogical … There are crudities in his writings that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist wonder; and there is often an expression of contempt for his fellow countrymen, and the rest of mankind, and their aims in life, that make the judicious grieve.” “To the last, his ornithology was not quite sure, not quite trustworthy.” The problem as he saw it was that Thoreau had for some inane or self-absorbed reason been “more intent on the natural history of his own thought than on that of the bird.” Under guidance by Walt Whitman, he proclaimed, his agenda was merely to “liberate the birds from the scientists.” A man after a publisher’s heart! HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 10, day: A report from Walt Whitman in regard to the death of Thomas Carlyle: “Specimen Days”

Death Of Carlyle And so the flame of the lamp, after long wasting and flickering, has gone out entirely. As a representative author, a literary figure, no man else will bequeath to the future more significant hints of our stormy era, its fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling parturition periods, than Carlyle. He belongs to our own branch of the stock too; neither Latin nor Greek, but altogether Gothic. Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he was himself more a French revolution than any of his volumes. In some respects, [Page 887] so far in the Nineteenth century, the best equipt, keenest mind, even from the college point of view, of all Britain; only he had an ailing body. Dyspepsia is to be traced in every page, and now and then fills the page. One may include among the lessons of his life — even though that life stretch’d to amazing length — how behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a sort of casting vote. Two conflicting agonistic elements seem to have contended in the man, sometimes pulling him different ways like wild horses. He was a cautious, conservative Scotchman, fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of modern radicalism is; but then his great heart demanded reform, demanded change — often terribly at odds with his scornful brain. No author ever put so much wailing and despair into his books, sometimes palpable, oftener latent. He reminds me of that passage in Young’s poems where as death presses closer and closer for his prey, the soul rushes hither and thither, appealing, shrieking, berating, to escape the general doom. Of short-comings, even positive blur-spots, from an American point of view, he had serious share. Not for his merely literary merit, (though that was great) — not as “maker of books,” but as launching into the self-complacent atmosphere of our days a rasping, questioning, dislocating agitation and shock, is Carlyle’s final value. It is time the English-speaking peoples had some true idea about the verteber of genius, namely power. As if they must always have it cut and bias’d to the fashion, like a lady’s cloak! What a needed service he performs! How he shakes our comfortable reading circles with a touch of the old Hebraic anger and prophecy — and indeed it is just the same. Not Isaiah himself more scornful, more threatening: “The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden under feet: And the glorious beauty which is on the head of the fat valley shall be a fading flower.” (The word prophecy is much misused; it seems narrow’d to prediction merely. That is not the main sense of the Hebrew word translated “prophet;” it means one whose mind bubbles up and pours forth as a fountain, from inner, divine spontaneities revealing God. Prediction is a very minor part of prophecy. The great matter is to reveal and [Page 888] outpour the God-like suggestions pressing for birth in the soul. This is briefly the doctrine of the Friends or Quakers.)

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

DEATH OF Thomas Carlyle [continued] Then the simplicity and amid ostensible frailty the towering strength of this man — a hardy oak knot, you could never wear out — an old farmer dress’d in brown clothes, and not handsome — his very foibles fascinating. Who cares that he wrote about Dr. Francia, and “Shooting Niagara” — and “the Nigger Question,” — and didn’t at all admire our United States? (I doubt if he ever thought or said half as bad words about us as we deserve.) How he splashes like leviathan in the seas of modern literature and politics! Doubtless, respecting the latter, one needs first to realize, from actual observation, the squalor, vice and doggedness ingrain’d in the bulk-population of the British Islands, with the red tape, the fatuity, the flunkeyism everywhere, to understand the last meaning in his pages. Accordingly, though he was no chartist or radical, I consider Carlyle’s by far the most indignant comment or protest anent the fruits of feudalism to-day in Great Britain — the increasing poverty and degradation of the homeless, landless twenty millions, while a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, possess the entire soil, the money, and the fat berths. Trade and shipping, and clubs and culture, and prestige, and guns, and a fine select class of gentry and aristocracy, with every modern improvement, cannot begin to salve or defend such stupendous hoggishness. The way to test how much he has left his country were to consider, or try to consider, for a moment, the array of British thought, the resultant ensemble of the last fifty years, as existing to-day, but with Carlyle left out. It would be like an army with no artillery. The show were still a gay and rich one — Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more — horsemen and rapid infantry, and banners flying — but the last heavy roar so dear to the ear of the train’d soldier, and that settles fate and victory, would be lacking. For the last three years we in America have had transmitted glimpses of a thin- bodied, lonesome, wifeless, childless, very old man, lying on a sofa, kept out of bed by indomitable will, but, of late, never well enough to take the open air. I have noted this news from time to time in brief descriptions in the papers. A week ago I read such an item just before I started [Page 889] out for my customary evening stroll between eight and nine. In the fine cold night, unusually clear, (Feb. 5, ’81,) as I walk’d some open grounds adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, and his approaching — perhaps even then actual — death, filled me with thoughts eluding statement, and curiously blending with the scene. The planet Venus, an hour high in the west, with all her volume and lustre recover’d, (she has been shorn and languid for nearly a year,) including an additional sentiment I never noticed before — not merely voluptuous, Paphian, steeping, fascinating — now with calm commanding seriousness and hauteur — the Milo Venus now. Upward to the zenith, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon past her quarter, trailing in procession, with the Pleiades following, and the constellation Taurus, and red Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion strode through the southeast, with his glittering belt — and a trifle below hung the sun of the night, Sirius. Every star dilated, more vitreous, nearer than usual. Not as in some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible, and just as nigh. Berenice’s hair showing every gem, and new ones. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

DEATH OF Thomas Carlyle [concluded] To the northeast and north the Sickle, the Goat and kids, Cassiopea, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying. (To soothe and spiritualize, and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of death and genius, consider them under the stars at midnight.) And now that he has gone hence, can it be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an identity still? 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. With me, too, when depress’d by some specially sad event, or tearing problem, I wait till I go out under the stars for the last voiceless satisfaction. [Page 890]

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW Later Thoughts and Jottings. There is surely at present an inexplicable rapport (all the more piquant from its contradictoriness) between that deceas’d author and our United States of America — no matter whether it lasts or not.1 As we Westerners assume definite shape, and result in formations and fruitage unknown before, it is curious with what a new sense our eyes turn to representative outgrowths of crises and personages in the Old World. Beyond question, since Carlyle’s death, and the publication of Froude’s memoirs, not only the interest in his books, but every personal bit regarding the famous Scotchman — his dyspepsia, his buffetings, his parentage, his paragon of a wife, his career in Edinburgh, in the lonesome nest on Craigenputtock moor, and then so many years in London — is probably wider and livelier to-day in this country than in his own land. Whether I succeed or no, I, too, reaching across the Atlantic and taking the man’s dark fortune-telling of humanity and politics, would offset it all, (such is the fancy that comes to me,) by a far more profound horoscope- casting of those themes — G.W.F. Hegel’s.2 [Page 891]

1.It will be difficult for the future — judging by his books, personal dissympathies, &c., — to account for the deep hold this author has taken on the present age, and the way he has color’d its method and thought. I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as affecting myself. But there could be no view, or even partial picture, of the middle and latter part of our Nineteenth century, that did not markedly include Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many others, literary productions, works of art, personal identities, events,) there has been an impalpable something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to — those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy — even from the most erudite and sincere mind of Europe. 2.Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during their lives consider’d the United States worthy of serious mention, all the principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: “Speculations for the use of North America, and Democracy there, with the relations of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the New.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] First, about a chance, a never-fulfill’d vacuity of this pale cast of thought — this British Hamlet from Cheyne row, more puzzling than the Danish one, with his contrivances for settling the broken and spavin’d joints of the world’s government, especially its democratic dislocation. Carlyle’s grim fate was cast to live and dwell in, and largely embody, the parturition agony and qualms of the old order, amid crowded accumulations of ghastly morbidity, giving birth to the new. But conceive of him (or his parents before him) coming to America, recuperated by the cheering realities and activity of our people and country — growing up and delving face-to-face resolutely among us here, especially at the West — inhaling and exhaling our limitless air and eligibilities — devoting his mind to the theories and developments of this Republic amid its practical facts as exemplified in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, or Louisiana. I say facts, and face-to-face confrontings — so different from books, and all those quiddities and mere reports in the libraries, upon which the man (it was wittily said of him at the age of thirty, that there was no one in Scotland who had glean’d so much and seen so little,) almost wholly fed, and which even his sturdy and vital mind but reflected at best. Something of the sort narrowly escaped happening. In 1835, after more than a dozen years of trial and non-success, the author of SARTOR RESARTUS removing to London, very poor, a confirmed hypochondriac, “Sartor” universally scoffed at, no literary prospects ahead, deliberately settled on one last casting-throw of the literary dice — resolv’d to compose and launch forth a book on the subject of the French Revolution — and if that won no higher guerdon or prize than hitherto, to sternly abandon the trade of author forever, and emigrate for good to America. But the venture turn’d out a lucky one, and there was no emigration. Carlyle’s work in the sphere of literature as he commenced and carried it out, is the same in one or two leading respects that Immanuel Kant’s was in speculative philosophy. But the Scotchman had none of the stomachic phlegm and never-perturb’d placidity of the Konigsberg sage, and did not, like the latter, understand his own limits, and stop when he got to the end of them. He clears away jungle and poison- vines and [Page 892] underbrush — at any rate hacks valiantly at them, smiting hip and thigh. Kant did the like in his sphere, and it was all he profess’d to do; his labors have left the ground fully prepared ever since — and greater service was probably never perform’d by mortal man. But the pang and hiatus of Carlyle seem to me to consist in the evidence everywhere that amid a whirl of fog and fury and cross-purposes, he firmly believ’d he had a clue to the medication of the world’s ills, and that his bounden mission was to exploit it.1

1.I hope I shall not myself fall into the error I charge upon him, of prescribing a specific for indispensable evils. My utmost pretension is probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims, and general movement and result, of ideas. Something of the latter kind seems to me the distinctive theory of America, of democracy, and of the modern — or rather, I should say, it is democracy, and is the modern. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] There were two anchors, or sheet-anchors, for steadying, as a last resort, the Carlylean ship. One will be specified presently. The other, perhaps the main, was only to be found in some mark’d form of personal force, an extreme degree of competent urge and will, a man or men “born to command.” Probably there ran through every vein and current of the Scotchman’s blood something that warm’d up to this kind of trait and character above aught else in the world, and which makes him in my opinion the chief celebrater and promulger of it in literature — more than Plutarch, more than Shakspere. The great masses of humanity stand for nothing — at least nothing but nebulous raw material; only the big planets and shining suns for him. To ideas almost invariably languid or cold, a number-one forceful personality was sure to rouse his eulogistic passion and savage joy. In such case, even the standard of duty hereinafter rais’d, was to be instantly lower’d and vail’d. All that is comprehended under the terms republicanism and democracy were distasteful to him from the first, and as he grew older they became hateful and contemptible. For an undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as his, the bearings he persistently ignored were marvellous. For instance, the promise, nay certainty of the democratic principle, to each and every State of the current world, not so much of helping it to perfect legislators and executives, but as the only effectual method for surely, however slowly, training [Page 893] people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling and managing themselves (the ultimate aim of political and all other development) — to gradually reduce the fact of governing to its minimum, and to subject all its staffs and their doings to the telescopes and microscopes of committees and parties — and greatest of all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient content, which went well enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism of the antique and medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent ebb and tide action for those floods of the great deep that have henceforth palpably burst forever their old bounds — seem never to have enter’d Carlyle’s thought. It was splendid how he refus’d any compromise to the last. He was curiously antique. In that harsh, picturesque, most potent voice and figure, one seems to be carried back from the present of the British islands more than two thousand years, to the range between Jerusalem and Tarsus. His fullest best biographer justly says of him: “He was a teacher and a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah have become a part of the permanent spiritual inheritance of mankind, because events proved that they had interpreted correctly the signs of their own times, and their prophecies were fulfill’d. Carlyle, like them, believ’d that he had a special message to deliver to the present age. Whether he was correct in that belief, and whether his message was a true message, remains to be seen. He has told us that our most cherish’d ideas of political liberty, with their kindred corollaries, are mere illusions, and that the progress which has seem’d to go along with them is a progress towards anarchy and social dissolution. If he was wrong, he has misused his powers. The principles of his teachings are false. He has offer’d himself as a guide upon a road of which he had no knowledge; and his own desire for himself would be the speediest oblivion both of his person and his works. If, on the other hand, he has been right; if, like his great predecessors, he has read truly the tendencies of this modern age of ours, and his teaching is authenticated by facts, then Carlyle, too, will take his place among the inspired seers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] To which I add an amendment that under no circumstances, [Page 894] and no matter how completely time and events disprove his lurid vaticinations, should the English-speaking world forget this man, nor fail to hold in honor his unsurpass’d conscience, his unique method, and his honest fame. Never were convictions more earnest and genuine. Never was there less of a flunkey or temporizer. Never had political progressivism a foe it could more heartily respect. The second main point of Carlyle’s utterance was the idea of duty being done. (It is simply a new codicil — if it be particularly new, which is by no means certain — on the time-honor’d bequest of dynasticism, the mould-eaten rules of legitimacy and kings.) He seems to have been impatient sometimes to madness when reminded by persons who thought at least as deeply as himself, that this formula, though precious, is rather a vague one, and that there are many other considerations to a philosophical estimate of each and every department either in general history or individual affairs. Altogether, I don’t know anything more amazing than these persistent strides and throbbings so far through our Nineteenth century of perhaps its biggest, sharpest, and most erudite brain, in defiance and discontent with everything; contemptuously ignoring, (either from constitutional inaptitude, ignorance itself, or more likely because he demanded a definite cure-all here and now,) the only solace and solvent to be had. There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, (in its moral completeness, considered as ensemble, not for that moral alone, but for the whole being, including physique,) a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education, (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name) — an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifarious, mad chaos of fraud, frivolity, hoggishness — this revel of fools, and incredible make- believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leash’d dog in the hand of the hunter. Such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind — mere optimism explains only [Page 895] the surface or fringe of it — Carlyle was mostly, perhaps entirely without. He seems instead to have been haunted in the play of his mental action by a spectre, never entirely laid from first to last, (Greek scholars, I believe, find the same mocking and fantastic apparition attending Aristophanes, his comedies,) — the spectre of world-destruction. How largest triumph or failure in human life, in war or peace, may depend on some little hidden centrality, hardly more than a drop of blood, a pulse-beat, or a breath of air! It is certain that all these weighty matters, democracy in America, Carlyleism, and the temperament for deepest political or literary exploration, turn on a simple point in speculative philosophy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man — the problem on whose solution science, art, the bases and pursuits of nations, and everything else, including intelligent human happiness, (here to-day, 1882, New York, Texas, California, the same as all times, all lands,) subtly and finally resting, depends for competent outset and argument, is doubtless involved in the query: What is the fusing explanation and tie — what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side, of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and space, on the other side? Immanuel Kant, though he explain’d, or partially explain’d, as may be said, the laws of the human understanding, left this question an open one. Friedrich von Schelling’s answer, or suggestion of answer, is (and very valuable and important, as far as it goes,) that the same general and particular intelligence, passion, even the standards of right and wrong, which exist in a conscious and formulated state in man, exist in an unconscious state, or in perceptible analogies, throughout the entire universe of external Nature, in all its objects large or small, and all its movements and processes — thus making the impalpable human mind, and concrete Nature, notwithstanding their duality and separation, convertible, and in centrality and essence one. But G. F. Hegel’s fuller statement of the matter probably remains the last best word that has been said upon it, up to date. Substantially adopting the scheme just epitomized, [Page 896] he so carries it out and fortifies it and merges everything in it, with certain serious gaps now for the first time fill’d, that it becomes a coherent metaphysical system, and substantial answer (as far as there can be any answer) to the foregoing question — a system which, while I distinctly admit that the brain of the future may add to, revise, and even entirely reconstruct, at any rate beams forth to-day, in its entirety, illuminating the thought of the universe, and satisfying the mystery thereof to the human mind, with a more consoling scientific assurance than any yet. According to Hegel the whole earth, (an old nucleus-thought, as in the Vedas, and no doubt before, but never hitherto brought so absolutely to the front, fully surcharged with modern scientism and facts, and made the sole entrance to each and all,) with its infinite variety, the past, the surroundings of to-day, or what may happen in the future, the contrarieties of material with spiritual, and of natural with artificial, are all, to the eye of the ensemblist, but necessary sides and unfoldings, different steps or links, in the endless process of Creative thought, which, amid numberless apparent failures and contradictions, is held together by central and never-broken unity — not contradictions or failures at all, but radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose; the whole mass of everything steadily, unerringly tending and flowing toward the permanent utile and morale, as rivers to oceans. As life is the whole law and incessant effort of the visible universe, and death only the other or invisible side of the same, so the utile, so truth, so health, are the continuous-immutable laws of the moral universe, and vice and disease, with all their perturbations, are but transient, even if ever so prevalent expressions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [continued] To politics throughout, Hegel applies the like catholic standard and faith. Not any one party, or any one form of government, is absolutely and exclusively true. Truth consists in the just relations of objects to each other. A majority or democracy may rule as outrageously and do as great harm as an oligarchy or despotism — though far less likely to do so. But the great evil is either a violation of the relations just referr’d to, or of the moral law. The specious, the unjust, the cruel, and what is called the unnatural, though not only permitted [Page 897] but in a certain sense, (like shade to light,) inevitable in the divine scheme, are by the whole constitution of that scheme, partial, inconsistent, temporary, and though having ever so great an ostensible majority, are certainly destin’d to failure, after causing great suffering. Theology, Hegel translates into science.1 All apparent contradictions in the statement of the Deific nature by different ages, nations, churches, points of view, are but fractional and imperfect expressions of one essential unity, from which they all proceed — crude endeavors or distorted parts, to be regarded both as distinct and united. In short (to put it in our own form, or summing up,) that thinker or analyzer or overlooker who by an inscrutable combination of train’d wisdom and natural intuition most fully accepts in perfect faith the moral unity and sanity of the creative scheme, in history, science, and all life and time, present and future, is both the truest cosmical devotee or religioso, and the profoundest philosopher. While he who, by the spell of himself and his circumstances, sees darkness and despair in the sum of the workings of God’s providence, and who, in that, denies or prevaricates, is, no matter how much piety plays on his lips, the most radical sinner and infidel. I am the more assured in recounting Hegel a little freely here,2 not only for offsetting the Carlylean letter and spirit — cutting it out all and several from the very roots, and below the roots — but to counterpoise, since the late death and deserv’d apotheosis of Darwin, the tenets of the evolutionists. Unspeakably precious as those are to biology, and henceforth indispensable to a right aim and estimate in study, they neither comprise or explain everything — and the last word or [Page 898] whisper still remains to be breathed, after the utmost of those claims, floating high and forever above them all, and above technical metaphysics. While the contributions which German Kant and Fichte and Schelling and Hegel have bequeath’d to humanity — and which English Darwin has also in his field — are indispensable to the erudition of America’s future, I should say that in all of them, and the best of them, when compared with the lightning flashes and flights

