CONVALESCENCE
All through 1875 the weakness continued; but in November he was well
enough to pay a visit to Washington, accompanied by John Burroughs;
and, the public re-burial of Poe taking place about that time in
Baltimore, Doyle appears to have convoyed him thither.[557] There,
sitting silently on the platform at the public function, he seems once
again to have been cordially greeted by Emerson, but O'Connor, who was
also present, made no sign.[558]
* * * * *
It was not till the following summer that Whitman's old spirits began
to return. Since his mother died he had passed three years in the
valley of the shadow, and he was still lonely, sick and poor when his
English friends came to his rescue.
He and his writings had been pulverised between the heavy millstones
of Mr. Peter Bayne's adjectives in the _Contemporary Review_ for the
month of December. In England, as well as in America, he had literary
enemies in high places. But on the 13th of March the _Daily News_[559]
published a long and characteristically fervid letter, full of generous
feeling, from Mr. Robert Buchanan, who dilated upon the old poet's
isolation, neglect and poverty. It aroused wide comment, and some
indignation on both sides of the Atlantic, among Whitman's friends as
well as among his enemies.
That he was never deserted by his faithful American friends a series
of articles upon his condition, published in the Springfield (Mass.)
_Republican_, bears witness.[560] But Buchanan's letter evoked new and
widespread sympathy, which was the means of saving Whitman from his
melancholy plight. A fortnight later the _Athenæum_ printed his short
sonnet-like poem, "The Man-o'-War Bird".
In the meantime, Mr. Rossetti, always faithful to his friend, had
learned of his condition, and had written asking how best his English
admirers might offer him assistance. Walt wrote in reply, stating that
his savings were exhausted, that he had been cheated by his New York
agents, and that in consequence he was now, for the new Centennial
edition, which had just appeared, his own sole publisher.[561] If any
of his English friends desired to help him, they could best do so by
the purchase of the book. He wrote with affectionate gratitude, and
quiet dignity. He was poor, but he was not in want.
There came, through Mr. Rossetti, an immediate, generous and most
cordial response, and in the list of English and Irish subscribers
appear many illustrious names. The invalid revived; "both the
cash and the emotional cheer," he wrote at a later time, "were
deep medicine".[562] He could now afford to overlook the bitter
and contemptuous attacks which were being made upon him by an old
acquaintance in the editorials of the _New York Tribune_.[563] And,
which was at least equally important, he could contrive to take a
country holiday.
[Illustration: TIMBER CREEK: THE POOL, 1904]
* * * * *
About the end of April, or early in May, he drove out through the
gently undulating dairy lands and the fields of young corn to the New
Jersey hamlet of Whitehorse, some ten miles down the turnpike which
leads to Atlantic City and Cape May.[564] A little beyond the village,
and close to the Reading Railroad, there still stands an old farmhouse,
then tenanted by Mr. George Stafford, and to-day the centre of a group
of pleasant villas known as Laurel Springs.
It was here that Whitman lodged, establishing cordial relations with
the whole Stafford family, relations which added greatly to the
happiness of his remaining years. He became especially attached to Mrs.
Stafford, who intuitively read his moods,[565] and to her son Harry.
* * * * *
A short stroll down the green lane, which is now being rapidly
civilised out of that delightful category, brings one to a wide woody
hollow, where amid the trees a long creek or stream winds down to a
large mill-pool with boats and lily leaves floating upon it. Save for
the boats and the people from the villas, the place has been but little
changed by the quarter of a century which has elapsed since Whitman
first visited it.[566] The walnut and the oak under which he used to
sit among the meadow-grass are older trees, of course, and the former
is now circled with a wooden seat; but the kecks and crickets, the
shady nooks by the pool, the jewel-weed and the great-winged tawny
butterflies are there as of old. And with them much of the old, sweet,
communicative quiet.
At the creek-head, among the willows, is a swampy tangle of mint
and calamus, reeds and cresses, white boneset and orange fragile
jewel-weed, and above, from its mouth in the steep bank, gushes the
"crystal spring" whose soft, clinking murmur soothed the old man many a
summer's day.
