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even give it away,-for complimentary copies, we are told, were in many instances returned, often accompanied by insulting letters. The book was considered meaningless, badly written, filthy, atheistical and utterly reprehensible. The second edition contained a number of new poems and met with a worse reception even than the first. Fowler and Wells undertook its publication, but the clamor was so loud that they almost at once threw up their contract, and the issue was continued by the author. However, there was little or no sale, and for a time "Leaves of Grass" seemed to be dead.

Whitman, however, was not, it seems, the least discouraged. He probably foresaw the reception the book must meet. He went on his way as joyous and sympathetic as ever. Indeed the poems written during the next few years were, if possible, more exultant and optimistic than those of the two first editions. Then, in 1860, Thayer and Eldridge of Boston published the third edition, which had as its frontispiece portrait number three, which is a steel engraving from an oil painting made by Charles Hine, an artist friend of the poet's. With the publication of this third edition began such mod

erate measure of success as "Leaves of Grass" has so far seen. The book began to sell. There was a lull in the storm of refusal which greeted the earlier editions. It seemed as if the "Leaves" were about to strike root and flourish. Then came the war. The book business was ruined, Thayer and Eldridge failed, and "Leaves of Grass" was once more out of print.

Portrait number four presents to us the poet as he was shortly after the issue of the third edition of his poems. Number three may have been taken a year or two before it was used in 1860. I have the authority of Whitman himself for the date of number four; it was probably taken at the end of 1860, number three having been painted, say, in 1857 or 1858. Number five was taken in 1861, in the early months of the war, that war which was to affect the poet so vitally; and (by what I suppose is an odd coincidence) his attitude and aspect in this photograph are as if the shadow of the national catastrophe, which was

NUMBER 8.

to crush him as well as so many thousand others, was already falling upon him and darkening his life. The same may be said of number six as of number five. Taken in the second year of the war, it shows or seems to show the poet suffering acutely (as he undoubtedly did suffer) under the calamity that had fallen upon his country. large part of "Drum-Taps" must have been written this year, since he left the manuscript in New York, when he went to the front, in December, 1862.

A

From that date until the end of the war, and even for some time after the war had ended, he devoted himself day and night, body and soul, to the

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neat, orderly, rectangular, strange towns, whose every citizen lay drained with sickness or wrung with pain. There, in those long wards, in rows of cots on either side, were stretched in all attitudes and aspects of mutilation, of pale repose, of contorted guish, of death, the martyrs of the war; and among them, with a soul that tenderly remembered the little chilAGE 49, 1868. dren in many a dwelling mournful of those fathers, the worn and anxious wives haggard with thinking of those husbands, the girls weeping their spirits from their eyes for those lovers, the mothers who, from afar, yearned to the bedsides of those sons, walked Walt Whitman, in the spirit. of Christ, soothing, healing, consoling, restoring, night and day, for years, never failing, never tiring, constant, vigilant, faithful. At the red aceldama of Fredericksburg, he is in a hospital on the banks of the Rappahannock; he soothes, he comforts, he consoles, he assists to lift the wounded into the ambulances; he

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NUMBER 9. AGE 51, 1870.

helps to place the worst cases on the stretchers; his kiss is warm upon the pallid lips of some who are mere children, his tears drop upon the faces of the dying. He writes letters to fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, sweethearts. Some of the soldiers are poor penmen; some cannot get paper; some fear to write lest they should worry the folks at home. He writes for them all; he uses that genius that shall endure to the latest generation to say the felicitous, the consoling, the cheering, the kindest, the best word."

This is how he was employed for a couple of years before, and two or three years after, number seven was taken. He was now forty-five years old and in the full maturity of his splendid bodily and mental powers.

In 1868, when number eight was taken, the poet was employed as a clerk in the attorney-general's office in Washington. He had been previously for a short time in the Department of the Interior, but had been dismissed by its chief (the Hon. James Harlan) for having written an "indecent" book-"Leaves of Grass," to wit. Since number seven was taken,

he has had much sickness from hospital malaria and over-emotional strain in his work among the sick. Number nine shows better than the preceding the failure of his vitality; but in numbers ten and eleven he seems, for the moment, to have rallied. During all this time he is still in Washington, in the attorney-general's office. Part of each month's salary he sends to his mother, who is now growing old. He lives economically, and most of what he has over he expends on the old soldiers who are still at the hospitals and to whom he still devotes a certain part of his time as well as means. Moreover, he is constantly adding to the "Leaves." Early in 1865 he prints "Drum-Taps." Then, upon Lincoln's assassination, in April, he withdrew the book from publication until he had prepared a sequel containing "President Lincoln's Burial Hymn" and other pieces. In 1867 he issued the fourth edition of the "Leaves," including "DrumTaps" and all poems down to date. The butterfly in picture eleven represents, of course, Psyche, his soul, his fixed contemplation of which accords