1.I am much indebted to J. Gostick’s abstract. 2.I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle’s ever-lurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most thoroughly American points of view I know. In my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Germany, or in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I should say, is quite the legitimate European product to be expected. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

Thomas Carlyle FROM AMERICAN POINTS OF VIEW [concluded] of the old prophets and exalt[??]s, the spiritual poets and poetry of all lands, (as in the Hebrew Bible,) there seems to be, nay certainly is, something lacking — something cold, a failure to satisfy the deepest emotions of the soul — a want of living glow, fondness, warmth, which the old exalt[??]s and poets supply, and which the keenest modern philosophers so far do not. Upon the whole, and for our purposes, this man’s name certainly belongs on the list with the just-specified, first-class moral physicians of our current era — and with Waldo Emerson and two or three others — though his prescription is drastic, and perhaps destructive, while theirs is assimilating, normal and tonic. Feudal at the core, and mental offspring and radiation of feudalism as are his books, they afford ever-valuable lessons and affinities to democratic America. Nations or individuals, we surely learn deepest from unlikeness, from a sincere opponent, from the light thrown even scornfully on dangerous spots and liabilities. (Michel Angelo invoked heaven’s special protection against his friends and affectionate flatterers; palpable foes he could manage for himself.) In many particulars Carlyle was indeed, as Froude terms him, one of those far-off Hebraic utterers, a new Micah or Habbakuk. His words at times bubble forth with abysmic inspiration. Always precious, such men; as precious now as any time. His rude, rasping, taunting, contradictory tones — what ones are more wanted amid the supple, polish’d, money-worshipping, Jesus- and-Judas-equalizing, suffrage-sovereignty echoes of current America? He has lit up our Nineteenth century with the light of a powerful, penetrating, and perfectly honest intellect of the first-class, turn’d on British and European politics, social life, literature, and representative personages — thoroughly dissatisfied with all, and mercilessly exposing the illness of all. [Page 899] But while he announces the malady, and scolds and raves about it, he himself, born and bred in the same atmosphere, is a mark’d illustration of it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 16, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

MY TRIBUTE TO FOUR POETS A short but pleasant visit to Longfellow. I am not one of the calling kind, but as the author of “Evangeline” kindly took the trouble to come and see me three years ago in Camden, where I was ill, I felt not only the impulse of my own pleasure on that occasion, but a duty. He was the only particular eminence I called on in Boston, and I shall not soon forget his lit-up face and glowing warmth and courtesy, in the modes of what is called the old school.

And now just here I feel the impulse to interpolate something about the mighty four who stamp this first American century with its birth-marks of poetic literature. In a late magazine one of my reviewers, who ought to know better, speaks of my “attitude of contempt and scorn and intolerance” toward the leading poets — of my “deriding” them, and preaching their “uselessness.” If anybody cares to know what I think — and have long thought and avow’d — about them, I am entirely willing to propound. I can’t imagine any better luck befalling these States for a poetical beginning and initiation than has come from Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier. Emerson, to me, stands unmistakably at the head, but for the others I am at a loss where to give any precedence. Each illustrious, each rounded, each distinctive. Emerson for his sweet, vital-tasting melody, rhym’d philosophy, and poems as amber-clear as the honey of the wild bee he loves to sing. Longfellow for rich color, graceful forms and incidents — all that makes life beautiful and love refined — competing with the singers of Europe on their own ground, and, with one exception, better and finer work than that of any of them. Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world — bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders — always lurkingly fond of threnodies — [Page 903] beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties — morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus. While in Whittier, with his special themes — (his outcropping love of heroism and war, for all his Quakerdom, his verses at times like the measur’d step of Cromwell’s old veterans) — in Whittier lives the zeal, the moral energy, that founded New England — the splendid rectitude and ardor of Luther, Milton, George Fox — I must not, dare not, say the wilfulness and narrowness — though doubtless the world needs now, and always will need, almost above all, just such narrowness and wilfulness.

April 23, Saturday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

It was well I got away in fair order, for if I had staid another week I should have been killed with kindness, and with eating and drinking. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Latter part of April: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A COUPLE OF OLD FRIENDS — A COLERIDGE BIT Have run down in my country haunt for a couple of days, and am spending them by the pond. I had already discover’d my kingfisher here (but only one — the mate not here yet.) This fine bright morning, down by the creek, he has come out for a spree, circling, flirting, chirping at a round rate. While I am writing these lines he is disporting himself in scoots and rings over the wider parts of the pond, into whose surface he dashes, once or twice making a loud souse — the spray flying in the sun — beautiful! I see his white and dark-gray plumage and peculiar shape plainly, as he has deign’d to come very near me. The noble, graceful bird! Now he is sitting on the limb of an old tree, high up, bending over the water — seems to be looking at me while I memorandize. I almost fancy he knows me.

Latter part of April, but 3 days later: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

My second kingfisher is here with his (or her) mate. I saw the two together flying and whirling around. I had heard, in the distance, what I thought was the clear rasping staccato of the birds several times already — but I couldn’t be sure the notes came from both until I saw them together. To-day at noon they appear’d, but apparently either on business, or for a little limited exercise only. No wild frolic now, full of free fun and motion, up and down for an hour. Doubtless, now they have cares, duties, incubation responsibilities. The frolics are deferr’d till summer- close. I don’t know as I can finish to-day’s memorandum better than with Coleridge’s lines, curiously appropriate in more ways than one: “All Nature seems at work — slugs leave their lair, The bees are stirring — birds are on the wing, And winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring; And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.” [Page 900] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 1, Sunday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway delivered a discourse on “The Oath and Its Ethics” before the South Place Society at 11 South Place, Finsbury, London.77 THE OATH AND ITS ETHICS

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A WEEK’S VISIT TO BOSTON Seems as if all the ways and means of American travel to-day had been settled, not only with reference to speed and directness, but for the comfort of women, children, invalids, and old fellows like me. I went on by a through train that runs daily from Washington to the Yankee metropolis without change. You get in a sleeping-car soon after dark in Philadelphia, and after ruminating an hour or two, have your bed made up if you like, draw the curtains, and go to sleep in it — fly on through Jersey to New York — hear in your half-slumbers a dull jolting and bumping sound or two — are unconsciously toted from Jersey city by a midnight steamer around the Battery and under the big bridge to the track of the New Haven road — resume your flight eastward, and early the next morning you wake up in Boston. All of which was my experience. I wanted to go to the Revere house. A tall unknown gentleman, (a fellow-passenger on his way to Newport he told me, I had just chatted a few moments before with him,) assisted me out through the depot crowd, procured a hack, put me in it with my traveling bag, saying smilingly and quietly, “Now I want you to let this be my ride,” paid the driver, and before I could remonstrate bow’d himself off.

The occasion of my jaunt, I suppose I had better say here, was for a public reading of “the death of Abraham Lincoln” essay, on the sixteenth anniversary of that tragedy; which reading duly came off, night of April 15. Then I linger’d a week in Boston — felt pretty well (the mood propitious, my paralysis lull’d) — went around everywhere, and saw all that was to be seen, especially human beings. Boston’s immense material growth — commerce, finance, commission stores, the plethora of goods, the crowded streets and sidewalks — made of course the first surprising show. In my trip out West, last year, I thought the wand of future prosperity, future empire, must soon surely be wielded by St. Louis, Chicago, beautiful Denver, perhaps San Francisco; but I see the said wand stretch’d out just as decidedly in Boston, with just as much certainty of staying; evidences of copious capital — indeed no centre of the New World ahead of it, (half the big railroads in the West are built with Yankees’ money, and they take the [Page 901] dividends.) Old Boston with its zigzag streets and multitudinous angles, (crush up a sheet of letter-paper in your hand, throw it down, stamp it flat, and that is a map of old Boston) — new Boston with its miles upon miles of large and costly houses — Beacon street, Commonwealth avenue, and a hundred others. But the best new departures and expansions of Boston, and of all the cities of New England, are in another direction.

77. Moncure Daniel Conway. THE OATH AND ITS ETHICS: A DISCOURSE GIVEN BEFORE THE SOUTH PLACE SOCIETY, MAY 1, 1881 (with some additions). London, 11 South Place, Finsbury. Pamphlet. THE OATH AND ITS ETHICS HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

THE BOSTON OF TO-DAY In the letters we get from Dr. Schliemann (interesting but fishy) about his excavations there in the far-off Homeric area, I notice cities, ruins, &c., as he digs them out of their graves, are certain to be in layers — that is to say, upon the foundation of an old concern, very far down indeed, is always another city or set of ruins, and upon that another superadded — and sometimes upon that still another — each representing either a long or rapid stage of growth and development, different from its predecessor, but unerringly growing out of and resting on it. In the moral, emotional, heroic, and human growths, (the main of a race in my opinion,) something of this kind has certainly taken place in Boston. The New England metropolis of to-day may be described as sunny, (there is something else that makes warmth, mastering even winds and meteorologies, though those are not to be sneez’d at,) joyous, receptive, full of ardor, sparkle, a certain element of yearning, magnificently tolerant, yet not to be fool’d; fond of good eating and drinking — costly in costume as its purse can buy; and all through its best average of houses, streets, people, that subtle something (generally thought to be climate, but it is not — it is something indefinable in the race, the turn of its development) which effuses behind the whirl of animation, study, business, a happy and joyous public spirit, as distinguish’d from a sluggish and saturnine one. Makes me think of the glints we get (as in Symonds’s books) of the jolly old Greek cities. Indeed there is a good deal of the Hellenic in B., and the people are getting handsomer too — padded out, with freer motions, and with color in their faces. I never saw (although this is not Greek) so many fine-looking gray hair’d women. [Page 902] At my lecture I caught myself pausing more than once to look at them, plentiful everywhere through the audience — healthy and wifely and motherly, and wonderfully charming and beautiful — I think such as no time or land but ours could show. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 28, Thursday: José Martí departed from Venezuela for New-York (where he would reside until 1895).

A report from Walt Whitman on a steamer to Long Branch: “Specimen Days”

8 1/2 A.M., on the steamer “Plymouth Rock,” foot of 23d street, New York, for Long Branch. Another fine day, fine sights, the shores, the shipping and bay — everything comforting to the body and spirit of me. (I find the human and objective atmosphere of New York city and Brooklyn more affiliative to me than any other.)

An hour later — Still on the steamer, now sniffing the salt very plainly — the long pulsating swash as our boat steams seaward — the hills of Navesink and many passing vessels — the [Page 907] air the best part of all. At Long Branch the bulk of the day, stopt at a good hotel, took all very leisurely, had an excellent dinner, and then drove for over two hours about the place, especially Ocean avenue, the finest drive one can imagine, seven or eight miles right along the beach. In all directions costly villas, palaces, millionaires — (but few among them I opine like my friend George W. Childs, whose personal integrity, generosity, unaffected simplicity, go beyond all worldly wealth.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 29-30: Walt Whitman returned to the place of his birth: “Specimen Days”

THE OLD WHITMAN AND VAN VELSOR CEMETERIES After more than forty years’ absence, (except a brief visit, to take my father there once more, two years before he died,) went down Long Island on a week’s jaunt to the place where I was born, thirty miles from New York city. Rode around the old familiar spots, viewing and pondering and dwelling long upon them, everything coming back to me. Went to the old Whitman homestead on the upland and took a view eastward, inclining south, over the broad and beautiful farm lands of my grandfather (1780,) and my father. There was the new house (1810,) the big oak a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old; there the well, the sloping kitchen- garden, and a little way off even the well-kept remains of the dwelling of my great- grandfather (1750-’60) still standing, with its mighty timbers and low ceilings. Near by, a stately grove of tall, vigorous black-walnuts, beautiful, Apollo-like, the sons or grandsons, no doubt, of black-walnuts during or before 1776. On the other side of the road spread the famous apple orchard, over twenty acres, the trees planted by hands long mouldering in the grave (my uncle Jesse’s,) but quite many of them evidently capable of throwing out their annual blossoms and fruit yet. I now write these lines seated on an old grave (doubtless of a century since at least) on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many generations. Fifty and more graves are quite plainly traceable, and as many more decay’d out of all form — depress’d mounds, crumbled and broken stones, cover’d with moss — the gray and sterile hill, the clumps of chestnuts outside, the silence, just varied by the soughing wind. There is [Page 693] always the deepest eloquence of sermon or poem in any of these ancient graveyards of which Long Island has so many; so what must this one have been to me? My whole family history, with its succession of links, from the first settlement down to date, told here — three centuries concentrate on this sterile acre. The next day, July 30, I devoted to the maternal locality, and if possible was still more penetrated and impress’d. I write this paragraph on the burial hill of the Van Velsors, near Cold Spring, the most significant depository of the dead that could be imagin’d, without the slightest help from art, but far ahead of it, soil sterile, a mostly bare plateau-flat of half an acre, the top of a hill, brush and well grown trees and dense woods bordering all around, very primitive, secluded, no visitors, no road (you cannot drive here, you have to bring the dead on foot, and follow on foot.) Two or three-score graves quite plain; as many more almost rubb’d out. My grandfather Cornelius and my grandmother Amy (Naomi) and numerous relatives nearer or remoter, on my mother’s side, lie buried here. The scene as I stood or sat, the delicate and wild odor of the woods, a slightly drizzling rain, the emotional atmosphere of the place, and the inferr’d reminiscences, were fitting accompaniments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 10, Wednesday: Having had too much to drink, David McDowell of Batavia, New York got up on the narrow railing of the Upper Suspension Bridge and walked entirely across the gorge of the Niagara River –something which, of course, no sane and non-inebriated person would ever attempt– and did so without falling.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

