Whitman despised riches, and all mere worldly success, as heartily as ever
did any of the old Christians. All outward show and finery were intensely
distasteful to him. He probably would not have accepted the finest house
in New York on condition that he live in it. During his hospital
experiences he cherished the purpose, as soon as the war was over, of
returning to Brooklyn, buying an acre or two of land in some by-place on
Long Island, and building for himself and his family a cheap house. When
his brother Jeff contemplated building, he advised him to build merely an
Irish shanty. After what he had seen the soldiers put up with, he thought
anything was good enough for him or his people. In one of his letters to
his mother, he comments upon the un-American and inappropriate
ornamentation of the rooms in the Capitol building, "without grandeur and
without simplicity," he says. In the state the country was in, and with
the hospital scenes before him, the "poppy-show goddesses" and the Italian
style of decoration, etc., sickened him, and he got away from it all as
quickly as he could.
V
During the war and after, I used to see a good deal of Whitman in
Washington. Summer and winter he was a conspicuous figure on Pennsylvania
Avenue, where he was wont to walk for exercise and to feed his hunger for
faces. One would see him afar off, in the crowd but not of it,--a large,
slow-moving figure, clad in gray, with broad-brimmed hat and gray
beard,--or, quite as frequently, on the front platform of the street
horse-cars with the driver. My eye used to single him out many blocks
away.
There were times during this period when his aspect was rather
forbidding,--the physical man was too pronounced on first glance; the
other man was hidden beneath the broad-brimmed hat. One needed to see the
superbly domed head and classic brow crowning the rank physical man.
In his middle manhood, judging from the photos, he had a hirsute, kindly
look, but very far removed from the finely cut traditional poet's face.