Here, early and late, he would sit or saunter through the glinting
glimmering lights, and here Mother-Nature took him, an orphan, to her
breast. The baby and boyhood days in the lanes and fields at West
Hills, and among the woods and orchards came back to him and blessed
him with significant memories. To outward seeming an old man, and
near sixty as years go, in heart he was still and always a child. And
for the last three years a broken-hearted, motherless child. He had
been starving to death for lack of the daily ministry of Love.
[Illustration: TIMBER CREEK: "CRYSTAL SPRING" AND THE OLD MARL-PIT,
1904]
At Timber Creek, by the pool and in the lanes, the touch of that
all-embracing Love which pervades the universe was upon him. Without
any effort on his part the caressing air and sunshine re-established
the ancient relationship of love, in which of old he had been united
to Nature. He would sit silent for hours, wrapt in a sort of trance,
realising the mystery of the Whole, through which, as through a body,
the currents of life flow and pulse. Woe to any one, however dear, who
broke suddenly in upon his solitude![567]
His heart went out to the tall poplars and the upright cedars with
their tasselled fruit, and he felt virtue flow from them to him in
return. He believed the old dryad stories, and became himself truly
nympholeptic, and aware of presences in the woods. In August, 1877,
he writes: "I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs
and medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a
particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally
a large dug-out marl-pit, now abandoned, filled with bushes, trees,
grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank and a spring of delicious
water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little
cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer.
Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom
less alone than when alone. Never before did I come so close to Nature,
never before did she come so close to me. By old habit I pencilled down
from time to time almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and
outlines on the spot."[568]
Unlike the ordinary naturalist he regarded the birds and trees, the
dragon-flies and grey squirrels, the oak-trees and the breeze that sang
among their leaves, as spirits; strange, but kindred with his own,
members together with his of a transcendental life; and he communed
with them. Something, he felt sure, they interchanged; something passed
between them.
Their mystical fellowship had its ritual, as have all religions. The
place was sacred, and he did off, not only his shoes, but all his
raiment, giving back himself to naked Mother-Nature, naked as he was
born of her. In the solitude, among the bare-limbed gracious trees
and the clear-flowing water, he enjoyed many a sun-bath, and on hot
summer days, in his bird-haunted nook, many a bathing in the spring;
many a wrestle, too, with strong young hickory sapling or beech bough,
conscious, as they wrestled together, of new life flowing into his
veins.[569]
Whatever ignorance of names his Washington acquaintance may have
discovered,[570] his diary at this time is full of nature-lore. It
enumerates some forty kinds of birds, and he was evidently familiar
with nearly as many sorts of trees and shrubs; while differentiating
accurately enough between the sundry trilling insects, locusts,
grasshoppers, crickets and katydids which populate the district,
vibrant by day and night. Doubtless he had learnt much from the
companionship of John Burroughs, but he was himself an accurate
observer.
The story of his visits to Timber Creek and its vicinity from 1876
to 1882 is told in _Specimen Days_, with much else beside--a book to
carry with one on any holiday, or to make a holiday in the midst of
city work. It is, for the rest, an admirable illustration of the saying
of the philosopher-emperor, that virtue is a living and enthusiastic
sympathy with Nature.[571]
* * * * *
Three years of gradual convalescence were divided not only between the
Stafford's farm and the house on Stevens Street, but also with the
homes of other friends whose love now began to enrich his life.[572]
Of three of the most notable among his new comrades we must speak
in passing. In the autumn of 1876 Anne Gilchrist took a house in
Philadelphia, while in the following summer Dr. Bucke and Mr. Edward
Carpenter came to Camden on pilgrimage.
Whitman often said in his later years that his best friends had
been women, and that of his women friends Mrs. Gilchrist was the
nearest. She was an Essex girl of good family, nine years younger than
Whitman.[573] At school she had loved Emerson, Rousseau, Comte and
Ruskin, and a little later she added to them the writings of Carlyle,
Guyot and Herbert Spencer. Music and science, with the philosophical
suggestions which spring from the discoveries of science, were her
chief interests.
At twenty-three she married Alexander Gilchrist, an art-critic and
interpreter. It was a wholly happy marriage; Anne became the mother of
four children, and, beside being deeply interested in her husband's
work, contrived to contribute scientific articles to the magazines.