As I haltingly ramble an hour or two this forenoon by the more secluded parts of the shore, or sit under an old cedar half way up the hill, the city near in view, many young parties gather to bathe or swim, squads of boys, generally twos or threes, some larger ones, along the sand-bottom, or off an old pier close by. A peculiar and pretty carnival — at its height a hundred lads or young men, very democratic, but all decent behaving. The laughter, voices, calls, responses — the springing and diving of the bathers from the great string-piece of the decay’d pier, where climb or stand long ranks of them, naked, rose-color’d, with movements, postures ahead of any sculpture. To all this, the sun, so bright, the dark-green shadow of the hills the other side, the amber-rolling waves, changing as the tide comes in to a transparent tea-color — the frequent splash of the playful boys, sousing — the glittering drops sparkling, and the good western breeze blowing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

“CUSTER’S LAST RALLY” Went to-day to see this just-finish’d painting by John Mulvany, who has been out in far Dakota, on the spot, at the forts, and among the frontiersmen, soldiers and Indians, for the last two years, on purpose to sketch it in from reality, or the best that could be got of it. Sat for over an hour before [Page 910] the picture, completely absorb’d in the first view. A vast canvas, I should say twenty or twenty- two feet by twelve, all crowded, and yet not crowded, conveying such a vivid play of color, it takes a little time to get used to it. There are no tricks; there is no throwing of shades in masses; it is all at first painfully real, overwhelming, needs good nerves to look at it. Forty or fifty figures, perhaps more, in full finish and detail in the mid-ground, with three times that number, or more, through the rest — swarms upon swarms of savage Sioux, in their war-bonnets, frantic, mostly on ponies, driving through the background, through the smoke, like a hurricane of demons. A dozen of the figures are wonderful. Altogether a western, autochthonic phase of America, the frontiers, culminating, typical, deadly, heroic to the uttermost — nothing in the books like it, nothing in Homer, nothing in Shakspere; more grim and sublime than either, all native, all our own, and all a fact. A great lot of muscular, tan-faced men, brought to bay under terrible circumstances — death ahold of them, yet every man undaunted, not one losing his head, wringing out every cent of the pay before they sell their lives. Custer (his hair cut short) stands in the middle, with dilated eye and extended arm, aiming a huge cavalry pistol. Captain Cook is there, partially wounded, blood on the white handkerchief around his head, aiming his carbine coolly, half kneeling — (his body was afterwards found close by Custer’s). The slaughter’d or half-slaughter’d horses, for breastworks, make a peculiar feature. Two dead Indians, herculean, lie in the foreground, clutching their Winchester rifles, very characteristic. The many soldiers, their faces and attitudes, the carbines, the broad-brimm’d western hats, the powder-smoke in puffs, the dying horses with their rolling eyes almost human in their agony, the clouds of war-bonneted Sioux in the background, the figures of Custer and Cook — with indeed the whole scene, dreadful, yet with an attraction and beauty that will remain in my memory. With all its color and fierce action, a certain Greek continence pervades it. A sunny sky and clear light envelop all. There is an almost entire absence of the stock traits of European war pictures. The physiognomy of the work is realistic and Western. I only saw it for an hour or so; but it needs to be seen many times — needs to be studied [Page 911] over and over again. I could look on such a work at brief intervals all my life without tiring; it is very tonic to me; then it has an ethic purpose below all, as all great art must have. The artist said the sending of the picture abroad, probably to London, had been talk’d of. I advised him if it went abroad to take it to Paris. I think they might appreciate it there — nay, they certainly would. Then I would like to show Messieur Crapeau that some things can be done in America as well as others. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN August 16, Tuesday: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

SOME OLD ACQUAINTANCES — MEMORIES “Chalk a big mark for to-day,” was one of the sayings of an old sportsman-friend of mine, when he had had unusually good luck — come home thoroughly tired, but with satisfactory results of fish or birds. Well, to-day might warrant such a mark for me. Everything propitious from the start. An hour’s fresh stimulation, coming down ten miles of Manhattan island by railroad and 8 o’clock stage. Then an excellent breakfast at Pfaff’s restaurant, 24th street. Our host himself, an old friend of mine, quickly appear’d on the scene to welcome me and bring up the news, and, first opening a big fat bottle of the best wine in the cellar, talk about antebellum times, ’59 and ’60, and the jovial suppers at his then Broadway place, near Bleecker street. Ah, the friends and names and frequenters, those times, that place. Most are dead — Ada Clare, Wilkins, Daisy Sheppard, O’Brien, Henry Clapp, Stanley, Mullin, Wood, Brougham, Arnold — all gone. And there Pfaff and I, sitting opposite each other at the little table, gave a remembrance to them in a style they would have themselves fully confirm’d, namely, big, brimming, fill’d-up champagne- glasses, drain’d in abstracted silence, very leisurely, to the last drop. (Pfaff is a generous German restaurateur, silent, stout, jolly, and I should say the best selecter of champagne in America.)

A DISCOVERY OF OLD AGE Perhaps the best is always cumulative. One’s eating and drinking one wants fresh, and for the nonce, right off, and have done with it — but I would not give a straw for that person or poem, or friend, or city, or work of art, that was [Page 912] not more grateful the second time than the first — and more still the third. Nay, I do not believe any grandest eligibility ever comes forth at first. In my own experience, (persons, poems, places, characters,) I discover the best hardly ever at first, (no absolute rule about it, however,) sometimes suddenly bursting forth, or stealthily opening to me, perhaps after years of unwitting familiarity, unappreciation, usage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN September 17, Saturday: Walt Whitman, age 62, visited Concord, staying at Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s home, and among other things visited Walden Pond and the grave of his friend Henry Thoreau in Sleepy Hollow cemetery. According to W. Barksdale Maynard’s WALDEN POND, A HISTORY, “An illustrious group gathered for tea — those two plus Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, and Emerson. Bronson was struck by Whitman’s ‘ruff of beard and open-bosom collar, folded shirt-cuffs — he standing full six feet in his skirtless blue coat, supporting himself with his staff and stooping a little.’ They talked of Margaret Fuller and Thoreau, the conversation ranging back to heady days of 1840s transcendentalism. Whitman studied Emerson intently, concluding that the great man’s mind was slipping.”

“Specimen Days”

Next Day. — Several hours at E.’s house, and dinner there. An old familiar house, (he has been in it thirty-five years,) with surroundings, furnishment, roominess, and plain elegance and fullness, signifying democratic ease, sufficient opulence, and an admirable old-fashioned simplicity — modern luxury, with its mere sumptuousness and affection, either touch’d lightly upon or ignored altogether. Dinner the same. Of course the best of the occasion (Sunday, September 18, ’81) was the sight of E. himself. As just said, a healthy color in the cheeks, and good light in the eyes, cheery expression, and just the amount of talking that best suited, namely, a word or short phrase only where needed, and almost always with a smile. Besides Emerson himself, Mrs. E., with their daughter Ellen, the son Edward and his wife, with my friend F.S. and Mrs. S., and others, relatives and intimates. Mrs. Emerson, resuming the subject of the evening before, (I sat next to her,) gave me further and fuller information about Thoreau, who, years ago, during Mr. E.’s absence in Europe, had lived for some time in the family, by invitation.

OTHER CONCORD NOTATIONS Though the evening at Mr. and Mrs. Sanborn’s, and the memorable family dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Emerson’s, have [Page 914] most pleasantly and permanently fill’d my memory, I must not slight other notations of Concord. I went to the old Manse, walk’d through the ancient garden, enter’d the rooms, noted the quaintness, the unkempt grass and bushes, the little panes in the windows, the low ceilings, the spicy smell, the creepers embowering the light. Went to the Concord battle ground, which is close by, scann’d French’s statue, “the Minute Man,” read Emerson’s poetic inscription on the base, linger’d a long while on the bridge, and stopp’d by the grave of the unnamed British soldiers buried there the day after the fight in April ’75. Then riding on, (thanks to my friend Miss M. and her spirited white ponies, she driving them,) a half hour at Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s graves. I got out and went up of course on foot, and stood a long while and ponder’d. They lie close together in a pleasant wooded spot well up the cemetery hill, “Sleepy Hollow.” The flat surface of the first was densely cover’d by myrtle, with a border of arbor- vitae, and the other had a brown headstone, moderately elaborate, with inscriptions. By Henry’s side lies his brother John, of whom much was expected, but he died young. Then to Walden Pond, that beautifully embower’d sheet of water, and spent over an hour there. On the spot in the woods where Thoreau had his solitary house is now quite a cairn of stones, to mark the place; I too carried one and deposited on the heap. As we drove back, saw the “School of Philosophy,” but it was shut up, and I would not have it open’d for me. Near by stopp’d at the house of W.T. Harris, the Hegelian, who came out, and we had a pleasant chat while I sat in the wagon. I shall not soon forget those Concord drives, and especially that charming Sunday forenoon one with my friend Miss M. [Horace Mann, Sr.’s daughter], and the white ponies.

THOREAU’S CAIRN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

Fall: A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

A VISIT, AT THE LAST, TO R. W. EMERSON Concord, Mass. — Out here on a visit — elastic, mellow, Indian-summery weather. Came to-day from Boston, (a pleasant ride of 40 minutes by steam, through Somerville, Belmont, Waltham, Stony Brook, and other lively towns,) convoy’d by my friend F. B. Sanborn, and to his ample house, and the kindness and hospitality of Mrs. S. and their fine family. Am writing this under the shade of some old hickories and elms, just after 4 P.M., on the porch, within a stone’s throw of the Concord river. Off against me, across stream, on a meadow and side-hill, haymakers are gathering and wagoning-in probably their second or third crop. The spread of emerald-green and brown, the knolls, the score or two of little haycocks dotting the meadow, the loaded-up wagons, the patient horses, the slow-strong action of the men and pitch-forks — all in the just-waning afternoon, with patches of yellow sun-sheen, mottled by long shadows — a cricket shrilly chirping, herald of the dusk — a boat with two figures noiselessly gliding along the little river, passing under the stone bridge-arch — the slight settling haze of aerial moisture, the sky and the peacefulness expanding in all directions and overhead — fill and soothe me.

Same evening: Never had I a better piece of luck befall me: a long and blessed evening with Emerson, in a way I couldn’t have wish’d better or different. For nearly two hours he has been placidly sitting where I could see his face in the best light, near me. Mrs. S.’s back-parlor well fill’d with people, neighbors, many fresh and charming faces, women, mostly young, but some old. My friend A.B. Alcott and his daughter Louisa were there early. A good deal of talk, the subject Henry Thoreau — some new glints of his life and fortunes, with letters to and from him — one of the best by Margaret Fuller, others by Horace Greeley, Channing, &c. — one from Thoreau himself, most quaint and interesting. (No doubt I seem’d very stupid to the room-full of company, taking hardly any part in the conversation; but I had “my own pail to milk in,” as the Swiss proverb puts it.) My seat and the relative arrangement were such that, without being rude, or anything of the kind, I could just look squarely at E., which I did a good part of the two hours. On entering, he had spoken very briefly and politely to several of the company, then settled himself in his chair, a trifle push’d back, and, though a listener and apparently an alert one, remain’d silent through the whole talk and discussion. A lady friend quietly took a seat next him, to give special attention. A good color in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known expression of sweetness, and the old clear-peering aspect quite the same. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

November: A report from Walt Whitman: OSSIAN “Specimen Days” AN OSSIANIC NIGHT — DEAREST FRIENDS Again back in Camden. As I cross the Delaware in long trips to-night, between 9 and 11, the scene overhead is a peculiar one — swift sheets of flitting vapor- gauze, follow’d by dense clouds throwing an inky pall on everything. Then a spell of that transparent steel-gray black sky I have noticed under similar circumstances, on which the moon would beam for a few moments with calm lustre, throwing down a broad dazzle of highway on the waters; then the mists careering again. All silently, yet driven as if by the furies they sweep along, sometimes quite thin, sometimes thicker — a real Ossianic night — amid the whirl, absent or dead friends, the old, the past, somehow tenderly suggested — while the Gaelstrains [Page 916] chant themselves from the mists — [“Be thy soul blest, O Carril! in the midst of thy eddying winds. O that thou woulds’t come to my hall when I am alone by night! And thou dost come, my friend. I hear often thy light hand on my harp, when it hangs on the distant wall, and the feeble sound touches my ear. Why dost thou not speak to me in my grief, and tell me when I shall behold my friends? But thou passest away in thy murmuring blast; the wind whistles through the gray hairs of Ossian.”] But most of all, those changes of moon and sheets of hurrying vapor and black clouds, with the sense of rapid action in weird silence, recall the far-back Erse belief that such above were the preparations for receiving the wraiths of just- slain warriors — [“We sat that night in Selma, round the strength of the shell. The wind was abroad in the oaks. The spirit of the mountain roar’d. The blast came rustling through the hall, and gently touch’d my harp. The sound was mournful and low, like the song of the tomb. Fingal heard it the first. The crowded sighs of his bosom rose. Some of my heroes are low, said the gray-hair’d king of Morven. I hear the sound of death on the harp. Ossian, touch the trembling string. Bid the sorrow rise, that their spirits may fly with joy to Morven’s woody hills. I touch’d the harp before the king; the sound was mournful and low. Bend forward from your clouds, I said, ghosts of my fathers! bend. Lay by the red terror of your course. Receive the falling chief; whether he comes from a distant land, or rises from the rolling sea. Let his robe of mist be near; his spear that is form’d of a cloud. Place a half-extinguish’d meteor by his side, in the form of a hero’s sword. And oh! let his countenance be lovely, that his friends may delight in his presence. Bend from your clouds, I said, ghosts of my fathers, bend. Such was my song in Selma, to the lightly trembling harp.”] How or why I know not, just at the moment, but I too muse and think of my best friends in their distant homes — of William O’Connor, of Maurice Bucke, of John Burroughs, and of Mrs. Gilchrist — friends of my soul — stanchest friends of my other soul, my poems.

November 26, Saturday: Johann Ludwig Krapf died at his home in Korntal, Germany, on his knees.

The Boston Liberty reported, on its page 3, about a new edition of Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS: Liberty has received from the publishers, and joyfully welcomes Leaves of Grass, the collective title of Walt Whitman’s poems. It is a convenient, compact, and tastefully “got up” volume of 382 pages, and contains a number of hitherto unpublished poems, besides those of the earlier editions. Leaves of Grass have lost nothing of their original native simplicity, freshness, and vigor from being more carefully arranged and placed in a more HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN artistic, though it may be a more conventional vase. The book will be more readily purchased and read, at any rate; and that is the main point. The titles of some of the poems have been changed, and the table of contents newly arranged and made much more convenient for reference to special passages. We have not discovered that the book has lost anything of its characteristic outspoken independence, nor that any concession has been made to Mrs. Grundy. It still retains all its naked truthfulness and purity, like its prototype in marble, the Greek Slave. Walt Whitman is preeminently, above all and before all, the poet of innovation, the poet of change, the poet of growth, the poet of evolution. There is not a drop of stagnant blood in his veins. Every fibre of him quivers with life, energy, and fire. His spirit is at the same time the spirit of content and discontent. He is satisfied with whatever is and as it is - for to-day, but not for to-morrow, nor that for any future tomorrow. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. That seems to him to be the key-note of the universe.

