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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."

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 of 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 on at Camden, but spent part of each summer with some former friends in the country at a place called Timber

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

AGE 53, 1872.

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 seq.).

Fifteen and sixteen were taken

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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 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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not believe that there has walked the grassy floor of the earth in my day another man so godlike and at the same time so human as the author of "Leaves of Grass."

In 1881 Osgood and Company wrote Whitman, offering to publish the "Leaves." Terms were agreed upon, and they got out the book, Whitman spending part of that summer in Boston, overseeing the printing and reading proof. I will not recite as I might (for I have all the letters and other documents) the shameful history of the col

lapse of this edi

But Whitman's faith in himself and his work carried him unscathed through this, as through all other rebuffs. He kept quietly on his way, cheery and confident, and I fancy that few well-off, young and healthy persons enjoy life as did this muchmaligned, poor, half-paralyzed, semiinvalided old man.

Here is a picture of him at this time: The scene, a dining room in a large, well-appointed Germantown house in Philadelphia. Present, the host and hostess, several grown-up

tion. The book Wall Whiteman
was complained
of as being ob-
scene, and the
publishers noti-
fied the author
that they would
not continue to
bring it out; he
of course acqui-
esced, and the
plates were
handed to him as
the royalty so far
earned. I have
never been able
to understand
how men who
had solicited

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the

young people, a friend or two, besides the poet and the present writer. After dessert the host produces current number, that day published, of one of the most influential magazines of the time, announces that it contains an article on Walt Whitman, and proceeds to read the same for the benefit of the company. The poet, sitting with the rest of us, heard himself in good set phrases AGE 60, 1879. charged with "immodesty," "ignorance," "stupidity," "vulgarity," "materialism," "insanity," "the delirium of self-conceit," "bad grammar," "misuse of words," "incoherence of ideas," "inconsecutiveness," "egotism," with being a "vain, disagreeable fellow," with writing lines "too vile for quotation.' As Whitman listened to these and many more such expressions, recited with much gravity, as if the reader agreed with the writer, he first held up his hands and assumed an expression of overwhelming humiliation and

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self-abasement; he then bent down his head as if quite overcome; then as denunciation after denunciation was poured forth, from time to time he would look up, and his face would be seen glowing with the keenest enjoyment, while his whole frame would be shaken with half-suppressed merriment. When the reading was over, for a time no one spoke; we waited to hear what the poet would say. He made no direct allusion to the

NUMBER 15.

piece read or the writer of it, but after a few quiet moments said, in his inimitably soft, musical voice, and with the drollest imaginable expression: "A robber once met a Quaker in a wood, knocked him down and beat him, took from him his purse and watch, then pulling out a long knife proceeded to cut his throat. The knife was dull, the patience of the poor Quaker almost exhausted. 'Friend,' said he to the robber, 'I do not object to thee cutting my throat, but thee haggles.'" Numbers seventeen, eighteen (frontispiece) and nineteen show Whitman at sixty-eight. In the last seven years he has aged markedly, but is as bright and cheery as ever. One of these portraits is from a photograph of Morse's bust, one of the best likenesses ever made of the poet. Morse's story of his summer with Whitman while he was working on it, told in "In re Walt Whitman," is almost as good as the bust itself, and I should

like well to quote from it, had I space.

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Number twenty shows a still further lowering of vitality in the old poet; it makes him look much more worn than was his usual aspect, but is nevertheless an admirable likeness. Number twenty-one, of the same date, is from the oil painting made by Eakins that year. This painting, which is perhaps the best that has been done of Whitman, is one of the writer's most treasured possessions. In June of this year the poet had a serious illness, accompanied by marked increase of his paralysis. The attack passed over,

AGE 61, 1880.

but left him older, feebler and more helpless than ever. He rallied somewhat; and number twentytwo shows him as he was about the beginning of the last year of his life.

Number twenty-three, taken September 7, 1891, shows us the poet as he was immediately before the onset of the attack of pneumonia, which terminated his earthly life. Then followed the long, slow suffering of his last sickness, when he lay in that upper room of the old house in Camden, waiting with almost superhuman patience for the end. On one of these early days of 1892, when he was able to bear to be propped up for a brief while, Eakins, the painter, took the last of the many photographs of him, reproduced here as number twentyfour. After that came the remaining

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