While compiling his well-known _Life of Blake_, Mr. Gilchrist fell a
victim to scarlet fever. His widow, with her four young children and
the uncompleted book, removed to a cottage in the country, and there,
with the encouragement and help of the Rossetti brothers, she finished
her husband's task. Her life was now, as she said, "up hill all the
way," but the book helped her. And her close study of Blake, added
to her scientific interests and her love of music, formed the finest
possible introduction to her subsequent reading of Whitman.
Her task was concluded in 1863; it had tided her over the first
two years of her bereavement; but her letters of sympathy to Dante
Rossetti, heart-broken at the loss of his young wife, discover her
gnawing sorrow yet undulled by time. Like Whitman, she had the capacity
for great suffering. And like Whitman, too, she was helped in her
sorrow by the companionship of Nature. And, again, she was a good
comrade.
Unlike her grandmother, who was one of Romney's beauties, Anne
Gilchrist was not a handsome woman; but her personality was both vivid
and profound, and increasingly attractive as the years passed. She was
so serious and eager in temperament that, even in London, she lived in
comparative retirement.
The letters which she exchanged with the Rossettis during a long period
are evidence both of her common-sense and her capacity for passionate
sympathy. They are often as frank as they are noble; revealing a nature
too profound to be continually considerate of criticism. This gives to
some of her utterances a half naïve and wholly charming quality, which
cannot have been absent from her personality, and must have endeared
her to the comrades whom she honoured with her confidence.
This high seriousness of hers made her the readier to appreciate a poet
who, almost alone among Americans, has bared his man's heart to his
readers, careless of the cheap ridicule of those smart-witted cynics
whom modern education and modern morality have multiplied till they are
almost as numerous as the sands of the sea. She was a little more than
forty when she first read _Leaves of Grass_ and wrote those letters to
W. M. Rossetti in which she attested her appreciation of their purpose
and power.[574]
It was no light thing for a woman to publish such a declaration of
faith; and in her own phrase,[575] she felt herself a second Lady
Godiva, going in the daylight down the public way, naked, not in body
but in soul, for the good cause. She was convinced that her ride was
necessary; for men would remain blind to the glory of Whitman's message
until a woman dared the shame and held its glory up to them. And what
she did, she did less for men than for their wives and mothers, upon
whom the shadow of their shame-in-themselves had fallen.
Mr. Rossetti has described[576] her as a woman of good port, in fullest
possession of herself, never fidgetty, and never taken unawares;
warm-hearted and courageous, with full, dark, liquid eyes, which were
at the same time alive with humour and vivacity, quick to detect every
kind of humbug, but wholly free from cynicism. Her face was not only
expressive of her character, but "full charged with some message" which
her lips seemed ever about to utter. Her considerable intellectual
force was in happy harmony with her domestic qualities, and filled her
home-life with interest.
Such was the woman who, in November, 1876, at the age of forty-eight,
brought her family to Philadelphia, in order that one of the daughters
might study medicine at Girard College; and in whose home, near the
college grounds, Whitman henceforward, for two or three years,[577]
spent a considerable part of his time. The relationship of these two
noble souls seems to have been comparable with that which united
Michael Angelo and Vittoria Colonna, and they were at a similar time of
life.
* * * * *
This, the Centennial year, was filled with thoughts and celebrations
of American independence; among which we may recall the Exposition
in Philadelphia--where throughout the summer, Whitman had been a
frequent visitor--and the Centennial edition of his works. He had also
celebrated the occasion by sitting for his bust to a young sculptor, in
an improvised studio on Chestnut Street. The weather was too hot for a
coat; and in his white shirt sleeves he would, at the artist's request,
read his poems aloud with naïve delight, which rose to a climax when
the sound of applause from a group of young fellows on the stairs
without, crowned his efforts. "So you like it, do you?" he cried to
them; "well, I rather enjoyed that myself."[578]
The old sad and solitary inertia was broken. Ill though he often was,
the lonely little upper room held him no longer; nor was he any more
shut up within the sense of bereavement. Jeff had come over from St.
