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If I forget the tenor of our discourse I have not forgotten the immense impression made upon me by the man. As vain as a peacock, Walt looked like a Greek rhapsodist. Tall, imposing in bulk, his regular features, mild, light-blue or grey eyes, clear ruddy skin, plentiful white hair and beard, evoked an image of the magnificently fierce old men he chants in his book. But he wasn't fierce, his voice was a tenor of agreeable timbre, and he was gentle, even to womanliness. Indeed, he was like a receptive, lovable old woman, the kind he celebrates so often. He never smoked, his only drink was water. I doubt if he ever drank spirits. His old friends say "No," although he is a terrible rake in print. Without suggesting effeminacy, he gave me the impression of a feminine soul in a masculine envelope. When President Lincoln first saw him he said: "Well, he looks like a man!" Perhaps Lincoln knew, for his remark has other connotations than the speech of Napoleon when he met Goethe: "Voil
In Walt Whitman we in America have known an American author who was an American martyr in a more literal sense than any of the men named by the great German.
He answered, in effect, that he didn't make masterpieces. His poetry was diffused, like the grass blades that symbolized for him our democratic masses. Of course, the man in the street thinks that Walt Whitman's stuff is not poetry at all, but just bad prose. He acknowledges that there are splendid lines, phrases, and whole passages.
"Come, draw your chair a little closer," she said, and their elbows now touching, they sat on through the night. The next morning at dawn, as Em passed through Tant Sannie's bedroom, she found the Boer-woman pulling off her boots preparatory to climbing into bed. "Where is Piet Vander Walt?" "Just gone," said Tant Sannie; "and I am going to marry him this day four weeks.
"Better turn in and have a good sleep. And then to-morrow it's Ho! for Tom Tiddler's ground, a pickin' up gold and silver." "And maybe bullets," came from Walt. "Oh, my dear fellow, that's all in the life. Buenas noches!" And Bob Harding passed on, humming gayly to himself. The boys entered their tent and lit the lamp.
Thank the Almighty Lord, we've stuck to your gun through the thick an' the thin o't. Ef we hedn't we mout jest as well lie down agin' an' make a die at oncest." "Go which way you please, Walt; you know best. I am ready to follow you; and I think I shall be able." "Wal, at anyhow, we'd best be movin' off from hyar.
Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey pony near the Field Hospital." The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary faltered: "What what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's account when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is unfair.
Somehow, what I felt from his preaching well, everything got sort of mixed up with him, and he was was different. It was like the long dream of Walt and the baby, and he a part of it. I don't know what I felt, or what I might have felt for him. I'm a woman I can't understand. But I know what I feel now. I never want to see him again on earth or in heaven.
That's where the dog belongs, and that's where he'll be happiest." "The dog doesn't go," Walt announced in a determined voice. "So there is no need of further discussion." "What's that?" Skiff Miller demanded, his brows lowering and an obstinate flush of blood reddening his forehead. "I said the dog doesn't go, and that settles it. I don't believe he's your dog. You may have seen him sometime.
We think of Dante in harassed exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly professional stress, of Milton in exasperated exposure and material darkness; we think of Burns and Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and bareness and bleakness all this in reference to the voices that have most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing in how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but defeated a hand, the torch could still be carried.
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