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with his declaration: "I need no assurances; I am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul."

of

On the morning of the twentyfourth of January, 1873, Walt Whitman awoke and found that his left side was paralyzed. This was the culmination of the sickness caused by the poisonous air and the more poisonous wounds and sores of the hospitals. From this time until the end he was an invalid. He left Washington and went to Camden, where then lived his mother with his brother George. He was getting a little better, when, on the twenty-third May of this year, his mother died. He had lost, in February, his favorite sister, Mattie, Jeff's wife. The grief of these two deaths, especially that of his mother, crushed him, and for a long time he lived on the very brink of the grave. He continued Camden, but spent part of each summer with some former friends in the country at a place called Timber

on at

NUMBER II.

Creek, where he lived much alone in the woods and where he used to take sun baths naked or almost so. He always thought that these sun baths. saved his life and brought back what little physical vigor he possessed after this period.

Portrait number twelve is from a crayon sketch made out in the woods at Timber Creek by his friend, the English artist, H. H. Gilchrist, about the year 1877,-which sketch hangs in my office facing me now. The study for number thirteen was made by the same artist about the same

date, not in the woods, but in Philadelphia. From the study a sepia etching was made for the present writer and hangs at present in his library. I am in the habit of calling it the "Buddha" likeness-just as I call number one the "Christ" likeness.

By 1879 Walt Whitman had improved much in health, though he still remained quite lame from his paralysis. It will be noticed how very much he has aged in the last eight years,that is, since number ten was taken. In 1879, however, he was well enough to take a long railroad jaunt with

some friends as

far west as Denver, an account of which journey will be found in his Complete Prose Works (Small, Maynard and Company,

1898. Pp. 132 et scq.).

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Fifteen and sixteen were taken in London, Ont., where the poet spent the summer of 1880 with the present writer. At that time he was sixty-one past; he was a large, exceedingly handsome man, with AGE 53, 1872. very white hair and more than the usual color in his face; in manner he was markedly quiet, unassuming and undemonstrative; he wore a white shirt with a large turn-down collar open at the throat, and a light gray tweed suit (the coat in the pictures is his overcoat, which was darker). His person and everything about him seemed constantly breathing an air of purity. Every decent individual is clean in person and clothing; but in him there was something beyond that, which though vividly present to my mind this moment, I find it difficult to put in words.

NUMBER 12. AGE 58, 1877.

His presence produced much the effect of a bright, breezy spring morning. As you associated more and more with him you perceived that the quality in question was not merely physical, not belonging solely or mostly to his person and raiment, but that it inhered, to at least an equal degree, in his mind, that in fact it belonged there, and that the external phenomenon was but the radiation of an inner spiritual quality. You found that his speech and thought were if possible cleaner, purer, freer from taint or stain, than were even his body or his linen. Further you noticed that, over and above, the man was singularly free from faults and blemishes that are almost if not quite universal. For instance, I never knew Whitman (in 1880 or any other time) to speak a word in depreciation of any person, except (and even this rarely) himself. I never knew him to find fault with the weather, with any of his surroundings, or with anything that might happen, such as "bad luck," sickness, or ill treatment by others. I never knew him to utter a harsh word of or to any one. The

fact is, Whitman lived in an upper spiritual stratum above all mean thoughts, sordid feelings, earthly harassments. He resembled hardly at all ordinary men, but lived in a different world and was governed by entirely different thoughts and feelings and considerations. What these were I could not state fully, however much I might endeavor to do so.

The charm of Whitman's presence cannot be conceived by those who have had no experience of it. This charm resided partly in such elements as those mentioned above, but perhaps still more in his manner, which was courteous, sympathetic and attractive in a very high degree. I have met many men in several countries, men of deservedly world-wide reputation, such as Tennyson, men of great spiritual force, such as Browning, men of the tenderest heart and most loving personality, such as Edward Carpenter, magnificent and magnetic orators, such as Henry Ward Beecher; but I have never met another such man as Whitman, and I do

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