Louis, and his two daughters spent the autumn with their aunt and
uncles in Stevens Street. All through the winter Walt was moving back
and forward between George's house, the Staffords farm, and Mrs.
Gilchrist's. He was cheerfully busy with the orders for his pair of
handsome books, which were selling briskly at a guinea a volume.
_Leaves of Grass_ had been reprinted from the plates of the fifth
edition. Its companion, _Two Rivulets_, was a "mélange" compounded of
additional poems, including "Passage to India," and the prose writings
of which we have already spoken, printed at various times during the
last five years. "Specimen Days" was not among them, and did not appear
till 1882. The title _Two Rivulets_ suggests the double thread of
its theme, the destiny of the nation and of the individual, American
politics and that mystery of immortal life which we call death. They
were not far asunder in Whitman's thought.[579]
At the end of February, Mr. Burroughs met Walt at Mrs. Gilchrist's,
and thence they set out together for New York. Here, Whitman stayed
with his new and dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston;[580] and
presented himself in his own becoming garb at the grand full-dress
receptions which were held in his honour; the applause which greeted
him, and the atmosphere of real affection by which he was surrounded,
compensating him for the always distasteful attentions of a lionising
public, eager for any sensation.
He renewed also, and with perhaps more unmitigated satisfaction, his
acquaintance with the men on the East River ferries, and the Broadway
stages; and, finally, he ascended the Hudson to stay awhile with John
Burroughs. This pleasant holiday jaunt was not without its tragic
element; his friend, Mrs. Johnston, dying suddenly on his last evening
in New York.
* * * * *
It was in May that Mr. Edward Carpenter visited him in Camden. After a
brilliant Cambridge career, he was now a pioneer University Extension
lecturer in natural sciences. But besides, or rather beyond this, a
poet, in whom the sense of fellowship and unity was already becoming
dominant.
[Illustration: EDWARD CARPENTER AT FORTY-THREE]
In a note to his just-published preface, Whitman had spoken of the
"terrible, irrepressible yearning"[581] for sympathy which underlay his
work, and by which he claimed the personal affection of such readers
as he could truly call his own. This also was the aim which underlay
Mr. Carpenter's first book of verses, _Narcissus and Other Poems_,
published in 1873.[582]
Their author was already familiar with _Leaves of Grass_, which he had
first read at about the age of twenty-five, and which he had since
been absorbing, much as he absorbed the sonatas of Beethoven. They fed
within him the life of something which was still but dimly conscious;
something dumb, blind and irrational, but of titanic power to disturb
the even tenor of an academic life. One remarks that both Mrs.
Gilchrist and he shared to the full the modern feeling for science and
its philosophy, and for music.
When he visited Whitman, Edward Carpenter was thirty-three; it was
not till four years after this that he gave himself up to the writing
of his own "Leaves," coming into his spiritual kingdom a little later
in life than did Walt. In many respects his nature, and consequently
his work which is the outcome and true expression of his personality,
was in striking contrast with that of his great old friend. Lithe
and slender in figure, he was subtle also and fine in the whole
temper of his mind; sharing with Addington Symonds that tendency to
over-fineness, that touch of morbid subtilty which demands for its
balance a very sweet and strenuous soul, such indeed, as is revealed in
the pages of _Towards Democracy_.
He found Whitman's mind clear and unclouded after the suffering of the
last four years, his perception keen as ever.[583] Courteous, and
possessed of great personal charm, he was yet elemental and "Adamic"
in character. He impressed his visitor with a threefold personality:
first, the magnetic, effluent, radiant spirit of the man going out to
greet and embrace all; then, the spacious breadth of his soul, and the
remoteness of those further portions in which his consciousness seemed
often to be dwelling; and afterwards, the terrible majesty, as of
judgment unveiled in him, a Jove-like presence full of thunder.
This last element in his nature was naked, ominous, immovable as
a granite rock. When once you perceived it, there was, as Miss
Gilchrist has remarked,[584] no shelter from the terrible blaze of
his personality. But this rocky masculine Ego was wedded in him with
a gentle almost motherly affection, which found expression in certain
caressing tones of his widely modulated voice. While, to complete alike
the masculine and feminine, was the child--the attitude of reverent
wonder toward the world.