A study, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” affords a good idea of what he himself considers his mission, and shows how thoroughly one in purpose that mission is with Liberty’s. He shall speak for himself from that poem. [there follows a 79-line extract]

The Chicago Tribune reported, on its page 9, in regard to “Walt Whitman’s Claim to Be Considered a Great Poet”: Walt Whitman has issued a new and complete edition of his poems, with the same title as that given to his first volume, published in 1855, and reissued at Camden, N. J., some twenty years later. In his volume all the objectionable passages which were the cause of so much complaint at the time of their first appearance are given entire without a word changed or omitted. It was said of Mr. Mallock by an English reviewer, that in his last novel he had introduced “the beastly into literature.” Considering some of the unexpurgated lines in this volume, Mr. Whitman is entitled to the honorable position of the apostle of the beastly in poetry. Nothing that Swinburne — a kindred unclean spirit, of greater intellectual power, however — ever wrote compares with the foulness of some of the “good gray poet’s” verse. The lines might be appropriate over the portals of a bawdy house, but not in a volume of poetry from a respectable publishing firm, intended for general circulation. Mr. Whitman has been so long silent that the leading facts in his career are generally forgotten. He is now in his 63d year, having been born in 1819 at West Hills, on Long Island. His father was an Englishman and his mother from Holland. During his life he has worked as printer, carpenter, school-teacher, army-nurse, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN clerk in the office of the Attorney-General. He has traveled quite extensively, and has suffered of late years from partial paralysis. For a proper appreciation of his poetry a peculiarly cultured taste is required. Claiming to be a writer for and of the people, those to whom Whitman appeals have shown the least sympathy with him and the greatest ignorance of the inspirations of his muse. Possibly we do not comprehend Whitman. Certainly we fail to enjoy what he is pleased to call his poetry. To any of Carlyle’s heavily-capitalized pages the same title might be applied with equal force. The difficulty is to understand why it would not be equally effective and striking if entitled “prose.” Take as an instance the poem entitled “Our Old Feuillage”: Always our old feuillage! Always Florida’s green peninsula — always the priceless delta of Louisiana —always the cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas, Always California’s golden hills, and hollows, and the silver mountains of New Mexico — always soft-breath’d Cuba, Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea, inseparable with the slopes drain’d by the Eastern and Western Seas, The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main, the thirty thousand miles of river navigation, The seven millions of distinct families and the same number of dwellings —always these, and more, branching forth into numberless branches, Always the free range and diversity — always the continent of Democracy; Always the prairies, pastures, forests, vast cities, travelers, Kanada the snows: Always these compact lands tied at the hips with the belt stringing the huge oval lakes —

Thus, in the same strain, this so-called poetry runs on for four pages without a single period! It is true that Walt Whitman has been praised by such high authorities in literature as Emerson, Tennyson, and Ruskin. Their eulogies, however, were rather on the thoughts and sentiments of the author than praise of his versification. His power is rugged and his controlling impulse, apart from his egotism, is to say whatever occurs to him at the moment, whether relevant or irrelevant. He lacks both rhyme and rhythm. His is imaginative, but not metrical, composition; the fruit of an excited imagination, but without measured form. If we call him a great poet, and judge him by his writings, where shall we assign our Longfellow or Whittier, tried on the same kind of evidence? Macaulay has as broad and liberal a definition of ars poetica as anyone. “By poetry,” he says, “we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination; the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors.” Now, if we take one or two of Walt Whitman’s best efforts, how does he fulfill these requirements? Here is a little HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN bit called “Aboard at a Ship’s Helm”: Aboard at a ship’s helm, A young steersman steering with care. Through fog on a seacoast dolefully ringing, An ocean-bell — O a warning bell rocked by the waves. O you give a good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing, Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place. For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition. The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her gray sails, The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gayly and safe. But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

Or take a few lines from another poem: Sauntering the pavement or riding the country by road, lo, such faces! Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality, The spiritual prescient face, the always welcome common benevolent face, The face of the singing of music, the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges broad at the back-top, The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows, the shaved blanched faces of orthodox citizens, The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face, The ugly face of some beautiful soul, the handsome detested or despised face. This now is too lamentable a face for a man. Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for it, Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it wrig to its hole. The face is a haze more chill than the Arctic sea, Its sleepy and wabbling icebergs crunch as they go.

Milton defines poetry as “thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers”; and Chatfield says, “Poetry is the music of thought, conveyed to us in the music of language.” Joubert happily puts it, “Nothing which does not transport is poetry. The lyre is a winged instrument.” Let us see, then how a few lines from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” come up to the requirements of these authorities: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air. Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back awhile sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy.

Take some of the shorter poems. Here is an ode to “Beautiful Women”: Women sit or move to and fro, some old, some young, The young are beautiful — but the old are more beautiful than the young. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Here is another, entitled “Thought”: Of obedience, faith, adhesiveness; As I stand aloof and look there is to me something profoundly affecting in large masses of men following the lead of those who do not believe in men.

Ruskin considers that “It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and metre. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains which he himself could never hope to hear” — and this great critic, Ruskin, say Whitman’s admirers, has praised our hero! So be it! Phidias and Raphael and Beethoven were judged in accordance with the merits of what they produced. Their “acted poetry” stood the test of the most acute analysis and was given prominent rank because it was perfection. In the same manner “talking poetry,” by whoever written, must satisfy the eye, the ear, the mind, the heart, all the higher mental faculties in order to be classed as true, genuine inspired poetry. Does this short poem meet these demands: A GLIMPSE A Glimpse, through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a barroom around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Or a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

See how easily Whitman’s verse becomes prose, and what would be the spontaneous criticism on any author who should write such prose: Thou orb aloft full-dazzling, thou hot October noon! Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand, the sibilant near sea with vistas far, and foam, and tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue; O sun of noon refulgent! My special word to thee. Hear me illustrious! Thy lover me, for always have I loved thee, even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by some woodedge, thy touching-distant beams enough, or man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I launch my invocation. Thou that with fructifying beat and light, o’er myriad farms, o’er land and waters North and South, o’er Mississippi’s endless course, o’er Texas’ grassy plains, Kanada’s woods, o’er all the globe that turns its face to thee shining in space; thou that impartially infoldest all, not only continents, seas; thou that to grapes and weeds and little wild flowers givest so liberally, shed, shed thyself on mine and me, but with a fleeting ray out of the million millions. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Strike through these chants. Nor only launch thy subtle dazzle and thy strength for these; prepare the later afternoon of me myself — prepare my lengthening shadows, prepare my starry nights.

There is no thought of melody, of the mechanical requirements of verse. It is simply a combination of words like unto the bits of glass in the child’s kaleidoscope. Is it the language of a real genius or the voice of a ponderous fool? Whitman himself partially answers the question in a song from which we have already quoted. He is: Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking, and breeding. No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women, or apart from them. No more modest than immodest. I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.

This is the pen picture of himself by the man claiming to be the apostle of a new art, instead of being really the apostle of a great art in its most degraded form.

There is no necessity for further quotation. We can admire the native, rugged strength of Whitman’s unhampered genius. His active, brilliant imagination and his far-reaching enthusiasm seeking expression in language — in words that shall fire the heart and excite the mind — are characteristics of an extraordinary nature. So too his command of language and, apparently inexhaustible vocabulary is remarkable in a man with such antecedents and personal history. But these qualities do not make him a great poet. And to rank him as such is, to our thinking, to establish an entirely new standard from that which we have been wont to apply to the great masters of song. If they are true poets, then is Whitman a false one; if he is a poetic genius, then were the most honored names of literature but poetasters and “pitiful rhymers.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1882

January 12, Thursday: Thomas Edison opened the initial commercial power plant for producing electricity, at Holborn Viaduct, London.

Drei Stücke für Pianoforte und Violoncell op.1 was performed for the initial time, in Boston, composer Arthur William Foote at the keyboard.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

ONLY A NEW FERRY BOAT Such a show as the Delaware presented an hour before sundown yesterday evening, all along between Philadelphia and Camden, is worth weaving into an item. It was full tide, a fair breeze from the southwest, the water of a pale tawny color, and just enough motion to make things frolicsome and lively. Add to these an approaching sunset of unusual splendor, a broad tumble of clouds, with much golden haze and profusion of beaming shaft and dazzle. In the midst of all, in the clear drab of the afternoon light, there steam’d up the river the large, new boat, “the Wenonah,” as pretty an object as you could wish to see, lightly and swiftly skimming along, all trim and white, cover’d with flags, transparent red and blue, streaming out in the breeze. Only a new ferry-boat, and yet in its fitness comparable with the prettiest product of Nature’s cunning, and rivaling it. High up in the transparent ether gracefully balanced and circled four or five great sea hawks, while here below, amid the pomp and picturesqueness of sky and river, swam this creation of artificial beauty and motion and power, in its way no less perfect.

“Specimen Days”

STARTING NEWSPAPERS Reminiscences — (From the “Camden Courier.”) — As I sat taking my evening sail across the Delaware in the staunch ferry-boat “Beverly,” a night or two ago, I was join’d by two young reporter friends. “I have a message for you,” said one of them; “the C. folks told me to say they would like a piece sign’d by your name, to go in their first number. Can you do it for them?” “I guess so,” said I; “what might it be about?” “Well, anything on newspapers, or perhaps what you’ve done yourself, starting them.” And off the boys went, for we had reach’d the Philadelphia side. The hour was fine and mild, the bright half-moon shining; Venus, with excess of splendor, just setting in the west, and the great Scorpion rearing its length more than half up in the southeast. As I cross’d leisurely for an hour in the pleasant night-scene, my young friend’s words brought up quite a string of reminiscences. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 18, Wednesday: Oscar Wilde visited Walt Whitman (in Boston, during this month, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice was persuading Whitman’s publisher James R. Osgood & Co. to cease printing the 7th edition of LEAVES OF GRASS). Yes, Mr. Wilde came to see me early this afternoon, and I took him up to my den where we had a jolly good time. I think he was glad to get away from lecturing, and fashionable society, and spend a time with an “old rough.” We had a very happy time together. I think him genuine, honest and manly. I was glad to have him with me, for his youthful health, enthusiasm and buoyancy are refreshing. He was in his best mood, and I imagine that he laid aside any affectation he is said to have, and that I saw behind the scenes. He talked freely about the London literati and gave me many inside glimpses into the life and doings of Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris, Tennyson and Browning ... Wilde and I drank a bottle of wine downstairs, and when we came up here, where we could be on “thee and thou” terms, one of the first things I said was that I should call him “Oscar,” “I like that so much,” he answered, laying his hand on my knee. He seemed to me like a great big, splendid boy. He is so frank and outspoken and manly. I don’t see why such mocking things are written of him. He has the English society drawl, but his enunciation is better than I ever heard in a young Englishman or Irishman before. We talked here for two hours. I said to him, “Oscar you must be thirsty. I’ll make you some punch.” “Yes, I am thirsty,” he acknowledged, and I did make him a big glass of milk punch, and he tossed it off, and away he went.

Wilde would also reminisce about the afternoon: There was big chair for him and a little stool for me, a pine table on which was a copy of Shakespeare, a translation of Dante, and a cruse of water. Sunlight filled the room, and over the roofs of the houses opposite were the masts of the ships that lay in the river. But then the poet needs no rose to blossom on his walls for him, because he carries nature always in his heart. This room contains all the simple conditions for art — sunlight, good air, pure water, a sight of ships, and the poet’s works.

Later this month Wilde would offer his impressions of Whitman to the Boston Herald: “Do you know,” said Mr. Wilde, “that the greatest fault I have to find with you Americans is that you are not American enough. You are all to cosmopolitan. What I am wishing to meet is a true American. I mean a man of whom it can be said, He is entirely the product of American conditions.” “You will find that in Walt Whitman,” was suggested; “have you met Walt Whitman?” “Indeed I have,” said Mr. Wilde, his face kindling with enthusiasm. “I spent the most charming day I have spent in America with him. He is the grandest man I have ever seen. The simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age, and is not peculiar to any one people. Strong, true and perfectly sane; the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times. Probably he is dreadfully misunderstood. If people would only know that no artist lives for praise; he only wants one thing, to be understood. I hope that America will not treat its great poets HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN as England too often has. Now, in France, it is different; they are proud that they have poets and artists there, but in England they not only expect them to look to posterity for their fame, but also for their bread and butter.”

(Wilde and Whitman would meet again during May.)

February: Waldo Emerson came through snowdrifts to hear Franklin Benjamin Sanborn read from his new biography HENRY D. THOREAU.

VIEW THE PAGE IMAGES

Robert Louis Stevenson’s FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS. • Victor Hugo’s Romances ROBERT BURNS • Some Aspects of Robert Burns WALT WHITMAN • Walt Whitman HENRY THOREAU • Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO • Yoshida-Torajiro FRANCOIS VILLON • François Villon, Student, Poet, and House-Breaker CHARLES OF ORLEANS • Charles of Orleans SAMUEL PEPYS • Samuel Pepys • John Knox, and His Relations to Women HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN March 1, Wednesday: In part at the urging of the The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, Oliver Stevens, District Attorney for Boston, wrote to Osgood & Co. to advise them that Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS was obscene literature and that they would do well to suspend publication and to withdraw and suppress the book.

Frederick Douglass had just published a 3d expanded version of his NARRATIVE, that included passages on the relationship between Thomas Russell in Boston and Captain John Brown. Might that have been why Judge Russell made the following notation which has been preserved? A word from John Brown. “It would be better that a generation should perish from the Earth than that a word from the Sermon on the Mount or the Declaration of Independence should be forgotten among men.” March 1,1882. Thomas Russell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN April 3, Monday: Jesse Woodson James died as suddenly as might have been predicted.

A report from Walt Whitman, back in Camden, New Jersey: “Specimen Days”

I have just return’d from an old forest haunt, where I love to go occasionally away from parlors, pavements, and the newspapers and magazines — and where, of a clear forenoon, deep in the shade of pines and cedars and a tangle of old laurel-trees and vines, the news of Longfellow’s death first reach’d me. For want of anything better, let me lightly twine a sprig of the sweet ground-ivy trailing so plentifully through the dead leaves at my feet, with reflections of that half hour alone, there in the silence, and lay it as my contribution on the dead bard’s grave. Longfellow in his voluminous works seems to me not only to be eminent in the style and forms of poetical expression that mark the present age, (an idiosyncrasy, almost a sickness, of verbal melody,) but to bring what is always dearest as poetry to the general human heart and taste, and probably must be so in the nature of things. He is certainly the sort of bard and counteractant most needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, [Page 918] money-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon races, and especially for the present age in America — an age tyrannically regulated with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the politician and the day workman — for whom and among whom he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference — poet of the mellow twilight of the past in Italy, Germany, Spain, and in Northern Europe — poet of all sympathetic gentleness — and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were ask’d to name the man who has done more, and in more valuable directions, for America. I doubt if there ever was before such a fine intuitive judge and selecter of poems. His translations of many German and Scandinavian pieces are said to be better than the vernaculars. He does not urge or lash. His influence is like good drink or air. He is not tepid either, but always vital, with flavor, motion, grace. He strikes a splendid average, and does not sing exceptional passions, or humanity’s jagged escapades. He is not revolutionary, brings nothing offensive or new, does not deal hard blows. On the contrary, his songs soothe and heal, or if they excite, it is a healthy and agreeable excitement. His very anger is gentle, is at second hand, (as in the “Quadroon Girl” and the “Witnesses.”) There is no undue element of pensiveness in Longfellow’s strains. Even in the early translation, the Manrique, the movement is as of strong and steady wind or tide, holding up and buoying. Death is not avoided through his many themes, but there is something almost winning in his original verses and renderings on that dread subject — as, closing “the Happiest Land” dispute, And then the landlord’s daughter Up to heaven rais’d her hand, And said, “Ye may no more contend, There lies the happiest land.”

To the ungracious complaint-charge of his want of racy nativity and special originality, I shall only say that America and the world may well be reverently thankful — can never be thankful enough — for any such singing-bird vouchsafed out of the centuries, without asking that the notes be different [Page 919] from those of other songsters; adding what I have heard Longfellow himself say, that ere the New World can be worthily original, and announce herself and her own heroes, she must be well saturated with the originality of others, and respectfully consider the heroes that lived before Agamemnon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

THE GREAT UNREST OF WHICH WE ARE PART My thoughts went floating on vast and mystic currents as I sat to-day in solitude and half-shade by the creek — returning mainly to two principal centres. One of my cherish’d themes for a never-achiev’d poem has been the two impetuses of man and the universe — in the latter, creation’s incessant unrest,1 exfoliation, (Darwin’s evolution, I suppose.) Indeed, what is Nature but change, in all its visible, and still more its invisible processes? Or what is humanity in its faith, love, heroism, poetry, even morals, but emotion?

