THE CARPENTER
In the fifties a change came over America, a change preluding the great
struggle which ensued. The population grew rapidly with its former
mathematical regularity; but the settlement and development of the
country went forward even more rapidly. During the decade, the area of
improved land increased by one-half, and the value of farm property
was doubled. The west bank of the Mississippi being already settled,
the future of the lands still further west between the Missouri and
the Rockies, became of paramount interest to the nation. It was this
problem of the West which strained until it broke that policy of
compromise which for a generation had bound American politics.
The year 1850 itself is memorable for Clay's opportunist resolutions
in Congress, which were intended to settle nothing; and for the fierce
debates upon them and upon the Fugitive Slave Bill, in which Webster
and Seward, Calhoun and Jefferson Davis participated.[141] Clay and
Webster died soon after, and their party being utterly routed at the
polls in 1852, finally went to pieces. The vote of the liberty party
had declined, and compromise still held up its foolish head. But the
victorious Democrats brought all hope of its continuance to an end by
reviving the principle of "squatter sovereignty," and proceeding to
apply it in the newly settled lands. It was their policy to snatch
the question of slavery out of the hands of Congress; for which, as
the organ of the Federal power, they nursed an increasing enmity.
The bloody scenes which drew all eyes to Kansas made it plain that
compromise was done; the South had thrown it over, and was now
half-consciously driving the country into war.
When the leaders of 1850 died there was no one to take their places,
though the crisis called for men of counsel and of spirit. President
Pierce, of New Hampshire, the tool of the party machine, merely
represented the political weakness of the nation. It was not till
after the next elections that their new leaders were discovered by the
American people. Judge Douglas, the champion of "squatter sovereignty,"
rose indeed into prominence in 1854, but his greater antagonist still
remained comparatively unknown in the country, though famous in his
State and among his neighbours for keen logic and humorous common-sense.
There was no leadership. Compromise was yielding not to principle
but to the spirit of the mob. Immigration and the increase of the
towns favoured organised political corruption; and the tyranny of
interests and privileges was beginning to make itself felt on every
hand. When parties are separated by motives of personal gain rather
than by principle, party-feeling finds expression not in devotion and
enthusiasm, but in violence. It was not only in such newly settled
lands as Kansas, nor alone in such chaotic aggregations of humanity as
were being piled together in New York, that constitutional methods were
abandoned and private violence was condoned. The spirit of anarchy was
abroad, and members of Congress went armed to the Capitol itself.
The violence was a natural reaction from the compromise, and like the
compromise was a birth of the materialistic spirit. America's idealism,
so triumphant at the close of the eighteenth century, had fallen upon
too confident a slumber, and heavily must the Republic pay for that
sleep. A young nation of idealists is doubtless more subject than
any other to these outbreaks of materialism and its offspring. It is
optimistic, and when it sleeps it leaves no dogs on guard. The nation
becomes engrossed in material tasks, and is presently surprised by the
enemy. But being so surprised, and fighting thus at disadvantage, it
accomplishes more than the wary old pessimists whose energy is absorbed
in prudence.
American idealism was asleep, but its slumbers were by no means
sound. The voices of Garrison, Emerson and others mingled troublously
with its dreams. And the pursuit and capture of fugitive slaves like
Anthony Burns, in Boston itself; and the extraordinary sale, both in
America and Europe, of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_,[142] did much to quicken
that Abolitionist sentiment which in the end won the day. For the
present, however, and until the third year of the war, abolition
remained outside the region of practical politics. The question
which was dividing the nation was whether slavery should become a
national institution--whether it should take its place, as the South
intended, as one of the essential postulates in the theory of American
liberty--or should be restrained within its old limits as a State
institution, an evil which the Federal Government would never recognise
as necessary to the welfare of America, but which it was too proud and
too generous to compel its constituent States to abolish. The situation
was one of unstable equilibrium, and the illogical position could not
much longer be maintained. It was the logic of ideas that first drove
the South into secession, and afterwards the nation into abolition.
* * * * *
Immigration was now beginning to create a difficult problem in the
metropolis,[143] and was in part accountable for the corruption which
from this time forward disfigured its politics. By 1855 New York
counted more than six hundred thousand inhabitants; a number which in
itself must inevitably have created many a delicate situation in a new
country, but which was rendered tenfold more difficult to manage by its
rapid growth and heterogeneous character. It had doubled in fifteen
years, and a continuously increasing stream of immigration had poured
through it.