By turns then, a wistful child, a charming loving woman, an untamed
terrible truth-compelling man, Whitman seems to have both bewitched and
baffled his young English visitor.
Mr. Carpenter saw him at Stevens Street and Timber Creek, and again
under Mrs. Gilchrist's hospitable roof. They sat out together in the
pleasant Philadelphia fashion through the warm June evenings upon the
porch steps; and Walt would talk in his deliberate way of Japan and
China, or of the Eastern literatures. He liked to join hands while he
talked, communicating more, perhaps, of himself, and understanding
his companion better, by touch than by words. His mere presence was
sufficient to redeem the commonplace.
His visitor had also an opportunity of noting the efficiency of
Whitman's defences against the globe-trotting interview-hunting type of
American woman. His silence became aggressive, and her words rebounded
from it; he had disappeared into his rock-faced solitude where nothing
could reach him. And a very few moments of this treatment sufficed,
even for the brazen-armoured amazon.
* * * * *
During Mr. Carpenter's visit, Mrs. George Whitman, whom Dr. Bucke has
described as an attractive, sweet woman, was out of health, and her
brother-in-law made a daily excursion down town and across the ferry to
see her, and to transact his own affairs. In the heat of the following
July she first opened the door to Dr. Bucke.[585]
He, too, had long been a student of _Leaves of Grass_, a student at
first against his own judgment, and with little result beyond an
annoying bewilderment to his sense of fitness, and of exasperation
to his intelligence. But from the first, he felt a singular interior
compulsion to read the book, which he could not at all understand. Its
lack of all definite statement was the head and front of its offending
to a keen scientific mind. But now after many years, he had come to
recognise the extraordinary power of suggestion which was embodied in
every page.
Dr. R. Maurice Bucke's personality was strongly marked and striking; he
had as much determination as had Whitman himself, and his whole face is
full of resolute purpose.
Born in Norfolk, in 1837, but immediately transplanted to Canada, he
was thoroughly educated by his father, who was a man of considerable
scholarship and a minister in the Church of England.
In 1857, he crowned an adventurous youth passed in the mining regions
of the Western States, by a daring winter expedition over the Sierras,
in which he was so badly frozen that he afterwards lost both feet, but
his tall and vigorous figure showed hardly a trace of this misfortune.
Returning to Canada, he studied medicine; and eventually, in 1877,
became the head of a large insane asylum at London, Ontario. Here he
introduced several notable reforms in the treatment of the patients,
which were widely imitated throughout America.
He was a keen student of mental pathology, and for some time before
his death was reckoned among the leading alienists of the continent.
Certain interesting and suggestive studies of the relation which
appears to exist between the so-called sympathetic nervous system and
the moral and emotional nature, but especially his _magnum opus_,
_Cosmic Consciousness_, published the year before his death (1901),
reveal the direction of his dominant interest. From 1877, he was one
of Whitman's closest friends, and became subsequently his principal
biographer.[586]
In the printed recollections of his first interview with Whitman,[587]
Dr. Bucke recalls the exaltation of his mind produced by it; describing
it as a "sort of spiritual intoxication," which remained with him for
months, transfiguring his new friend into more than mortal stature. It
is another instance of the almost incredible power of the invalid's
personality.
[Illustration: RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE]
* * * * *
Whitman's own jottings and records of the period testify to his
increasing physical vigour. He goes, for instance, to the Walnut
Street Theatre, to a performance of Joaquin Miller's _The Danites_,
accompanied by his friend the author.[588] In the summer of 1878, and
in the succeeding year, he is again a guest both of John Burroughs
and of J. H. Johnston.[589] On the second occasion, he had delivered
his lecture on the "Death of Lincoln" in the Steck Hall, New York;
promising himself anew, that if health permitted, he would even now set
forth on the lecture tour which he had so long contemplated.[590] But
though, in the autumn, he made, with several friends, an extended tour
of some sixteen weeks beyond the Mississippi, he did not accomplish
this cherished scheme.