1.“Fifty thousand years ago the constellation of the Great Bear or Dipper was a starry cross; a hundred thousand years hence the imaginary Dipper will be upside down, and the stars which form the bowl and handle will have changed places. The misty nebulae are moving, and besides are whirling around in great spirals, some one way, some another. Every molecule of matter in the whole universe is swinging to and fro; every particle of ether which fills space is in jelly-like vibration. Light is one kind of motion, heat another, electricity another, magnetism another, sound another. Every human sense is the result of motion; every perception, every thought is but motion of the molecules of the brain translated by that incomprehensible thing we call mind. The processes of growth, of existence, of decay, whether in worlds, or in the minutest organisms, are but motion.”

April 9, Sunday: Dante Gabriel Rossetti died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May: Walt Whitman received from Osgood & Co. all of the plates, unbound sheets, and dies of LEAVES OF GRASS, along with a $100 payment.

A theatre was opened in the Jamestown, St. Helena barracks.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Foreigner at Home” appeared in Cornhill Magazine.

Alfred Russel Wallace’s LAND NATIONALISATION.

He argued that government should, long-term, buy out large land holdings and create a rent system which based rents on considerations of location plus the value added by the renter. Wallace espoused the construction of greenbelts and parks, and the legal protection of rural lands and historical monuments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 31, Wednesday: Antonio Maceo found work in Honduras as a deputy judge.

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

BY EMERSON’S GRAVE We stand by Emerson’s new-made grave without sadness — indeed a solemn joy and faith, almost hauteur — our soul-benison no mere [Page 922] “Warrior, rest, thy task is done,” for one beyond the warriors of the world lies surely symboll’d here. A just man, poised on himself, all-loving, all-inclosing, and sane and clear as the sun. Nor does it seem so much Emerson himself we are here to honor — it is conscience, simplicity, culture, humanity’s attributes at their best, yet applicable if need be to average affairs, and eligible to all. So used are we to suppose a heroic death can only come from out of battle or storm, or mighty personal contest, or amid dramatic incidents or danger, (have we not been taught so for ages by all the plays and poems?) that few even of those who most sympathizingly mourn Emerson’s late departure will fully appreciate the ripen’d grandeur of that event, with its play of calm and fitness, like evening light on the sea.

How I shall henceforth dwell on the blessed hours when, not long since, I saw that benignant face, the clear eyes, the silently smiling mouth, the form yet upright in its great age — to the very last, with so much spring and cheeriness, and such an absence of decrepitude, that even the term venerable hardly seem’d fitting.

Perhaps the life now rounded and completed in its mortal development, and which nothing can change or harm more, has its most illustrious halo, not in its splendid intellectual or esthetic products, but as forming in its entirety one of the few, (alas! how few!) perfect and flawless excuses for being, of the entire literary class.

We can say, as Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, It is not we who come to consecrate the dead — we reverently come to receive, if so it may be, some consecration to ourselves and daily work from him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days” FINAL CONFESSIONS — LITERARY TESTS So draw near their end these garrulous notes. There have doubtless occurr’d some repetitions, technical errors in the consecutiveness of dates, in the minutiae of botanical, astronomical, &c., exactness, and perhaps elsewhere; — for in gathering up, writing, peremptorily dispatching copy, this hot weather, (last of July and through August, ’82,) and delaying not the printers, I have had to hurry along, no time to spare. But in the deepest veracity of all — in reflections of objects, scenes, Nature’s outpourings, to my senses and receptivity, as they seem’d to me — in the work of giving those who care for it, some authentic glints, specimen- days of my life — and in the bona fide spirit and relations, from author to reader, on all the subjects design’d, and as far as they go, I feel to make unmitigated claims. The synopsis of my early life, Long Island, New York city, and so forth, and the diary-jottings in the Secession war, tell their own story. My plan in starting what constitutes most of the middle of the book, was originally for hints and data of a Nature-poem that should carry one’s experiences a few hours, commencing at noon- flush, and so through the after-part of the day — I suppose led to such idea by my own life-afternoon now arrived. But I soon found I could move at more ease, by giving the narrative at first hand. (Then there is a humiliating lesson one learns, in serene hours, of a fine day or night. Nature seems to look on all fixed-up poetry and art as something almost impertinent.) [Page 925] Thus I went on, years following, various seasons and areas, spinning forth my thought beneath the night and stars, (or as I was confined to my room by half- sickness,) or at midday looking out upon the sea, or far north steaming over the Saguenay’s black breast, jotting all down in the loosest sort of chronological order, and here printing from my impromptu notes, hardly even the seasons group’d together, or anything corrected — so afraid of dropping what smack of outdoors or sun or starlight might cling to the lines, I dared not try to meddle with or smooth them. Every now and then, (not often, but for a foil,) I carried a book in my pocket — or perhaps tore out from some broken or cheap edition a bunch of loose leaves; most always had something of the sort ready, but only took it out when the mood demanded. In that way, utterly out of reach of literary conventions, I re-read many authors. I cannot divest my appetite of literature, yet I find myself eventually trying it all by Nature — first premises many call it, but really the crowning results of all, laws, tallies and proofs. (Has it never occurr’d to any one how the last deciding tests applicable to a book are entirely outside of technical and grammatical ones, and that any truly first-class production has little or nothing to do with the rules and calibres of ordinary critics? or the bloodless chalk of Allibone’s Dictionary? I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied human soul giving its verdict.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

NATURE AND DEMOCRACY — MORALITY Democracy most of all affiliates with the open air, is sunny and hardy and sane only with Nature — just as much as Art is. Something is required to temper both — to check them, restrain them from excess, morbidity. I have wanted, before departure, to bear special testimony to a very old lesson and requisite. American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices — through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life — must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with outdoor light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, [Page 926] fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part — to be its health-element and beauty-element — to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World. Finally, the morality: “Virtue,” said Marcus Aurelius, “what is it, only a living and enthusiastic sympathy with Nature?” Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same — to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete. [Page 926] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 2, Sunday: A plan from Walt Whitman, who was “Down in the Woods” as he wrote this, to turn his jumbled notes into a book without going to terrible much trouble (conveniently, his editor was a kindred free spirit): “Specimen Days”

A HAPPY HOUR’S COMMAND If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of 1862-’65, Nature-notes of 1877-’81, with Western and Canadian observations afterwards, all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me this day, this hour, — (and what a day! what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul) — to go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary- scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages,* and let the melange’s lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves. It will illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life’s days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, [Page 690] and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work. At any rate I obey my happy hour’s command, which seems curiously imperative. May-be, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.

“Specimen Days”

ANSWER TO AN INSISTING FRIEND You ask for items, details of my early life — of genealogy and parentage, particularly of the women of my ancestry, and of its far back Netherlands stock on the maternal side — of the region where I was born and raised, and my father and mother before me, and theirs before them — with a word about Brooklyn and New York cities, the times I lived there as lad and young man. You say you want to get at these details mainly as the go-befores and embryons of “Leaves of Grass.” Very good; you shall have at least some specimens of them all. I have often thought of the meaning of such things — that one can only encompass and complete matters of that kind by exploring behind, perhaps very far behind, themselves directly, and so into their genesis, antecedents, and [Page 691] cumulative stages. Then as luck would have it, I lately whiled away the tedium of a week’s half-sickness and confinement, by collating these very items for another (yet unfulfill’d, probably abandon’d,) purpose; and if you will be satisfied with them, authentic in date- occurrence and fact simply, and told my own way, garrulous-like, here they are. I shall not hesitate to make extracts, for I catch at any thing to save labor; but those will be the best versions of what I want to convey. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1884

Thomas Kinsella died and Andrew McLean became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. McLean was a 36-year-old Scotsman who had worked his way to America in 1863 and had served on a monitor in the Navy until the end of the Civil War.

June: Rochester, New York celebrated its semi-centennial, with President Grover Cleveland gracing its proceedings by his presence.

Edward Carpenter visited Walt Whitman in a home that he had just purchased, at 328 Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey.

From this month to February 1885, creation of a works programme for the widening of the Suez Canal. EGYPT HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1885

July Walt Whitman was prostrated by a sunstroke. Friends would present him with a horse and buggy. Some $800 would be contributed toward the construction of a cabin for him on Timber Creek (a stream to the east of the Delaware River just below Camden, New Jersey), although this cabin never would become a reality. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1888

March 28, Wednesday: Horace Traubel began the process of transcribing Walt Whitman’s conversations.

May 9, Wednesday: Horace Traubel attributed to Walt Whitman the exclamation “Damn the expurgated books! I say damn ’em! The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book!” ONLINE RESOURCE HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July: After a 2d stroke, Walt Whitman lay ill and thinking that he was dying. He wrote a poem “America” expressive of his nationalistic chauvinism, four lines of which he would live to read in 1890 onto the wax cylinder of an early phonograph. [http://www.psymon.com/walden/whitman.html] Also, in this moribund state, he recalled that he had been fortunate enough to have been taken by his parents to hear Friend Elias Hicks preach his farewell sermon in a

ELIAS HICKS

This was a memory of an evening of November 15, 1829 when he was a ten-year-old boy. Now there was one further thing this old man needed to do as he thought he was dying. He needed to make a minute of this, for his departed parents and for the dear Friends. He titled it:

Notes (such as they are) founded on Elias Hicks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN THE PERFECT HUMAN VOICE “Some Laggards Yet”

Stating it briefly and pointedly I should suggest that the human voice is a cultivation or form’d growth on a fair native foundation. This foundation probably exists in nine cases out of ten. Sometimes nature affords the vocal organ in perfection, or rather I would say near enough to whet one’s appreciation and appetite for a voice that might be truly call’d perfection. To me the grand voice is mainly physiological — (by which I by no means ignore the mental help, but wish to keep the emphasis where it belongs.) Emerson says manners form the representative apex and final charm and captivation of humanity: but he might as well have changed the typicality to voice. Of course there is much taught and written about elocution, the best reading, speaking, etc., but it finally settles down to best human vocalization. Beyond all other power and beauty, there is something in the quality and power of the right voice (timbre the schools call it) that touches the soul, the abysms. It was not for nothing that the Greeks depended, at their highest, on poetry’s and wisdom’s vocal utterance by tete-a-tete lectures — (indeed all the ancients did.) Of celebrated people possessing this wonderful vocal power, patent to me, in former days, I should specify the contralto Marietta Alboni, Elias Hicks, Father Taylor, the tenor Bettini, Fanny Kemble, and the old actor Booth, and in private life many cases, often women. I sometimes wonder whether the best philosophy and poetry, or something like the best, after all these centuries, perhaps waits to be rous’d out yet, or suggested, by the perfect physiological human voice.

December 25, Tuesday: Walt Whitman carried on, on Christmas Day: “Memoranda”

Am somewhat easier and freer to-day and the last three days — sit up most of the time — read and write, and receive my visitors. Have now been in-doors sick for seven months — half of the time bad, bad, vertigo, indigestion, bladder, gastric, head trouble, inertia — Dr. Bucke, Dr. Osler, Drs. Wharton and Walsh — now Edward Wilkins my help and nurse. A fine, splendid, sunny day. My “November Boughs” is printed and out; and my “Complete Works, Poems and Prose,” a big volume, 900 pages, also. It is ab’t noon, and I sit here pretty comfortable. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1890

Walt Whitman in his moribund state was able to read 4 lines of his poem “America,” expressive of his nationalistic chauvinism, onto the wax cylinder of an early phonograph.

By this point Whitman was alleging that in his youth he had gone “off for two years on a working and journeying tour through nearly every one of the Middle, Southern and Western States, and to Louisiana and Texas (during the Mexican War of 1848 and ‘9).” This of course was the sheerest fabulation. Since there is no possibility that he could have unconsciously constructed such memories out of any of the trips he actually made or any of the things he actually had engaged in, we must say, simply, that at least in his old age Whitman was a lying self-aggrandizer. (Also, during this year, Whitman would deny rumors of his homosexuality and allege falsely that he had fathered 6 children.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN January 22, Wednesday: Francis Bowen died.

Inauguration of The League, a society to promote education in New-York. José Martí became a teacher for black workers.

Here are samples from Walt Whitman’s commonplace book “down at the creek”: “Specimen Days”

Victor Hugo makes a donkey meditate and apostrophize thus: My brother, man, if you would know the truth, We both are by the same dull walls shut in; The gate is massive and the dungeon strong. But you look through the key-hole out beyond, And call this knowledge; yet have not at hand The key wherein to turn the fatal lock. “William Cullen Bryant surprised me once,” relates a writer in a New York paper, “by saying that prose was the natural language of composition, and he wonder’d how anybody came to write poetry.” Farewell! I did not know thy worth; But thou art gone, and now ’tis prized: So angels walk’d unknown on earth, But when they flew were recognized. — Hood. John Burroughs, writing of Thoreau, says: “He improves with age — in fact requires age to take off a little of his asperity, and fully ripen him. The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and accepter — only it likes him farther off.”

Louise Michel at the burial of Blanqui, (1881) Blanqui drill’d his body to subjection to his grand conscience and his noble passions, and commencing as a young man, broke with all that is sybaritish in modern civilization. Without the power to sacrifice self, great ideas will never bear fruit. Out of the leaping furnace flame A mass of molten silver came; Then, beaten into pieces three, Went forth to meet its destiny. The first a crucifix was made, Within a soldier’s knapsack laid; The second was a locket fair, Where a mother kept her dead child’s hair; The third — a bangle, bright and warm, Around a faithless woman’s arm. A mighty pain to love it is, And ’tis a pain that pain to miss; But of all pain the greatest pain, It is to love, but love in vain. Maurice F. Egan on De Gurin. A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he, He follow’d Christ, yet for dead Pan he sigh’d, Till earth and heaven met within his breast: As if Theocritus in Sicily Had come upon the Figure crucified, And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

“Specimen Days”

And if I pray, the only prayer That moves my lips for me, Is, leave the mind that now I bear, And give me Liberty. — Emily Bronté. I travel on not knowing, I would not if I might; I would rather walk with God in the dark, Than go alone in the light; I would rather walk with Him by faith Than pick my way by sight. Prof. Huxley in a late lecture.

I myself agree with the sentiment of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, that “the scope of all speculation is the performance of some action or thing to be done.” I have not any very great respect for, or interest in, mere “knowing,” as such.

Prince Metternich.

Napoleon was of all men in the world the one who most profoundly despised the race. He had a marvellous insight into the weaker sides of human nature, (and all our passions are either foibles themselves, or the cause of foibles.) He was a very small man of imposing character. He was ignorant, as a sub-lieutenant generally is: a remarkable instinct supplied the lack of knowledge. From his mean opinion of men, he never had any anxiety lest he should go wrong. He ventur’d everything, and gain’d thereby an immense step toward success. Throwing himself upon a prodigious arena, he amaz’d the world, and made himself master of it, while others cannot even get so far as being masters of their own hearth. Then he went on and on, until he broke his neck.

“Mr. Ernest Rhys has just receiv’d an interesting letter from Whitman, dated ‘Camden, January 22, 1890.’ The following is an extract from it:” “Memoranda”

I am still here — no very mark’d or significant change or happening — fairly buoyant spirits, &c. — but surely, slowly ebbing. At this moment sitting here, in my den, Mickle Street, by the oakwood fire, in the same big strong old chair with wolf-skin spread over back — bright sun, cold, dry winter day. America continues — is generally busy enough all over her vast demesnes (intestinal agitation I call it,) talking, plodding, making money, every one trying to get on — perhaps to get towards the top — but no special individual signalism — (just as well, I guess.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN February 8, Saturday: “F’m Pall-Mall Gazette, London, England, Feb. 8, 1890: At the Complimentary Dinner, Camden, New Jersey, May 31, 1889, Walt Whitman said:” “Memoranda”

My friends, though announced to give an address, there is no such intention. Following the impulse of the spirit, (for I am at least half of Quaker stock) I have obey’d the command to come and look at you, for a minute, and show myself, face to face; which is probably the best I can do. But I have felt no command to make a speech; and shall not therefore attempt any. All I have felt the imperative conviction to say I have already printed in my books of poems or prose; to which I refer any who may be curious. And so, hail and farewell. Deeply acknowledging this deep compliment, with my best respects and love to you personally — to Camden — to New-Jersey, and to all represented here — you must excuse me from any word further. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN May 24, Saturday: Walt Whitman’s arbutus bunch for the Queen’s breakfast table: “Good-Bye My Fancy”

FOR QUEEN VICTORIA’S BIRTHDAY An American arbutus bunch to be put in a little vase on the royal breakfast table, May 24th, 1890.