The first great wave had brought nearly two millions of Europeans,
principally Germans and Irish, across the Atlantic during the later
forties. The failure of the Irish potato crop in 1846, the crisis of
1848, when Europe was swept by revolution and afterwards by reaction,
sent hundreds of thousands of homeless men across the sea. Many of the
Germans afterwards took their share in another struggle for freedom
in their new home; but on the other hand, the more helpless of the
immigrants, and a large proportion of the Irish, swelled the population
of New York; and proved themselves quicker to learn the advantages of
party subserviency than the ethics of citizenship. Many of them had
been trained in the school of tyranny at home. Thus the city government
became almost hopelessly corrupt, falling into the hands of the genteel
and unprincipled Mayor Fernando Wood,[144] and Isaiah Rynders, captain
of his bodyguard of blackguards. Men of this stamp began to control
not only the government of New York city, but the national party which
had its headquarters at Tammany Hall. Whitman was intimate with the
condition of things there,[145] and knew the men who manipulated the
machine, and pulled the strings at the nominating conventions. He has
described those of this period in the most scathing words, and has made
it clear that they were among the worst of a bad class. They did not
favour slavery so much as inaction; they longed only for a continuance
of their own good fortune, desiring to fatten peacefully at the troughs
of corruption. To men like these, ideals seem to constitute a public
danger. And the war which broke over America in 1861 was due as much to
the northern menials of Mammon as to the real followers of Calhoun. It
was not only against the South that America fought--or rather it was
not against the South itself at all--but against the hosts of those
who used her freedom for the accomplishment of an end antagonistic to
hers.
Evidences of the demoralising influence always present in the life
of a great city were thus painfully patent in New York, especially
in the lowest strata, becoming hourly more debased and numerous. The
plutocracy also began to imitate the showy splendours of Paris under
the second Empire.[146] But it would be wrong to assume that corruption
and display characterised the metropolis of the fifties. For in spite
of the foreign influx, and the venality of a considerable class both of
native and of foreign birth, and in spite too of the snobs, in spite
that is to say of the appearance of two dangerous elements, the very
poor and the very rich, there was still predominant in New York a frank
and hearty democratic feeling. The mass of the people still embodied
much of the true American genius; they were marked by the friendly,
independent and unconventional carriage which is still upon the whole
typical of the West.
New York was full of large democratic types of manhood. Notable, even
among these, was Walt Whitman. Even here, he was unlike other men: the
fulness of his spirits, his robust individuality, the generosity of his
whole nature, was so exceptional as to make itself felt. His figure
began to grow familiar to all kinds of New Yorkers during these years.
He was frequently to be seen on Broadway,[147] in his favourite coign
of vantage, on the stage-top by the driver's side, a great, red-faced
fellow, in a soft beaver, with clothes of his own choosing, an open
collar like that of Byron or Jean Paul, and a grey beard. The dress
suited him, he was plainly at home in it, and in those days it was
not specially remarkable or odd; it was the man himself who compelled
attention.
On many a holiday through 1853 he might also have been seen at the
International Exhibition or World's Fair,[148] which was held in the
Crystal Palace on Sixth Avenue and Fortieth Street, and offered a
remarkable object lesson to the people of New York on the development
of American resources and the value of that national unity which
railroads and machinery were yearly making more actual. Here America
was seen in all her own natural promise, and also in her relation to
the Transatlantic world.
It was one of those sights which Whitman dearly loved. The Exhibition
taught him far more than books about the country in which he lived;
for his mind was like a child's in its responsiveness to concrete
illustrations--a quality which may explain the long strings of nouns
which figure so oddly on many a page which he afterwards wrote. He
loved a medley of things, each one significant and delightful in
itself. A catalogue was for him a sort of elemental poem; and being
elemental, he sought to introduce the catalogue into literature. We who
live in another and more ordered world, rarely respond to this kind of
emotional stimulus, which was doubtless very powerful for Whitman, and
cannot but laugh at his attempts to move us by a chatter of names. It
may be we are wrong, and that another age will smile at us in our turn,
though at present we remain incredulous.