* * * * *
At night on the 10th of September, Whitman and his party left
Philadelphia, westward bound. Walt delighted in the magic speed and
comfort of the Pullman;[591] in which, lying awake among the sleepers,
he was whirled all through the first night up the broad pastoral
valley of the Susquehanna, curving with its thousand reedy aits about
thick-wooded steeps; and on, over ridge and ridge of the Alleghanies,
till morning found them at smoking Pittsburg.
Crossing the Ohio, almost at the point whence he had descended it
thirty years before on that fateful southern journey, the good engine,
the Baldwin, hurried them all that day through rich and populous Ohio
and Indiana. Whitman was not disinclined to acknowledge a personality
in the fierce and beautiful locomotive which he had already celebrated
in a poem full of fire and of the modern spirit.[592]
They were due next morning at St. Louis, but about nightfall their
headlong flight through the broad lands was arrested. The Baldwin ran
foul of some obstacle, and suffered serious damage and consequent
delay. Spending the third night in the city, they continued through a
beautiful autumn day, across the rolling prairies of Missouri, feasting
their eyes upon the wide farmlands full of the promise of bread for
millions of men.
Nor material bread only. There is something in the vast aerial spaces
of these prairie states, their great skies and lonely stretches, which
exalts and feeds the soul; something oceanic, Whitman thought, "and
beautiful as dreams".[593] Central in the continent, this country had
always seemed to him to correspond with certain central qualities in
his ideal America, and to supply the background for the two men whose
figures stood out supremely above the struggle for the union, Lincoln
and Grant--men of unplumbed and inarticulate depths of character, and
of native freedom of spirit and elemental originality of thought.
Whitman stayed for a while with friends upon the road, at Lawrence and
Topeka. Many of the boys he had tended in the wards were now hale men
out West, and they were always eager for sight of him; so that there
were few places in America where he would not have found a hearty
welcome.
He proceeded along the yellow Kansas River, through the Golden Belt,
and over the Colorado table-lands, bare and vast as some immense
Salisbury Plain, to Denver. In that young city he spent several days,
dreaming his great dreams of a Western town that should be full of
friends and strong for and against the whole world, breathing her fine
air, sparkling as champagne and clear as cold spring water; falling in
love with her people and her horses, and the little mountain streams
which ran along the channel ways of her broad streets.
Thence, he made short trips into the Rockies; where the railroad winds
among fantastic yellow buttes with steep sloping screes, and towering
battlements; and the trains swing eagerly round a thousand curves to
follow the bronze and amber path-finder, brawling in its sinuous ravine
between the pinnacled, red, cloud-topped crags which it has carved and
sundered.
Every break in the walls disclosed Olympian companies of august peaks
against the high blue. Gradually the way would climb to the summit,
its straightness widening, here and there, into sedgy mountain meadows
closed about by keen-cut granite heights, the perfect record of
laborious ages; and as the day advanced, the broad and restful light
broadened and grew more serene as it shone afar on chains of snowy
peaks.
Here in this tremendous mountain fellowship, with its shapes at once
fantastic and sublime, its solemn joy and wild imagination, its
infinite complex of form and colour suggesting vast emotions to the
soul, Walt breathed his proper air and recognised the landscape of his
deepest life. "I have found the law of my own poems," he kept saying
to himself with increasing conviction, hour after hour.[594] Like the
lonely mountain eagle which he watched wheeling leisurely among the
peaks, he was at home in this sternly beautiful, untamed, unmeasured
land.
Towards the end of September, he turned East again from the mining town
of Pueblo; leaving the Far West unseen[595]--Utah with its Canaanitish
glories of intense lake and naked, ruddy, wrinkled mountains; the great
grey desert of Nevada; and the forest-clad Sierras looking out across
their Californian garden towards the Pacific. Stopping here and there
with his former friends, he found his way to Jefferson Whitman's home
in St. Louis, and there remained over the year's end.
This cosmopolitan Western city,[596] planted in the centre of that
vast valley which the Mississippi drains and waters, and at the heart
of the American continent, was intensely interesting to Whitman. He
had an almost superstitious love for "the Father of Waters"; and many
a moonlit autumn night he haunted its banks, its wharves and bridges,
fascinated by the sound of the moving water as the river flowed through
the luminous silence under the eternal stars.