Lady, accept a birth-day thought — haply an idle gift and token, Right from the scented soil’s May-utterance here, (Smelling of countless blessings, prayers, and old-time thanks,)1 A bunch of white and pink arbutus, silent, spicy, shy, From Hudson’s, Delaware’s, or Potomac’s woody banks.

1.NOTE — Very little, as we Americans stand this day, with our sixty-five or seventy millions of population, an immense surplus in the treasury, and all that actual power or reserve power (land and sea) so dear to nations — very little I say do we realize that curious crawling national shudder when the “Trent affair” promis’d to bring upon us a war with Great Britain — follow’d unquestionably, as that war would have, by recognition of the Southern Confederacy from all the leading European nations. It is now certain that all this then inevitable train of calamity hung on arrogant and peremptory phrases in the prepared and written missive of the British Minister, to America, which the Queen (and Prince Albert latent) positively and promptly cancell’d; and which her firm attitude did alone actually erase and leave out, against all the other official prestige and Court of St. James’s. On such minor and personal incidents (so to call them,) often depend the great growths and turns of civilization. This moment of a woman and a queen surely swung the grandest oscillation of modern history’s pendulum. Many sayings and doings of that period, from foreign potentates and powers, might well be dropt in oblivion by America — but never this, if I could have my way. W.W.

I don’t have any evidence that anyone, in this year, remembered Thoreau’s birthday, with an arbutus bunch or a clutch of blossoms or a poem shaped like a bundle of flowers. However, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, his gravestone was replaced, and the old family stones were used to cover a drainage ditch. And according to local legend there is supposed to have been a Concord lady who decorated the graves of the famous in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery with flowers, who, at Henry Thoreau’s grave, would always exclaim:

No flowers for you, you dirty little atheist!

Thoreau’s new gravestone would eventually be stolen, and replaced by another “Henry” stone very like it, but we do not suspect this local atheist hating flower lover to have been the one to have made off with his marker.78

78.Do you suppose the flower lady had Thoreau confused with Ingersoll? HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN June 2, Friday: In the Camden, New Jersey Post, “The gay and crowded audience at the Art Rooms, Philadelphia, Tuesday night, April 15, 1890, says a correspondent of the Boston Transcript, April 19, might not have thought that W.W. crawl’d out of a sick bed a few hours before, crying, Dangers retreat when boldly they’re confronted, WALT WHITMAN and went over, hoarse and half blind, to deliver his memoranda and essay on the death of Abraham Lincoln, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of that tragedy.” He led off with the following new paragraph: “Memoranda”

“Of Abraham Lincoln, bearing testimony twenty-five years after his death — and of that death — I am now my friends before you. Few realize the days, the great historic and esthetic personalities, with him in the centre, we pass’d [Page 1280] through. Abraham Lincoln, familiar, our own, an Illinoisian, modern, yet tallying ancient Moses, Joshua, Ulysses, or later Cromwell, and grander in some respects than any of them; Abraham Lincoln, that makes the like of Homer, Plutarch, Shakspere, eligible our day or any day. My subject this evening for forty or fifty minutes’ talk is the death of this man, and how that death will really filter into America. I am not going to tell you anything new; and it is doubtless nearly altogether because I ardently wish to commemorate the hour and martyrdom and name I am here. Oft as the rolling years bring back this hour, let it again, however briefly, be dwelt upon. For my own part I hope and intend till my own dying day, whenever the 14th or 15th of April comes, to annually gather a few friends and hold its tragic reminiscence. No narrow or sectional reminiscence. It belongs to these States in their entirety — not the North only, but the South — perhaps belongs most tenderly and devoutly to the South, of all; for there really this man’s birthstock; 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 realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially in personnel and character a Southern contribution?”

“The most of the poet’s address was devoted to the actual occurrences and details of the murder. We believe the delivery on Tuesday was Whitman’s 13th of it. The old poet is now physically wreck’d. But his voice and magnetism are the same. For the last month he has been under a severe attack of the lately prevailing influenza, the grip, in accumulation upon his previous ailments, and, above all, that terrible paralysis, the bequest of Secession War times. He was dress’d last Tuesday night in an entire suit of French Canadian grey wool cloth, with broad shirt collar, with no necktie; long white hair, red face, full beard and moustache, and look’d as though he might weigh two hundred pounds. He had to be help’d and led every step. In five weeks more he will begin his 72d year. He is still writing a little.” [Page 1281] HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN July 27, Sunday: Robert Louis Stevenson remained in Noumea, New Calcedonia while Frances (Fanny) Matilda Vandegrift (or Van de Grift) Stevenson as her son Samuel Lloyd Osbourne departed for Sydney, Australia.

Walt Whitman wrote in his journal: “Memoranda”

Feeling fairly these days, and even jovial — sleep and appetite good enough to be thankful for — had a dish of Maryland blackberries, some good rye bread and a cup of tea, for my breakfast — relish’d all — fine weather — bright sun to-day — pleasant north-west breeze blowing in the open window as I sit here in my big rattan chair — two great fine roses (white and red, blooming, fragrant, sent by mail by W. S. K. and wife, Mass.) are in a glass of water on the table before me. Am now in my 72d year.

In something like this period there was a curious testimonial dinner given for Whitman for which the notorious 19th-Century agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll was the presentation speaker. Walt allowed this speaker to laud him to the skies before informing the guests that he himself was convinced of the immortality of the soul — else what’s all this progress of ours for? (The two of them being such great friends, Ingersoll did not take this badly.)

August 19, Tuesday: Walt Whitman denied the rumors of his homosexuality and claimed to have fathered 6 bastards, none of whom he had done anything to support. He lay claim in addition, to having Southern grandchildren by them. The current speculation is that he was attempting, in the homophobic atmosphere of the time, despite his having lived constantly with younger men, to create a cover story which might belatedly mask his lifelong homoeroticism. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1891

December 28, Monday: Horace Traubel reported on attendance at the death-bed of Walt Whitman in Camden: To W.’s at eight — the first thing after starting. Found he has passed a pretty good night. Upstairs and into the room, though not waking him up. He seemed comparatively easy. Afterwards Warrie came in and said, “How are things now, Mr. Whitman?” “Pretty bad, Warrie, pretty bad.” “Do you wish any water now, Mr. Whitman?” “No, I guess not. It is as well as it is.” “Do you feel any stronger?” “None at all.” Voice rather weak and bad. Troubled all night with hiccoughs. Still, too, no nourishment. Left, and to Philadelphia. Letter from Brinton. His mother worse. Bucke in about ten. How did he find W.? “About the same. Almost bright, cheerful. He spoke readily to me. I went into the room and asked him what kind of a night he had spent, and he said poor, poor! I told him he ought to give McAlister a copy of the book, and he immediately replied, ‘Certainly, I will. Warrie, go over there and get him a copy. Yes, get him two.’” Bucke still determined to go tonight. Now in search of a professional nurse (wants a woman). The Johnston-Wallace cable yesterday was simply “Love.” I sent them “Pioneers,” translated: “a little better.” My yesterday’s telegram to Ingersoll was: “Slightly favorable change. Will write.” And did write this morning and sent off special. After consulting (Bucke and I) I gave Ingersoll’s telegram away to the papers last evening. Met Bucke at 328 at 5:10. We immediately went off to Harned’s. Bucke quite determined to go. Says of W., “He is not better nor worse than yesterday. But I can’t wait — it would not be right: would not be right to the government, nor right to the Asylum, nor right to my family. I will simply have to go, and come back on your call.” What were W.’s prospects? “He may die any day, or may go on this way for two or three weeks. It is all confusion and mystery. I can’t possibly see how he can live through January. My opinion now is that January will put an end to all this business.” He thought W. was “rather talky” today: his heart keeping to a uniform figure — about 80. He ate a couple of fingers of mutton-chop and drank a cup of mixed milk and hot water. He was rather disappointed that the nurse was a woman, but told Doctor after introduction, “I feel I shall like her. But the main question is, will she say the same thing for me? But I guess doctors and nurses learn to bear with the poor sick human critter.” The woman’s name is Keller. Bucke believed she was eager to come. Would start this evening. We are to pay her $20 per week. Bucke explained the situation and she seemed instantly to take it in, viz., that she was first under the direction of the doctors, then of Harned and me, and to no way turn to those in the house — though to live amicably with them. As to W.’s room: “You are mistress of it,” Bucke said. We may put in some new furniture if it may seem required — certainly some bedding. W. gave Bucke a couple of copies of the Johnson etching and insisted on sitting up in bed (Warrie assisting) and autographing them. Keeps constantly in mind Bucke’s departure. Harned will attempt to raise money for the new nurse in Camden HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN — as Camden’s gift — not to touch on my fund. At 509 Arch my mother handed me a couple of telegrams that had just shortly before arrived. Both from Ingersoll, to this effect: “How is the brave pioneer today. Give him the love of the whole family. R. G. Ingersoll.” “Of course I will keep my promise and speak at the funeral. If Whitman asks you can give him the assurance. R. G. Ingersoll.” Later in evening I replied to Ingersoll, by wire. Also sent to Bolton cable, “Average,” translated, that W. is neither worse nor better. Took supper at home then hurried down to 328 again to meet Bucke, with whom I was to go to station. Mrs. Keller had arrived and I was introduced to her. Bucke writing a letter down in parlor (it was 7:10). Had not yet been up. I went to see Warrie, who said W. had spoken to him to effect that he had rather the new nurse had been a man, but no further criticism. Nurse was to start this evening to relieve Warrie. Bucke now came up, and he and I went into W.’s room together — Bucke first. W. caught us on the approach (was hiccoughing horribly and it interfered with and broke all his talk). “Ah! Maurice! It is you! And Horace, too! Welcome both.” Bucke took a chair up to the bed, and I one out on the floor — both of us sitting down — he taking W.’s pulse. (We had shaken hands with him.) Asking W. how he felt, he replied, “Poorly! Poorly!” And when Bucke asked, “Have you been eating anything this evening?” he responded, “O yes! some: part of a mutton chop and some milk and water.” Warrie said, “But that was long ago, Mr. Whitman.” “No, Warrie, not more than an hour,” but it was, nevertheless. As Warrie glided about the room, W. asked Bucke, “Who’s that — who’s here?” seeming not to recognize him. The light burned decently high. When Bucke was done, I approached the bed again, took W.’s hand as before and gave him Ingersoll’s message. He responded, “How good that is! God bless ’em all! How good! Good! It cheers a fellow up to get such things — to hear them. Give my love to all — my love to all — all,” and seemed exhausted, adding after a slight cough, “The great fellow! The great fellow! Yes, it does us good!” I resumed my seat, and Bucke, removing his chair, sat on the edge of the box near the head of the bed, regarding W. intently. For a few minutes utter silence, except for W.’s hiccoughing. Then Bucke arose and took W.’s hands, bending over him with intent gaze and emotion, which for an instant checked any attempt at speech. Then he broke forth, “Well, good-bye Walt! I must go!” “I suppose! I suppose!” “Well, I ought to go, Walt. I don’t want to go. But you know I am not my own master — that I have duties.” “Yes, Maurice, I know.” “But if I go now, I can no doubt get back soon to see you again.” “No, Maurice, you will never see me again!” And after a pause, “I ought to be gone now — it were best all over now — I would be more than satisfied.” The voice — the desire! Bucke could hardly speak — the tears sprang to my eyes. “This is an end of all, Maurice. This is the end — you will never see me again!” “Well, Walt, these things are not in our own hands. We have to submit. I hate to go.” “Yes, and it tears me up to have you leave.” Bucke stooped over and kissed him — and kissed him again — withdrew from the bed a minute, “Oh! so loth to depart!” then back and took W.’s hand again, and stooped over and once more kissed him. “Good-bye! Good-bye! You are in good hands, Walt!” — holding his hands, gazing at him (he, too, at Bucke), turning towards the door, then back for another look (oh! the pain — the HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN solemn sad secret thought and heart-throb!) — finally to break away rapidly, stride from the room and downstairs — stirred, overwhelmed, speech lost in passion and feeling. I still kept my place in the chair — heard W. breathe heavily, cough some — not a word being spoken. Then I went over to W., leaned down and kissed him. He took my hand — squeezed and held it. I said, “Well, good night, Walt, good night!” And he replied faintly, “Don’t go! Don’t go!” at the same time increasing his grip on my hand (I was surprised at its strength). And I lingered for a minute or more so, saying nothing. But again I urged, “I must say good night, Walt. Doctor expects me to go to Philadelphia with him.” I felt the hand tighten about mine again. Leaning over I kissed him. He responded — his lips closed with mine, “Good night, then, boy. God bless you — God bless you.” He opened his eyes a brief instant. “This is the finish of the tale, Horace — this is the wind-up!” Overcome I rushed from the room. I stopped for an instant at the head of the stairs to recover myself — then joined Bucke in the parlor, where he sat with Mrs. Keller, Mrs. Davis and Warrie — silent, full of sacred unutterable thoughts, emotions. “By God! I don’t want to go!” cried Bucke, and then to those around, “But when a fellow has an institution with 1200 people on his hands, what can he do?” Soon the cab, farewells and departure. We crossed the river without event and to 9th and Green. Ingram there at station with a bottle of wine and lunch for Bucke. Had come out of his bed (he has been sick) to bring it. I arranged with Bucke to write twice a day — morning and evening, after seeing W. — and wiring instead of writing if any disasters threaten. Bucke has “no doubt but it’ll be a very short time only” between today and the next call. Will reach London tomorrow evening. To Camden again and to 328 by the way. McAlister there. W.’s pulse 84 — respiration 32. No fears for the night, so we both went home. Mrs. Keller on watch and Warrie to sleep till midnight. Bucke left these memoranda with me: Notes for Horace To write me each day. To have Dr. McA. keep notes of case for me — taking pulse, resp. etc. morning & evening. Mrs. Keller is to have $20.00 a week — if not satisfactory may be sent away or changed. If wanted I will at any time send $25.00 toward pay of nurse. Circular for our book cannot be written till after W. dies. About notifying friends when W. dies? Will not notices in papers be best? ONLINE RESOURCE

No member of his immediate family ever had a clue as to what Walt was up to, either in regard to his sex life or in regard to his poetry. At his funeral, therefore, surviving family would be amazed at the interest being displayed.

Walt’s brain would reside for a time at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. Here is the story per page 176 of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1907): The American Anthropometric Society was established in 1889.... The chief object of the society was the preservation of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN brains of its members. Three of the founders of the society have since died and their brains were duly removed and preserved as were those of members who subsequently joined the society and are now deceased. In the order of acquisition, the list of brains in the collection includes the following: 1. Joseph Leidy. 2. Philip Leidy. 3. J.W. White, Sr. 4. Andrew J. Parker. 5. Walt Whitman. 6. Harrison Allen. 7. Edward D. Cope. 8. William Pepper. The brain of Walt, in a jar, was said to have been dropped by a careless assistant. Unfortunately, not even pieces were salvaged.

(They would be able to take a measurement indicating that the brain had been smaller than average.) THE MARKET FOR HUMAN BODY PARTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1892

W.D. O’Connor’s THE CARPENTER, a sequel to his 1866 THE GOOD GRAY POET in which he even more straightforwardly portrayed Walt Whitman as a Christ figure.79

Whitman managed an oblique reference to the hanged Friend Mary Dyer in his NOVEMBER BOUGHS, in a snippet anent the Hicksite/Orthodox split among Friends, as an assertion regarding there having been “no persecution worth mentioning” of Friends in America subsequent to her hanging: “The Separation”

Note. — The Separation. — The division vulgarly call’d between Orthodox and Hicksites in the Society of Friends took place in 1827, ’8 and ’9. …A reviewer of the old dispute and separation made the following comments on them in a paper ten years ago: “It was in America, where there had been no persecution worth mentioning since Mary Dyer was hang’d on Boston Common, that about fifty years ago differences arose, singularly enough upon doctrinal points of the divinity of Christ and the nature of the atonement. Whoever would know how bitter was the controversy, and how much of human infirmity was found to be still lurking under broad-brim hats and drab coats, must seek for the information in the Lives of Elias Hicks and of Thomas Shillitoe, the latter an English Friend, who visited us at this unfortunate time, and who exercised his gifts as a peacemaker with but little success. The meetings, according to his testimony, were sometimes turn’d into mobs. The disruption was wide, and seems to have been final. Six of the ten yearly meetings were divided; and since that time various sub-divisions have come, four or five in number. There has never, however, been anything like a repetition of the excitement of the Hicksite controversy; and Friends of all kinds at present appear to have settled down into a solid, steady, comfortable state, and to be working in their own way without troubling other Friends whose ways are different.”