Here, too, he studied such examples as he found of statuary and
painting, arts of which he must hitherto have been largely ignorant. It
is only very old or very wealthy cities that become treasuries of the
plastic arts, and at this time New York was not yet sufficiently rich,
or perhaps sufficiently travelled, to have accumulated this kind of
wealth. Whitman was not blind to painting, like Carlyle, for in later
years he so appreciated the genius of J. F. Millet that he used to say,
"the man that knows his Millet needs no creed".[149]
* * * * *
After a varied experience as teacher, printer, journalist and editor,
Whitman had settled into the life of an American artisan. He had
inherited much of the Dutch realism, the love of things and of the
making of things, from his mother's side; while on his father's, the
associations with mallet and chisel had been strong from his childhood;
and thus his trade helped him to gather together the fragments of his
identity and weld them into one. As he was never in any sense its
slave, it also provided him with the means for that constant leisurely
study of life which was now his real occupation. When a house was
off his hands and the money for it assured, he would take a holiday,
extending sometimes over weeks together, in the remote parts of Long
Island.[150] The open spaces helped his mood, and the quietness
furthered the slow processes of self-realisation.
While at Brooklyn, he was every day on the ferry, and almost every
evening he was in New York. He read during his dinner hour, and thought
and meditated while he worked. The physical exercise quieted his brain.
Taken earlier, it might have deadened it; but he was now a mature man
full of thoughts, and well furnished with experience. What he needed
was to assimilate all this material and make it his own. And while
he built houses, the co-ordinating principle of his personality was
building up for him a harmonious self-consciousness, which gradually
filled out the large and wholesome body of the man. This gestating
process required precisely the deliberation and open-air accompaniments
which were afforded by his present life--a life so different from the
confinement and incessant strain and stress which check all processes
of conscious development in most men and women before they reach
maturity. His nature was emotional, and music played a considerable
part in its development. Always an assiduous opera-goer, Whitman took
full advantage of the musical opportunities which New York offered him
at this time. In 1850, Barnum had brought Jenny Lind to the Castle
Gardens--now the Aquarium--a fashionable resort on the Battery, and
Maretzek of the Astor Opera House, had replied with Parodi, and Bettini
the great tenor.[151]
Best of all, in 1853, Marietta Alboni visited the city, and Whitman
heard her every night of her engagement.[152] This great singer, whose
voice was then in the plenitude of its power, had been some twelve
years before the public and was already beginning to attain those
physical proportions suggested in the cruel but witty saying that
she resembled an elephant which had swallowed a nightingale. She was
low-browed and of a somewhat heavy face, though Whitman thought her
handsome; but it was by her voice, not her face, that she triumphed.
Critics found her talent exceptionally impersonal and even cold, though
they confessed that never voice was more enchanting.[153] This coldness
is rather difficult to understand, for Whitman, who was a judge in such
matters, felt it to be full of passion, and a passion which swept him
away in the Titanic whirlwind of its power.[154] He had found Jenny
Lind somewhat immature and her voice unrewarding, but Alboni awakened
and illumined his very soul, and became, as it were, the incarnation of
music.
The same summer[155] Walt took his father, whose health was failing, on
a visit to Huntington, to see the old home for a last time. Two years
later, Walter Whitman died and was buried in Brooklyn.
The family seems to have been living in Ryerton Street,[156] in a house
which was the last building on that side of the town. Beside Walt,
there were three unmarried brothers at home, George and Jeff as well as
Edward; and Hannah, Walt's favourite sister. We hear little of Jesse,
the oldest brother, who appears to have been a labourer, of Andrew, or
of the remaining sister Mary. Probably they were all married by this
time and living away.
The three at home were the ablest of the brothers, and doubtless
they shared the financial responsibility between them. The Portland
Avenue house, into which they presently moved, bears witness to their
comfortable circumstances. Walt contributed his share with his
brothers; beyond that he seemed indifferent about money; he hardly ever
spoke of it, and perhaps by way of contrast with the others, evidently
regarded the subject as of minor importance. Indeed, just as his own
work had really grown profitable and he was on the way to become rich,
he gave up carpentering for good. This was early in 1855.
Of late he had been more and more absorbed and pre-occupied; his days
off had been more frequent and numerous, and whatever his immediate
occupation he was continually stopping to write. He seemed to grow
daily more indifferent to opinion, daily more markedly himself.
