bent be self-abasement; he then 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 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. 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, 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. AGE 61, 1880. 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 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. 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 a 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 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. bidding farewell to the man they Whitman personally, after having 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 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 ing to his friends and to any 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 daw ne d. Strangely enough, I was 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 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, NUMBER 22. 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 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. AGE 71, 1890. 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 |