(It is to be noted that Whitman forwards the notion that Friend Mary Dyer was hanged on Boston Common despite the fact that there is no preserved historical evidence whatever that she had not been hanged at the usual place for such events — the municipal gallows on Boston Neck.)

Had he made a more careful study of the records of Revolutionary persecution of male Friends, persecution in which our Peace Testimony was taken to be equivalent to traitorous Loyalism to the Crown, of course Whitman would have been able to forward no such simplistic opinion. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

79. NOVEMBER BOUGHS, published in this year of Walt Whitman’s death, contains additional material on the Hicksite split among Friends: HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Walt Whitman also mentioned, in NOVEMBER BOUGHS, a collection of 5,000 poems that had been donated to Brown University: “Five Thousand Poems”

There have been collected in a cluster nearly five thousand big and little American poems — all that diligent and long- continued research could lay hands on! The author of ‘Old Grimes is Dead’ commenced it, more than fifty years ago; then the cluster was pass’d on and accumulated by C. F. Harris; then further pass’d on and added to by the late Senator Anthony, from whom the whole collection has been bequeath’d to Brown University. A catalogue (such as it is) has been made and publish’d of these five thousand poems — and is probably the most curious and suggestive part of the whole affair. At any rate it has led me to some abstract reflection like the following. I should like, for myself, to put on record my devout acknowledgment not only of the great masterpieces of the past, but of the benefit of all poets, past and present, and of all poetic utterance — in its entirety the dominant moral factor of humanity’s progress. In view of that progress, and of evolution, [Page 1185] the religious and aesthetic elements, the distinctive and most important of any, seem to me more indebted to poetry than to all other means and influences combined. In a very profound sense religion is the poetry of humanity. Then the points of union and rapport among all the poems and poets of the world, however wide their separations of time and place and theme, are much more numerous and weighty than the points of contrast. Without relation as they may seem at first sight, the whole earth’s poets and poetry — en masse — the Oriental, the Greek, and what there is of Roman — the oldest myths — the interminable ballad-romances of the Middle Ages — the hymns and psalms of worship — the epics, plays, swarms of lyrics of the British Islands, or the Teutonic old or new — or modern French — or what there is in America, Bryant’s, for instance, or Whittier’s or Longfellow’s — the verse of all tongues and ages, all forms, all subjects, from primitive times to our own day inclusive — really combine in one aggregate and electric globe or universe, with all its numberless parts and radiations held together by a common centre or verteber. To repeat it, all poetry thus has (to the point of view comprehensive enough) more features of resemblance than difference, and becomes essentially, like the planetary globe itself, compact and orbic and whole. Nature seems to sow countless seeds — makes incessant crude attempts — thankful to get now and then, even at rare and long intervals, something approximately good.

March 26, Saturday: Walt Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey at the age of 72. His brain, when taken to the American Anthropometric Society in Philadelphia,80 would accidentally be dropped on the floor and would have to be discarded. They would be able to take a measurement indicating that it was somewhat smaller than average. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

March 30, Wednesday: The corpse of Walt Whitman, minus of course the brain, was interred in a large granite “burial house” which he himself had designed, in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey. No member of his immediate family had ever had a clue as to what Walt had been up to, in regard to his poetry, although there had been a few unsettling suspicions in regard to his sex life. At his funeral, therefore, surviving family had been amazed at the positive interest that was being displayed.81

80. In 1849 Whitman had had his head examined by a phrenologist, who had said nice stuff about him. Whitman, who vastly impressed himself, was vastly impressed that phrenology thought highly of him, and therefore made this bequest. 81. Do not imagine Tony Bennett showing up to croon “I left my braaiin, in Phill-uh-delllll-fya.” –No, I told you not to imagine that. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1896

John Burroughs’s WHITMAN: A STUDY. WALT WHITMAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1905

The Reverend Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s THE CLANSMAN: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE OF THE KU KLUX KLAN. Racial conflict is an epic struggle with the future of civilization at stake. Maybe we can’t have human slavery anymore but American blacks cannot be allowed to be politically equal with American whites as that would lead to social equality, and social equality would lead to miscegenation, and miscegenation would lead to the destruction of the family, and the destruction of the family would lead to the destruction of civilized society. Everything we admire and respect would fall like a row of damn dominoes, you fool.

In this year the Reverend Egisto Fabbri Chauncey’s son Henry Chauncey was born. In his baby book, carefully preserved, there was a place to write down what “people are reading,” and we note that Mrs. Chauncey has listed the Reverend Dixon’s THE CLANSMAN, one of the books on which the movie The Birth of a Nation would be based, as well as Edith Wharton’s THE HOUSE OF MIRTH and Jack London’s WAR OF THE CLASSES — reading matter that characterized our country as one that was still, despite the best improving efforts of two HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN and a half centuries of Chaunceys, after fighting a devastating Civil War, still in a state of upheaval over matters of race, class, and social exclusion.

A homophobic theory of Walt Whitman’s “sex pathology” began to surface and was promptly countered among Whitman afficionados by a less accurate but less damaging “dark lady” theory.

In order to identify slow learners, Alfred Binet devised the first test that could measure general intelligence, providing for each personnel folder a single overall IQ number. By comparing this number with a person’s physical age, he felt that he could determine that person’s mental age. The following anonymous remark about Henry Thoreau appeared in Joel Benton’s PERSONS AND PLACES (NY: Broadway, pages 12-13): I am not sure whether you had personal knowledge of Thoreau, whom I had seen a little of from time to time, and a good deal more about thirty years ago, when I spent several Sundays at his mother’s house (having the same expectation of becoming a resident of Concord), and had a good many talks with him. He was a surveyor by profession, and kept a local map, which served him for a guide in his long tramps. He avoided the highways, and was reluctant even to have his feet off the turf or out of the woods. One may believe that he knew every rabbit-burrow and squirrel- hole in Concord, if not the individual physiognomy of each wild creature. He watched them as individuals; would bring turtles’ eggs in his pocket to hatch in the garden, and had an undue contempt for book-and-study naturalists, unjustly disparaging Agassiz. As Mr. Emerson said to me, he was “so good—and so bad!” His hermit-like and ascetic theories were eked out by frequent sharing of Emerson’s conversation and hospitality. Before “Walden” was published I heard him give a lecture before a small audience, which began: “I have been a good deal of a traveler— about my native village,” and went on with a very entertaining account of his experiments in living. Nonconformist as he was, he once spent a week [sic] in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes. His mother lived very quietly near the railroad station, and took occasional boarders — like myself. His sister was (I believe) a nurse by profession, and a grave woman of bright intelligence. She used to beat me easily at chess. His out-door life probably kept at bay the consumption he died of; though his hermitage could hardly have been good for him. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1906

Max Eastman explained patriotism: “If one were loyal to one’s nation only because it was good and true ... one would not be loyal to any nation, but to truth and goodness. The idea of patriotism would have no place either in our dictionaries or in our lives.”

Bliss Perry insisted that “As far as I know there has never been the slightest evidence that Walt Whitman practiced homo-sexuality.”

Recognizing a relatively cheap way to glorify the killing of people, and make it seem as if it were not only a good idea but something around which a decent young man might build a life and a career, the US Congress appropriated $100,000 for repair and restoration of what was left of the USS Constitution.

There is not the slightest evidence that the US Congress was aware of what it was doing. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1907

Bubonic Plague killed 1,200,000 in India.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, a British-educated Indian lawyer in prison in Pretoria, South Africa, read “RESISTANCE TO CIVIL GOVERNMENT”:

The Thoreau-Gandhi entente has ... become a straw for Indo-American amity for both nations to clutch at on appropriate occasion. The Thoreau Centennial provided such an occasion in 1962, and the Indian Ambassador to the United States made a whole log out of this straw when he delivered his address at the dedication of Malvina Hoffman’s bust of Thoreau in the Hall of Fame at New York University.

Thoreau’s essay titled “Civil Disobedience” was republished in a South African newspaper Indian Opinion which Gandhi was editing.

The leading anarchist journal in the US, Liberty, began to claim “Civil Disobedience” as an “anarchist classic.” However, these people were still focusing more upon Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman than upon Henry Thoreau. (And they were paying no attention at all to actual US legal enactment and precedent.)

Publication of the Reverend James Wood’s THE NUTTALL ENCYCLOPÆDIA BEING A CONCISE AND COMPREHENSIVE DICTIONARY OF GENERAL KNOWLEDGE CONSISTING OF OVER 16,000 TERSE AND ORIGINAL ARTICLES ON NEARLY ALL SUBJECTS DISCUSSED IN LARGER ENCYCLOPÆDIAS, AND SPECIALLY DEALING WITH SUCH AS COME UNDER THE CATEGORIES OF HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, GEOGRAPHY, LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND ART: THE SEVEN SAGES OF GREECE: • Solon of Athens, his motto “Know thyself” • Chilo of Sparta, his motto “Consider the end” • Thales of Miletus, his motto “Whoso hateth suretyship is sure” • Bias of Priene, his motto “Most men are bad” • Cleobulus of Lindos, his motto “Avoid extremes” • Pittacus of Mitylene, his motto “Seize Time by the forelock” • Periander of Corinth, his motto “Nothing is impossible to industry.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN WILLIAM TELL, Swiss hero and patriot, a peasant, native of the canton of Uri, who flourished in the beginning of the 14th century; resisted the oppression of the Austrian governor Gessler, and was taken prisoner, but was promised his liberty if with his bow and arrow he could hit an apple on the head of his son, a feat he accomplished with one arrow, with the second arrow in his belt, which he told Gessler he had kept to shoot him with if he had failed. This so incensed the governor that he bound him to carry off to his castle; but as they crossed the lake a storm arose, and Tell had to be unbound to save them, when he leapt upon a rock and made off, to lie in ambush, whence he shot the oppressor through the heart as he passed him; a rising followed, which ended only with the emancipation of Switzerland from the yoke of Austria. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN (People still play around with this legend. For instance, on January 16, 2001, at a circus performance in Paris, Mme Cathy Jamet has been shot in the face by a crossbow arrow fired by her husband M Alain Jamet.)

William Denison McCrackan’s THE SPELL OF THE ITALIAN LAKES: BEING THE RECORD OF PILGRIMAGES TO FAMILIAR AND UNFAMILIAR PLACES OF THE “LAKES OF AZURE, LAKES OF LEISURE,” TOGETHER WITH A DESCRIPTION OF THEIR QUAINT TOWNS AND VILLA GARDENS AND THE TREASURES OF THEIR ART AND HISTORY (Boston: L.C. Page & Co.) (1908, 1913, 1918). HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1913

Dr. W.C. Rivers, in WALT WHITMAN’S ANOMALY, outed the poet as a homosexual and then proceeded to excuse him on grounds that his orgasms had presumably been achieved through masturbation rather than through the unseemly penetration of a bodily orifice of another.

During this year an article by A.A. Brill, Ph.D., M.D. Chief of Clinic of Psychiatry and Clinical Assistant in Neurology, Columbia University, “The Conception of Homosexuality” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing various attempts that were being made to cure male homosexuality, also known as uranism. The attempts being currently made to cure male inverts included psychotherapy, which Dr. Brill favored, but also included hypnotism, which never had any effect at all, castration and bladder washing, neither of which were favored by Dr. Brill, and massage of the prostate, a treatment which the patients tended to consider as ridiculous. “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner,” the doctor elaborated. We should be particularly careful not to suggest anything. I never tell a patient at once that he is homosexual. Be reasonably sure that he is homosexual and you need not then hesitate to tell him so. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1914

Walt Whitman on Henry Thoreau, per Horace Traubel’s WITH WALT WHITMAN IN CAMDEN (NY: Mitchell Kennerley): Thoreau had his own odd ways. Once he got to the house while I was out — went straight to the kitchen where my dear mother was baking some cakes — took the cakes hot from the oven. He was always doing things of the plain sort — without fuss. I liked all that about him. But Thoreau’s great fault was disdain — disdain for men (for Tom, Dick and Harry): inability to appreciate the average life even the exceptional life: it seemed to me a want of imagination. He couldn’t put his life into any other life — realize why one man was so and another man was not so: was impatient with other people on the street and so forth. We had a hot discussion about it — it was a bitter difference: it was rather a surprise to me to meet in Thoreau such a very aggravated case of superciliousness. It was egotistic — not taking that word in its worst sense.... We could not agree at all in our estimate of men — of the men we meet here, there, everywhere — the concrete man. Thoreau had an abstraction about man — a right abstraction: there we agreed. We had our quarrel only on this ground. Yet he was a man you would have to like — an interesting man, simple, conclusive.... When I lived in Brooklyn — in the suburbs — probably two miles distant from the ferries — though there were cheap cabs, I always walked to the ferry to get over to New York. Several times when Thoreau was there with me we walked together. ... Thoreau, in Brooklyn, that first time he came to see me, referred to my critics as “reprobates.” I asked him: “Would you apply so severe a word to them?” He was surprised: “Do you regard that as a severe word? reprobates? what they really deserve is something infinitely stronger, more caustic: I thought I was letting them off easy.” ... Henry was not all for me — he had his reservations: he held back some: he accepted me — my book — as on the whole something to be reckoned with: he allowed that I was formidable: said so to me much in that way: over in Brooklyn: why, that very first visit: “Whitman, do you have any idea that you are rather bigger and outside the average — may perhaps have immense significance?” That’s what he said: I did not answer. He also said: “There is much in you to which I cannot accommodate myself: the defect may be mine: but the objections are there.” ... One thing about Thoreau keeps him very near to me: I refer to his lawlessness — his dissent — his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN 1919

September 10, Wednesday: The Peace of St. Germain-en-Laye establishes the boundaries of the Republic of Austria. Austria recognizes the independence of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland.

Austria makes the following cessions: Slovenia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of Styria to Yugoslavia, Bukovina to Romania, eastern Galicia and Krakow to Poland, and Southern Tyrol, Trent, Görz (Gorizia), Istria, and Trieste to Italy. Austria was forbidden to join in union with Germany. Prime Minister Bratianu of Romania resigns rather than sign the treaty because it does not give Romania more territory. The terms would take effect next July 16.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann was admitted as a student at the Lehrerbildungsanstalt in Pasing, near München.

State militia were called out to calm the city of Boston during the police strike. Two people were killed by troops when they fail to disperse. In response, crowds of citizens began attacking the soldiers.

September 11, Thursday: As the funeral of Horace L. Traubel was being held at a church in New York City, with something close to 1,000 attending, the church burst into flames and the funeral needed to be relocated to the People’s House of the Rand School of Social Science. There, by way of a ceremony, several of the deceased’s poems from OPTIMOS (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1910) were read aloud (the remains would be deposited in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey, close by those of Walt Whitman).

September 12, Friday: Gabriele D’Annunzio and a force of 3,100 Italian nationalists occupy Fiume in an effort to keep it from being awarded to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

A German war veteran named Adolf Hitler attends his 1st meeting of the German Workers Party in the Sternecker beer hall in München. When one attender suggests the secession of Bavaria, Hitler rises to make an impassioned impromptu speech against such a notion. Everyone at the meeting was stunned by his speaking ability.

While vacationing with his wife in Blue Hill, Maine, Horatio Parker was taken to a hospital in Bangor for an appendectomy.