The fragments which he wrote in out-of-the-way places or at work he
would read aloud or recite when by himself, to the waves or to the
trees; trying them over at the opera, on the ferry, or on Broadway,
where in the midst of the city one can be so unobserved and so unheard
in the heart of its hubbub. He must assure himself that they were
without a hint of unreality or of books.
For he was now deliberately at work upon his great task, his child's
fancy. He was come up into his manhood. He had, it seemed to him,
thoroughly perceived and absorbed the spirit of America and of his
time. His message had come to him, and he was writing his prophetic
book, his _Song of Walt Whitman_.
At last, the manuscript was done, and in the early summer he went to
work in a little printing shop on Cranberry Street, and set up much,
perhaps the whole, of the type jealously with his own hands.[157] About
the beginning of July, and a few days only before his father's death,
it was completed. In the _New York Tribune_ for the sixth of the month,
it was advertised as being on sale at Fowler & Wells's Phrenological
Depôt and Bookstore on Broadway, and at Swayne's in Fulton Street,
Brooklyn. The price was at first two dollars, which seems a little
exorbitant for so slender and unpretending a volume, in shape and
thickness a mere single copy of one of the smaller periodicals, bound
in sea-green cloth, with the odd name, _Leaves of Grass_, in fanciful
gilt lettering across its face. It was presently reduced to a dollar.
The other members of the household took the new venture very quietly.
They had never been consulted in the matter--it had been Walt's affair,
and only his; and the father's death must speedily have obliterated the
little mark it made upon their minds.[158] "Hiawatha" was published
about the same time, and a copy found its way into the house. The
mother, turning the pages of both, considered that if Longfellow's
were acknowledged as poetry, Walt's queer lines might pass muster too.
Brother George fingered the book a little, and concluded it was not
worth reading--that it was not in his line anyhow.
Doubtless they were relieved when the writing and printing were done,
thinking that now surely Walt would return to the ways of mortals. For
he had certainly fallen into the most irregular habits. He lay late
abed, and came down still later to breakfast; wrote for a few hours,
and when the table was being laid for dinner, took down his big hat
and sauntered out, to return presently after the meal was over and the
dishes cold.[159] He was not intentionally inconsiderate, but he was
wholly engrossed in his work, and so pre-occupied that he must often
have been tiresome enough.
After dinner he disappeared altogether, spending the afternoon and
evening in his own leisurely way; setting type, perhaps, on his book at
Andrew Rome's little office, and then going off to the opera or to some
friend's; and, as he came back, staying far into the night in talk with
the young fellows on the ferry, or on one of the East River steamers.
Sometimes Hannah or Jeff might accompany him, but as a rule he went
alone.
If his family anticipated any change in his ways when the book was
out, they were doomed to disappointment. The new task was but begun;
the methods approved themselves to his mind and were pursued. He had
weighed everything over again that summer, as soon as the book was out,
going away to the eastern shore of Long Island for months of thought
and solitude.[160]
* * * * *
As one turns the ninety broad pages of the volume, with their large
type, their long flowing lines, their odd punctuation and occasional
slips in orthography, every detail telling of the individuality behind
it, one feels a little of what it must have meant to its maker. Five
times, they say,[161] he wrote and re-wrote, made and un-made it, and
looking back it seemed as though for seven years it had been struggling
with him for utterance.
He had written tales and verses with the others, but this book he knew
was different from them all. It was not so much his writing as himself.
It was a man, and, withal, a new sort of man. For better or worse it
was Walt Whitman, a figure familiar enough to the common people of
Brooklyn and New York, familiar and beloved--he was not unconscious of
his exceptional power of attraction[162]--but a Walt Whitman whom, as
yet, they understood very little, who had, indeed, but recently come to
an understanding of himself, and who was now approaching to speak with
them. Here is the frank declaration of himself, which he proffers to
all. Now, at last, we shall understand one another, he seems to say.
It was the old, old need for expression, the ultimate and deepest
necessity of man, which urged him to his task and made its publication
possible. Self-revelation is, of course, continuous and inevitable
upon its unconscious side. It is only when it becomes a deliberate act
that it astonishes the beholder to outcries of admiration or indignant
horror.