Physically, St. Louis did not suit him: he was ill there for weeks
together; but even so, he was happy in his own simple, human way.
He went twice a week to the kindergartens, and there, for an hour
together, he entertained the younger pupils with his funny children's
tales.[597] After the first moments of strangeness, and alarm at his
size and the whiteness of his hair, nearly all the children quickly
came to love old "Kris Kringle" or "Father Christmas" as they would
call him;[598] and for his part, he was as happy among little children
as a young mother.
Early in January, 1880, he returned home. All his delight in the West,
gathered on his first journey up the Mississippi thirty years before,
and since accumulating from many sources, notably from the young
Western soldiers he had nursed, had been confirmed by this visit.
In only one thing was he disappointed. The men had seemed, to his
searching gaze, fit sons of that new land of possibility; but in the
women he had failed to find the qualifications he was seeking.[599]
Physically and mentally, he saw them still in bondage to old-world
traditions; instead of originating nobler and more generous manners,
they were imitating the foolish gentility of the East. Whitman was very
exacting in his ideal of womanhood; and perhaps it was mainly upon the
ladies of the shops and streets that his strictures were passed; for
there are others in that Western world, who are not far from her whom
he has described in the "Song of the Broad-axe"--the best-beloved,
possessed of herself, who is strong in her beauty as are the laws of
nature.[600]
* * * * *
After six months at home among his books and his friends--to whom
at this time he added, at least by correspondence, Colonel Robert
Ingersoll, afterwards a member of the inner circle--Whitman set out
upon another journey, in length almost equal to that of the preceding
autumn. Early in June,[601] he crossed the bridge over Niagara on his
way to London, Ontario; and now at his second sight, the significance
of that majestic scene, which thirty years before he would seem to have
missed, was discovered to him.
Staying with Dr. Bucke, he made frequent visits to the great asylum,
with its thousand patients, under the wise doctor's care. Walt's own
family life, with the tragedy of his youngest brother's incapacity,
had made the melancholy brotherhood of those whom he has beautifully
described as the "sacred idiots"[602] especially interesting to him.
He attended the religious services held in the asylum; joining with
those wrecked minds in a common worship, and seeing the storms of their
lives strangely quieted, as though a Divine love, brooding over all,
had hushed them.[603] With many of the patients he became personally
acquainted, and years afterwards recalled them by name, inquiring
affectionately after their welfare.
Whitman was in better health than usual, and in excellent spirits. He
loved the doctor, was happy and at home in his household, and on the
best of terms with its younger members. Among the latter, his presence
never checked the natural flow of high spirits, as does the presence of
most grown-up persons: he was always one of themselves.
This, indeed, was a characteristic of Whitman in whatever company he
was found, from a kindergarten to a company of "publicans and sinners".
The spirit of comradeship identified him with the others, and he was
so profoundly himself that such identification took nothing away from
his own identity. Among the young people of Dr. Bucke's household his
fun and humour had free and natural expression; as when, for example,
one moonlit evening, he undertook the burial of an empty wine-bottle,
addressing a magniloquent oration over its last resting-place to the
goddess Semele.
He loved to linger at the table, telling stories after tea; and to
recite or read aloud, when the family sat together in the dusk on the
verandah; and sometimes, too, he would take his turn in singing some
well-known song. For reading aloud, he would often choose some poem of
Tennyson's--"Ulysses" seems to have been his favourite.
At this time also, in a secluded nook in the grounds, he read leisurely
over to himself, with the satisfaction which Tennyson's work nearly
always gave him, the newly published _De Profundis_.[604] His diary
of these pleasant, refreshing weeks contains many notes of the
thick-starred heavens and the merry birds, and the multitudinous
swallows, which would recall to his well-stored mind the story of
Athene and Ulysses' return.[605]
* * * * *
His vital force seemed to be almost unimpaired. The noble calm of his
presence, indeed, made him appear even older than he was; his fine
hair was snowy white, and the high-domed crown which rose through it
and grew higher and nobler with every year, gave him all claims to
reverence.[606]
But, though at first sight he seemed to be nearer eighty than sixty
years old, and though he was lame from paralysis, a second glance
showed him erect and without a line of care or of senility upon his
face. His complexion was rosy as a winter pippin, and his cheeks were
full and smooth, for his heart was always young.