Boston Police vote to return to work. The mayor sacks all of them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1942

In this year in Germany, noncoital male homosexual acts such as embracing and kissing, and even acknowledged male homosexual fantasizing, became punishable by execution. In about this year in the USA, on the recommendation of a group of psychologists, male homosexuals were for the first time identified and excluded from the barracks of our armies as unfit, not on the basis of acts such as “buggery” but on the basis of implicit attitudes or propensities.82 With all this going on, Mark van Doren of course saw reason to decry Walt Whitman’s “manly” love as “deficient and abnormal.”83

82. Leading to the punchline “Heterosexuals to their barracks!” 83. Leading to the punchline “Make war not love!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1946

March 13, Wednesday: Malcolm Cowley wrote Kenneth Burke: “I’m working on Whitman, the old cocksucker. Very strange amalgam he made between cocksucking and democracy.” WALT WHITMAN

HOMOSEXUALITY HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1949

While confined at the St. Elizabeth’s mental institution, Ezra Pound was the recipient of the Library of Congress Bollingen Prize for Poetry, for the PISAN CANTOS.

As might be expected, this award created something of an uproar in literary circles.

In related news, a Walt Whitman Birthplace Association was established during this year to preserve that poet’s birthplace, a still-extant shingle house near Huntington Station on Paumanok “Long Island.” The structure would come to be maintained by the New York State Parks and Recreation Department, open to the public. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1977

Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s THE ART OF LIFE: STUDIES IN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE (HENRY ADAMS, FRANK O’HARA, HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALT WHITMAN, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS) (Austin: U of Texas P).

THE ART OF LIFE examines the transformation of history into literature in WALDEN, “Song of Myself,” Henry James’s PREFACES, THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, Paterson, and the poetry of Frank O’Hara. These works are approached as events in themselves and are analyzed as conversions of form and history, fiction and fact, and even aesthetics and politics. Thus the work of literature is set in the total experience of living, and the writer is seen not only as an artist but also as a person in a historical, political, and cultural environment. As well as a creator of literature, the writer is viewed as a social, psychological, and biological being. Chapters on the narcissistic economy of WALDEN, the mythicizing of history and personality in “Song of Myself,” the self-conscious relation that makes the PREFACES of Henry James the autobiography of an artist. the comic perspective of THE EDUCATION OF H ENRY A DAMS, and the radical innovation of Paterson and O’Hara’s poetry provide new readings of major American works. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1988

Fiona Stafford’s THE SUBLIME SAVAGE dealt with the Ossian/James Macpherson controversy.

President Thomas Jefferson may still have been reading and appreciating Ossian as late as 1789, and commenting upon his continuing admiration as late as 1799, but is that so strange? • Much later than 1799, as of 1815 even, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was fond of referring to Ossian as “the northern Homer,” had François Gérard paint his palace at Malmaison “in the style of Ossian.” Over his bed in the Quirinale in Rome, instead of a mirror, he had Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres do a “Dream of Ossian” on the ceiling. • Much later than 1815, in the fall of 1843 even, Henry Thoreau was appreciating the poetry of Ossian as if there were no challenge to its authenticity. He was, of course, a Harvard graduate who had specialized in literature and languages, and he did, of course, lecture and publish, and it is clear that no challenge was brought forward on this topic from members of his New England audiences. As of 1846, while Thoreau was working simultaneously on drafts of WEEK and of WALDEN, he was bringing materials forward from his lecture “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer” (upon which he had begun work at the suggestion of Waldo Emerson, another Harvard grad, while he was staying on Staten Island and utilizing the resources of the NY Mercantile Library), without indicating that any concerns had ever been brought to his attention. None of the learned readers of The Dial took any exception to these materials. As of May 1, 1851 Thoreau was writing an alleged Ossian excerpt into his Journal. • Much later than Fall 1843, as of November 1881 even, Walt Whitman was still writing about “an Ossianic night” without any indication of awareness that challenge had been made to the authenticity of the materials!

These instances fall further and further outside the longest of the long 18th Centuries. But Thoreau was not a person of ill will, not a white supremacist, not one of those period blokes who were running at the mouth about the AngloKeltish stock and suchlike, as Emerson and Bronson Alcott were being tempted to do, and as Whitman most certainly did for the duration of his exceedingly long florut. And this was all despite the existence since 1775 of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS and it was all despite the existence since 1782 of Shaw’s AN ENQUIRY INTO THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE POEMS ATTRIBUTED TO OSSIAN. Clearly what we need is a “reception study” to evaluate how belatedly such correctives spread through the learned community, what the lag cycle is and how it can be shortened, etc. The basic problem is that we have at present a publication system that lets stuff get out there and sit on library shelves where essentially it becomes stand-alone uncorrectable. Some of it, such as this embarrassing white-race-pride wannabelieve nonsense about origins, is relatively benign, at least in encouraging such folks to feel proud of themselves (everybody deserves to feel proud of themselves), but other of it —such as for instance a recipe for cooking fiddlehead ferns in a “nature” book, a recipe which would in fact promptly give a family incurable cancers of the stomach— is while equally innocent not so harmless. We issue recalls for our vehicles but not for our ideas. Which is one of the many reasons why I am looking forward to the early date at which all academic publishing is going to be by way of hanging files off of one’s WWW homepage. Once we reach that point, we can be in the process of maintaining and correcting and polishing and elaborating our materials for the duration of our respective floruts. —Which should cut down somewhat on this lag cycle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN In this year Terry Bisson created a piece of science fiction or alternate history, a novel FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN. Thoreau appears in this novel. The synopsis of this alternate history is that Captain John Brown and his men are able to adhere to their original schedule and conduct their raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia on the symbolic 4th of July 1859. In this version Harriet Tubman does not claim at the last moment that she has “gotten sick” and cannot come (as in real life she claimed, after having a prophesy dream foretelling doom) and became a general for them. They succeed in getting away from the federal arsenal with weapons, up into the mountains, and General Tubman attracts an army of runaways. The result, however, in this alternative history, is not the sort of genocide or racial pogrom which I myself fear would actually have been the resultant of a temporary “success,” but a 2nd Revolutionary War between American blacks and American whites in which our one nation splits permanently rather than temporarily into two. Clearly, this author Terry Bisson was struggling to use the form of science fiction and the form of the alternative-history novel to create a disruptive story in which Harpers Ferry is not the initiating event of the US Civil War which freed the slaves through the benevolence of The White People Who Want To Do What Is Right, but the initiating event of a 2nd American Revolution in which the American slaves free themselves from the whites precisely as the whites had previously freed themselves from the crown. Abraham Lincoln, in this novel, becomes just another racist white cracker determined to hold the United States of America together as one nation indivisible; in order to achieve this grand objective he is determined to off all the black Americans — whom he disdains (just like in real life) as subhumans. Frederick Douglass, in this novel, rather than running away to England (as he did in real life), upon seeing the initial success of the raid, thinks better of abandoning the cause, and puts himself forward as a political leader for it. In the course of the novel the Douglass character has an opportunity to deliver a truly awesome speech — every bit as good as ones he actually did deliver in real life. Walt Whitman, instead of becoming a male nurse in Washington-area war hospitals (as he did in real life), joins the rebel forces in the mountains. Giuseppe Garibaldi of the red shirt, instead of disdaining the war (as he did in real life, when the northern government would not promise him that it would eventually free the slaves), comes over from Italy and raises an army of liberators in Mexico that invades north to assist the black rebels.

“Lincoln must be seen as the embodiment, not the transcendence, of the American tradition of racism.” — Lerone Bennett, Jr., FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM (Johnson Publishing, 1999) On page 147 of Terry Bisson’s alternate-history FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN, in Concord, Massachusetts, Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau are having their own little Civil War with one another, a war of words with Henry apparently taking the side of Douglass, Tubman, and the black freedom fighters and with Waldo –but of course– taking the side of the established white-supremacist crackers under General Lincoln.

“History is the how of now.”

— Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1989

David Leverenz revealed that Walt Whitman’s homosexuality and homoeroticism made him, Leverenz, “as a heterosexual male, recoil.”

A second replica of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon was created, in Albany.

The American Medical Association had in 1847 promulgated a code of ethics, one item of which called for physicians to care for infectious patients “even at the jeopardy of their own lives.” The code of ethics of course had no teeth, and there were never any studies to discover whether it was having an impact upon the conduct of doctors. In 1957 this item of the physician’s code of ethics had been stricken. In this year, however this item of the code of ethics was reinstated (Something that may have escaped your notice might very well be relevant in this context: a physician is not in general a person suffering from a martyr complex, but instead in general is a fee professional. No studies have given us reason to believe that American physicians had behaved in any unusual manner in the period between the striking and the reinstatement.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1990

January 12, Friday-19, Friday: David Warner reported, in “The Good G(r)ay Poet” in the Philadelphia City Paper, that a brief public service announcement had been prepared by the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force in which a young man stands on the bank of the Delaware River with the Walt Whitman Bridge as a backdrop, and goes “Hey, I just found out that Walt Whitman was gay ... you know the guy they named the bridge after. I wish I had known that when I was in high school. Back then, I got hassled all the time by the other kids, ‘cause I’m gay — and the teachers — they didn’t say anything. Why didn’t they tell me Walt Whitman was gay?” None of the six TV stations serving the Philadelphia market would air this announcement, they said because it “advocated a particular lifestyle.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1992

March 26, Thursday: At an Iowa City conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s 6:40PM death, covered by national radio and TV, the poet’s voice was again heard. In 1889 Thomas Alva Edison had captured Whitman reading four lines from his 1888 poem “America” and this crumbling wax cylinder had been remastered especially for the occasion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

1993

Publication of a reassuring book entitled THE BOOK YOUR CHURCH DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ, Tim C. Leedom editor, by “The Truth Seeker Company.” Now from time to time we run into “village atheist” types, who define themselves in opposition to the hypocrisy of religion, and from time to time we hear Henry Thoreau disparaged as one of these types who define themselves in opposition, who know everything about everything that is wrong with everybody else. HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

So I looked into this new volume with some trepidation, wondering to what use they would be attempting to turn the memory of Thoreau. In scanning through the 400+ glossy pages of this publication, I failed to note any citations, and then at the end I discovered an appendix which attempted to make a list of the “Freethinkers” who are to be honored by these naysayers. And, glory be, Thoreau’s name is not on that rather extensive list! Here are a few of the “Freethinkers,” with the characterizations under which they have been selected out to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN thus honored:

Freethinkers

Marlon Brando Movie actor; specializes in morally intense roles

John Burroughs Nature lover and naturalist; biographer and close friend of Walt Whitman

John Caldwell Calhoun American statesman of the early 19th century; favored states’ rights

Charles Darwin English naturalist, author of ORIGIN OF SPECIES

Erasmus Darwin English botanist and physician, grandfather of Charles

Charles Dickens Novelist

Frederick Douglass Abolitionist

Charles W. Eliot President of Harvard for over 40 years

Waldo Emerson American philosopher and author

Edward Everett Politician, minister, Harvard president

Benjamin Franklin American writer, statesman, and inventor

Mahatma Gandhi Nationalist leader, Hindu, organizer of non-violent resistance

William Lloyd Garrison Abolitionist

William Godwin English philosopher

Horace Greeley Founder of the New-York Tribune

Oliver Wendell Holmes American physician and author

Julia Ward Howe Abolitionist and Suffragist HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN Freethinkers

Thomas Jefferson US President, lawyer, statesman, diplomat, philosopher

Immanuel Kant german philosopher, considered by some to be one of the greatest of modern thinkers

John Locke English philosopher

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet

James Madison President and youngest of the Founding Fathers; helped bring about ratification of the Constitution and passage of the Bill of Rights

Horace Mann American educator

Florence Nightingale English nurse, philanthropist

Thomas Paine Writer and political theorist. The mind behind the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence

Benjamin Pierce Mathematician, astronomer

Jean Jacques Rousseau French publisher and author

Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher

Percy Bysshe Shelley English romantic poet, wrote THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft

B.F. Skinner Behaviorist, psychologist, signed 1973 Humanist Manifesto

Herbert Spencer Philosopher, psychologist, sociologist

Mark Twain American author, humorist

Catherine Vogel Burned in 1539 for being a Unitarian

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German poet

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz German philosopher

Alfred Russel Wallace naturalist, devoted life to scientific entomology

Walt Whitman American poet, true inheritor of Emersonian principles

Mary Wollstonecraft Wrote VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, friend of Thomas Paine, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN “There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.” — Simone Weil, WAITING FOR GOD, page 32 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN

2003

March 28, Friday: Margaret Atwood wrote “A Letter to America,” which appeared on page A17 in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail: You’re the 21st-century Romans. Your admiring friends used to know you well: land of the brave, home of the free. Now, as you obsess over the omens of war, we wonder if you know yourself, muses MARGARET ATWOOD Dear America: This is a difficult letter to write, because I’m no longer sure who you are. Some of you may be having the same trouble. I thought I knew you: We’d become well acquainted over the past 55 years. You were the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comic books I read in the late 1940s. You were the radio shows — Jack Benny, Our Miss Brooks. You were the music I sang and danced to: the Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters, Elvis. You were a ton of fun. You wrote some of my favourite books. You created Huckleberry Finn, and Hawkeye, and Beth and Jo in Little Women, courageous in their different ways. Later, you were my beloved Thoreau, father of environmentalism, witness to individual conscience; and Walt Whitman, singer of the great Republic; and Emily Dickinson, keeper of the private soul. You were Hammett and Chandler, heroic walkers of mean streets; even later, you were the amazing trio, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, who traced the dark labyrinths of your hidden heart. You were Sinclair Lewis and Arthur Miller, who, with their own American idealism, went after the sham in you, because they thought you could do better. You were Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, you were Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, you were Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter. You stood up for freedom, honesty and justice; you protected the innocent. I believed most of that. I think you did, too. It seemed true at the time. You put God on the money, though, even then. You had a way of thinking that the things of Caesar were the same as the things of God: that gave you self-confidence. You have always wanted to be a city upon a hill, a light to all nations, and for a while you were. Give me your tired, your poor, you sang, and for a while you meant it. We’ve always been close, you and us. History, that old entangler, has twisted us together since the early 17th century. Some of us used to be you; some of us want to be you; some of you used to be us. You are not only our neighbours: In many cases –mine, for instance– you are also our blood relations, our colleagues, and our personal friends. But although we’ve had a ringside seat, we’ve never understood you completely, up here north of the 49th parallel. We’re like Romanized Gauls –look like Romans, dress like Romans, but aren’t Romans– peering over the wall at the real Romans. What are they doing? Why? What are they doing now? Why is the HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN haruspex eyeballing the sheep’s liver? Why is the soothsayer wholesaling the Bewares? Perhaps that’s been my difficulty in writing you this letter: I’m not sure I know what’s really going on. Anyway, you have a huge posse of experienced entrail-sifters who do nothing but analyze your every vein and lobe. What can I tell you about yourself that you don’t already know? This might be the reason for my hesitation: embarrassment, brought on by a becoming modesty. But it is more likely to be embarrassment of another sort. When my grandmother –from a New England background– was confronted with an unsavoury topic, she would change the subject and gaze out the window. And that is my own inclination: Mind your own business. But I’ll take the plunge, because your business is no longer merely your business. To paraphrase Marley’s Ghost, who figured it out too late, mankind is your business. And vice versa: When the Jolly Green Giant goes on the rampage, many lesser plants and animals get trampled underfoot. As for us, you’re our biggest trading partner: We know perfectly well that if you go down the plug-hole, we’re going with you. We have every reason to wish you well. I won’t go into the reasons why I think your recent Iraqi adventures have been –taking the long view– an ill-advised tactical error. By the time you read this, Baghdad may or may not look like the craters of the Moon, and many more sheep entrails will have been examined. Let’s talk, then, not about what you’re doing to other people, but about what you’re doing to yourselves. You’re gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn’t this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you’ve been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn’t used to be easily frightened. You’re running up a record level of debt. Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won’t be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you’ll go the way of the USSR: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning. That will make folks very cross. They’ll be even crosser when they can’t take a shower because your short-sighted bulldozing of environmental protections has dirtied most of the water and dried up the rest. Then things will get hot and dirty indeed. You’re torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be, not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce, at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country? Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system? Let’s hope not. If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest. The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them. - *** - Margaret Atwood studied American literature –among other things– at Radcliffe and Harvard in the 1960s. She is the author of 10 novels. Her 11th, Oryx and Crake, will be published in May. This essay also appears in The Nation.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: January 2, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

WALT WHITMAN WALT WHITMAN the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.