Now the passion that overwhelms the poet is near akin to the lover's,
for he is a lover whose heart is transfigured by the presence of
Beauty, the Beloved, immanent in his world. And only by a naked avowal
can such passion be satisfied.
There are those, of course, who regard every self-revelation as an
immodesty, and who will and do avert their eyes from all passion,
crying shame. But some at least of the others, who are well aware of
the weakness of words, and know how few can use them perfectly, will
reverently approach such a confession as Whitman's; not, indeed, as if
it were that of a young girl, but as that of a man, naïve, yet virile,
and of heroic sanity. And if they feel any shame they will frankly
acknowledge it to be their own.
There is a kind of egoism which all self-revelation pre-supposes--the
consciousness of possessing something supremely worthy of giving. This
glorious pride is not incompatible with the profoundest humility, for
it is divine, like the "I am" of Jehovah, the egoism of God.
* * * * *
If self-expression is the outcome of passion, its new incarnation has
some of the wonder which attends a birth. The most virile of poets
must here become as a woman; and the mystery which, for any mother,
enwraps her first-born, clings for his Muse about her slender child
by the great god of song. And when, as in the instance of this book
of Whitman's, the children of the Muse betray in every feature the
abandonment of the remote passion in which they were conceived, one
cannot oneself handle them without emotion.
Walt regarded the book with undisguised pride and satisfaction.
Mother-like, he eyed it as the future saviour of men. He saw it
prophetic and large with destiny for America. He was confident that the
public would be quick to recognise that quality in it for which they
had been so long half-consciously waiting. The people would read it
with a new delight, for surely it must be dynamic with the joy in which
it was written.
He often said in later years that _Leaves of Grass_ was an attempt to
put a happy man into literature.[163] Others may discuss the optimism
and the egoism of his pages, for of both qualities there is plenty in
them, but, after all, they are but secondary there. As to the qualities
themselves, we may hold contrary and even disparaging opinions of their
value, they will certainly at times repel us. But primarily these pages
portray the happy man, and a strong and happy personality has the
divine gift of attraction. Byron may dominate the whole of Europe for a
generation by the dark Satanic splendour of his pride; Carlyle may hold
us still by his fierce, lean passion for sincerity; but Whitman draws
us by the outshining of his joy.
Happiness is not less infectious than melancholy or zeal; and if it
is genuine it is at least equally beyond price. As far as it goes, it
seems to indicate that a man may be perfectly adjusted to this world
of circumstances, which to us appears so often contrary. A happy and
intelligent man of thirty-six, who has looked at life open-eyed, and
is neither handsome, rich nor famous is worthy of attention. There is
something half-divine about him; and we cannot but hope he may prove to
be prophetic of the race.
* * * * *
Some such thought must have been in Emerson's mind, when a few days
after the perusal of _Leaves of Grass_, he wrote his acknowledgment
to its unknown author.[164] The letter has been often quoted, but it
is so significant that I must quote it again. For no other literary
acknowledgment ever accorded to Whitman possesses anything like equal
interest or importance.
Emerson was certainly the most notable force among American writers
at that time; and one might add, the only figure of anything like the
first magnitude. In Great Britain, the century had already produced the
literature which we associate with the names of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Carlyle, not to mention the earlier
work of Tennyson, Browning and others. Emerson was the only American
who could venture to claim rank with these, and then hardly equal
literary rank. But in some respects his influence was greater, for
his was certainly the clearest and fullest expression of the American
spirit in letters. His words are therefore of importance to us:--
"CONCORD, MASS'TTS, _21st 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 seems 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
that 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.
"Mr. WALTER WHITMAN."
[Illustration: R. W. EMERSON]
The epigrammatic style of the sentences, together with a strong
flavour of sentiment, may set the reader in his turn rubbing his
eyes, and wondering whether Emerson were consciously inditing a mere
complimentary letter. But a second perusal renders such an idea
untenable. The epigram and the sentiment were parts of the Emersonian
mannerism. The letter was not penned in hot haste, after a first
glance at the pages; a delay had taken place between reading and
writing. Moreover, when about this time a visitor called at Concord,
he was sent on his way to Brooklyn as upon a pilgrimage, with the
significant words, "Americans abroad may now come home: unto us a man
is born".[165] Another epigram, uttered perhaps with a gentle smile,
but without a flavour of irony.