His host wished to show him Canada; in which country he was the
more deeply interested through his settled conviction that it would
presently become a part of the United States. The St. Lawrence and the
Lakes, he always said, cannot remain a frontier-line; they are and
should be recognised as a magnificent inland water-way, comparable with
the Mississippi.
Towards the end of July[607] he set out upon this great road with his
friend. Taking boat at Toronto, they descended by easy stages, stopping
a night or two at Kingston, Montreal and Quebec, Whitman thoroughly
enjoying all the new scenes and making friends everywhere on the
way. He sat on the fore-deck in the August sunshine, wrapped in his
grey overcoat, wondering at the grim pagan wildness of the lower St.
Lawrence, nightly watching the Northern Lights, and appearing on deck
before sunrise.
[Illustration: WHITMAN AT SIXTY-ONE, JULY, 1880]
As they turned up the deep dark Saguenay and reached the mountain
pillars of Eternity and Trinity, the mystery of northern river and
height, with all they hold of stillness and of storm, communed
with him. He saw infinite power wedded with an ageless peace; and
all, however awful in its sublimity, yet far from inhospitable
to an heroic race of men; nay, by its very awfulness, inviting and
proclaiming the men who shall dare to dwell therein.
With the people of Canada, as a whole, he was well pleased. He liked
their benevolent care for the weak and infirm in body and mind; and
thought them in every respect worthy of the destiny which he believed
that he foresaw--the destiny of citizenship in the Republic.
FOOTNOTES:
[557] _Comp. Prose_, 150.
[558] The incidents may not all belong to this visit.
[559] Bucke, 213.
[560] _W. W. Autobiographia_, 205 n.
[561] _Comp. Prose_, 311, 312; Donaldson, 29-31.
[562] _Comp. Prose_, 519.
[563] Bucke, 215, 216, etc.
[564] _Cf._ _Comp. Prose_, 75.
[565] MSS. Wallace.
[566] _Comp. Prose_, 75.
[567] MSS. Wallace.
[568] _Comp. Prose_, 96-98.
[569] _Comp. Prose_, 91, 92, 98.
[570] _Ib._, 84, 94, 116; _cf. supra_, 230.
[571] _Ib._, 193.
[572] MSS. Diary; Calamus, 170.
[573] _Anne Gilchrist_, by H. H. G.
[574] See _supra_, 225-7.
[575] Gilchrist, 190.
[576] _Ib._, Preface.
[577] MSS. Diary.
[578] _In re_, 370.
[579] _Comp. Prose_, 270.
[580] Bucke, 216, 217.
[581] _Comp. Prose_, 277 n.
[582] Tom Swan's _Edward Carpenter_, 1902, and article by E. C. in
_Labour Prophet_, May, 1894.
[583] Carpenter (_a_).
[584] G. Gilchrist, _op. cit._; _cf._ Carpenter (_b_).
[585] Calamus, 10 n.
[586] MS. of Dr. E. P. Bucke, and _W. W.'s Diary in Canada_, v.
[587] Bucke, 50; _Whit. Fellowship, Memories of W. W._, by R. M. B.
[588] MSS. Diary.
[589] _Comp. Prose_, 106, 122.
[590] _Ib._, 506.
[591] _Comp. Prose_, 132, 149.
[592] _L. of G._, 358.
[593] _Comp. Prose_, 134.
[594] _Comp. Prose_, 136.
[595] _Ib._, 140.
[596] Calamus, 170-72.
[597] Bucke, 63.
[598] MSS. Berenson (_a_).
[599] _Comp. Prose_, 146.
[600] _L. of G._, 157.
[601] _Comp. Prose_, 153-58, and _Whit. Fellowship Memo. of W. W._
(Bucke); Bucke, 48.
[602] _L. of G._, 325.
[603] _Comp. Prose_, 154.
[604] _Diary in Canada_, 10, 11.
[605] _Comp. Prose_, 132.
[606] Bucke, 49.
[607] _Diary in Canada_, 41.