days of weary, lingering, gradual dying, watched by friends, perhaps the closest and warmest that ever collected about a death-bed. On the twenty-sixth of March, 1892, he passed peacefully away, welcoming death as he had welcomed life.

a

On the day set for his burial, I think nearly all Camden and much of Philadelphia must have filed through the large room in which, in its coffin, his dead body was laid, an endless procession of young and old men, of women and little children, anxious to look once more on that noble face before it should be covered forever. The sidewalks and street in front of the house in which he lay were packed with solid crowd. It was a beautiful early spring day, the air was clear and fresh, the sun shone brightly. There were swarms of people everywhere, on the streets, on the roads, in the cemetery. Then came the voices of the speakers bidding farewell to the man they loved. From the reader came the words: "I am the resurrection and the life." And Ingersoll, as the tears ran down his face, closed his touching oration: "To-day I thank him for all the brave words he has uttered, for all the great and splendid words he has said in favor of liberty, in favor of man and woman, in favor of motherhood, in favor of fathers, in favor of children, and I thank him for the brave words he has said of death. He has lived, he has died; and death

NUMBER 16.

is less terrible than it was before. Thousands and millions will walk into the dark valley of the shadow, holding Walt Whitman by the hand. Long after we are dead, the brave words he has spoken will sound like trumpets to the dying."

So we left the worn-out and disused body of our friend in its tomb in Harleigh Cemetery. His real self, the Walt Whitman whom we know and love, freed from that prison which so long confined and hemmed him in, as real as in the old time and more alive

than then, its foundation laid, labors now to rear that edifice in the spirit of man, which he planned in his splendid youth.

To what I have written of the portraits of Whitman I proceed to add a few words upon his character and genius; for to me it is impossible to think of the face of the man apart from his spirit. When I came, in the late seventies, to AGE 61, 1880. know Walt Whitman personally, after having studied him in his own writings and in those of others about him for ten years, it gradually dawned upon me that he possessed qualities intellectual, moral or spiritual, or all three, which are not present in the make-up of ordinary men. At the risk of being misunderstood, I will be quite frank and will try and tell how this matter then appeared to me. Let me say that I was then a man over forty years of age, holding a responsible position which I filled then and since to the satis

NUMBER 17.

AGE 68, 1887.

faction of the government and which I still hold. It seemed to me, then, at that time, that Walt Whitman was surrounded, as it were, with a halo, that there was something sacred and superhuman about him. There was a period of months during which I could not believe that he was merely a man; there were times when I was almost persuaded that he was a god, -though what those words used in such connection should mean, I could not make at all clear to myself. This phase of thought passed away, and it became clear to me that Whitman was undoubtedly a man, neither more nor less; but in order to reach this conclusion I was forced to enlarge the content of the concept man in order to make it embrace this new specimen. I was forced to the conclusion that a man may be nobler, or that man as a race is nobler than I had hitherto supposed. I then asked. myself the question: In what does this man differ from what we see in others? and for years this was to me the question of questions. More than ever I studied the man in his works, in his life, in his conversation, by talk

one I could meet who had come into personal contact with him. As the Abbé Faria, in Dumas's great romance, wrote a history of the Borgia family in order to find out, if possible, what had become of the enormous wealth of the Spadas, so did I, not in a romance but in reality, write a book on Walt Whitman in order thereby, if that might be, to obtain an answer to the question with which I was perplexed. In my book I described the man and analyzed his mental qualities. I showed that he was different from ordinary folk, and pointed out in what manner he differed; but I failed to discover and therefore to set forth wherein precisely this difference consisted, or whence it sprang A rather striking mental experience of my own, followed after nineteen years by an interview with an absolute stranger, opened the door at last to the only answer I am likely to receive in this life to the problem in question.

NUMBER 20. AGE 69, 1888.

I had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We had occupied ourselves with Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning and especially Whitman. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging. My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images and emotions flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterwards there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but

I saw, that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds, and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision. showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost. Later I wrote a book to show that nothing else but that could be true, that no

other point of view would explain what we know of the universe and of man. All the same, I had no idea what had happened to me. I did not for a long time connect my experience in thought either with what I knew of psychology or with what I knew of history.

The experience which I have detailed threw a flood of light upon the teachings of "Leaves of Grass"; but strange to say (so it seems to me now) I saw no connection between it and the genesis of that book. My experience seemed to me a casual and isolated incident, having a deep individual but no special racial significance. Eighteen years passed away, occupied in continuous search for the secret. At last light da w ned. Strangely enough, I back in the same great city in which for the first and last time I had seen unveiled for a few seconds the truth. A man

was

NUMBER 22.

whom I had never met, but of whom I had heard as being possessed of extraordinary spiritual insight, was in the same city. I had wanted to see him for a long time. We made an appointment, met, and had a talk of some hours' duration. I found that he had entered the higher life of which I had had a glimpse and had had a large experience of its phenomena. In brief, my conversation with him, lit up by my own comparatively trivial experience, showed me not only where I stood,

SO

but where humanity stood, in relation to this new world, as it may be called. Especially, knowing Whitman well as I did, it showed me his position, where he obtained his inspiration, and the proof that this is absolutely genuine. I saw clearly also that the phenomenon of illumination was not an erratic, casual occurrence, but that it was part of the great scheme upon which the universe and especially humanity was originally planned. I saw that it was merely a

step in the great march of evolution, that many men had already taken this step, and that in due time it would be taken by the race at large; that among those who had taken the step was Whitman; and that the new faculties, mental and moral, the possession of which by him I had been unable to explain to myself, were simply attributes of this higher life belonging to AGE 71, 1890. the new humanity that was making its appearance. That Whitman actually manifested such higher faculties has been, and of course will be, disputed and denied; but I am here simply giving my own experiences and conclusions.

A single glance backward over Whitman's life and work, now that the clew was found, sufficed to show to a man like myself, who was thoroughly conversant with these, his possession of the new faculties, and when and how these came to him. It is known, for instance, that as a young man he

self to speak, to express itself. "Not words," he says, "not music or rhyme I want, not custom nor lecture, not even the best-only the lull I like, the hum of your valued voice." He was not as particular as his critics have been; all he asked was that the cosmic sense should speak and utter itself. He tells us that illumination came in June-the usual time of year; that after it came his life was absolutely controlled by it-it "held his feet." Then he tells of the peace, joy and knowledge (the moral exaltation and intellectual illumination which belong to the new birth), passing all the art and argument of the earth, that came to him. He saw the cosmic order-the "Brahmic Splendor". and that the basic facts of the universe and of the human soul are love and immortality.

NUMBER 23. AGE 72, 1892. was not markedly different from his contemporaries; that his writings at that time were not distinguished; but that at the age of thirty-six he had produced a volume which has been looked upon by many of the best minds of the present generation as almost unexampled in spiritual insight and power. Then he tells us of the sudden blaze of the subjective light, how

"As in a swoon, one instant,

Another sun, ineffable, full dazzles me, And all the orbs I knew, and brighter, unknown orbs;

One instant of the future land, Heaven's land."

On another page, addressing his new self, the cosmic sense, he tells in detail of his illumination. He says, in substance, to the new faculty: I believe in you. My other self (the self-conscious man) must not abase itself to you, and you must not be abased to it. Both these opposite errors have been fallen into by other men having cosmic consciousness; both the cosmic-conscious has tyrannized over the self-conscious man, and the self-conscious has obstructed the free life of the cosmic-conscious man. One notable case of the first error entailed on the Christian world untold misery. Whitman calls on the new

NUMBER 24. AGE 72, 1892.