Emerson was then a man of fifty-two. The first and second series of
his lecture-essays had been published more than ten years, and the
first volume of his poems in 1847; he was already famous in England as
well as in America. But though he was in certain quarters the cynosure
of admiration, in others he was the butt of ridicule. This same year
the London _Athenæum_ praised Irving because, as it said, his fancies
were ideal, and not like Emerson's merely typographical--because they
did not consist, like the latter's, in the use of verbs for nouns, in
erratic punctuation, tumid epithets, which were startling rather than
apposite, or in foreign forms and idioms.[166]
This though milder, is not unlike what many of the critics were soon
to be saying with better reason of Whitman; and it is interesting
to recall that in 1839, when he was Whitman's age, Emerson was
struggling to escape from the limits of metre into a rhythm that should
suggest the wildest freedom; that should be "firm as the tread of a
horse,"[167] vindicate itself like the stroke of a bell, and knock
at prose and dulness like a cannon ball; a rhythm which should be in
itself a renewing of creation, because it was the form of a living
spirit. In later years, Emerson seems to have harked back again to
the more regular forms, believing them to correspond to essential
pulse-beats, or organic rhythm. But his journal contains several
little prose poems of the date of 1855 or 1856, notably the sketch of
the "Two Rivers," outlined partly in loose irregular metres.
This search of the Concord prophet after a new free rhythmical form,
must have predisposed him to interest in such a book as _Leaves of
Grass_, where the laws of metre are in force no longer. But beyond
this, the older man felt a close kinship with the younger. Whitman
had declared himself unequivocally for the faith in life which was
Emerson's gospel; and he smacked of the soil and air of America in
a way that Emerson could not but love. Here at last was an actual
incarnation of the ideas he had so long been hurling at the heads of
the American people.
A beautiful and characteristic modesty is evident in the tone of the
letter. Emerson might well have acknowledged the younger man as a pupil
rather than as a benefactor; it was the same quality as had appeared in
his reply to Frederika Bremer, when, five years earlier, she had been
praising his own verses: "The Poet of America," he answered gravely,
"is not yet come. When he comes he will sing quite differently."
The idea of an American poet was "in the air". Intellectual America was
in revolt; she would remain no longer a mere province of Britain; her
writers should shape themselves no more upon merely English models.
Lowell in his "Biglow Papers" and Longfellow in "Hiawatha" were among
many who sought to exploit the literary soil of the New World. Whatever
their success in this, they can hardly be said to have inaugurated a
new literature. No American Muse had yet appeared upon the Heights of
Helicon to spread a new hush over the world, and by her singing raise
the place of song perilously near to the stars. But though she had not
appeared she was eagerly expected; and Emerson's letter is like nothing
so much as the heralding cry that he had at last caught a glimpse of
her across Whitman's pages. It was but a glimpse, and he was yet in
doubt; he must come to Brooklyn himself, must meet this fellow face to
face, and see.
FOOTNOTES:
[141] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 417, 418.
[142] _Comb. Mod. Hist._, 440.
[143] _Ib._, 701.
[144] Roosevelt, 195.
[145] _Comp. Prose_, 217.
[146] Roosevelt, 199.
[147] Burroughs (_a_), 24, 25.
[148] Bucke, 25.
[149] MSS. Traubel.
[150] Bucke, 24.
[151] _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iv., 178.
[152] _Mem. Hist. N.Y._, iv., 179; _cf._ _Saturday Rev._, 30th June,
1894.
[153] G. Bousquet, _Nouvelle Biog. Générale_.
[154] MSS. Wallace.
[155] Bucke, 157.
[156] M. D. Conway, _Autobiography_, vol. i.
[157] Bucke, 24; Johnston, 42, 43.
[158] _In re_, 35, 36.
[159] _In re_, 36.
[160] Bucke, 26.
[161] _Ib._, 137.
[162] _L. of G._, 322.
[163] _L. of G._, 443.
[164] Kennedy, 74, 75 n.; Dr. Platt's _Walt Whitman_, 27, 28, etc.
[165] Burroughs (_a_), 50.
[166] 17th Feb., 1855, qu. in _Alibone_.
[167] _Emerson in Concord_, 227-233.