After a winter in Camden, Philadelphia and the country, among friends old and new, Whitman paid his second visit to Boston. The house-tied stationary years of 1873 to 1876 had been succeeded by a period of considerable activity, both mental and physical.
On the 14th of April, he gave his lecture on the “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” at the Hawthorn Rooms.[608] It was the third year of its delivery; on the two previous occasions it had been read in New York and Philadelphia; and he purposed thus annually to commemorate an event which appeared to him as perhaps the most significant of his time, an event which the American people could ill afford to forget.
In Whitman’s view, as we have noted, the assassination of the great President had sealed the million deaths of the war, and cemented, as could nothing else, the union for whose sake they had been given. He believed that future ages would see in it the most dramatic moment of the victorious struggle of the nation against slavery. Rarely hereafter, in spite of increasing feebleness, did he miss the occasion as the season came round; though it was often with difficulty that even a small audience could be gathered for the anniversary.
Among the friends and notables whom he met in Boston was Longfellow, who had already called on him in Camden; and Whitman was warm in eulogies of the[Pg 279] old poet’s courteous manner and personality.[609] Something of the burden of his first prophetic message had lifted from Walt’s shoulders, and with it some of his wrath against the popular poets of America. He had consequently become better able to express his sense of the real value of work like theirs when its secondary place was recognised.
There were others in Boston whom he also now discovered for the first time; notably the women of middle and later life, among whom he rejoiced to find some of those large, vigorous personalities whose absence he had lamented in the West.
In earlier days he had been alienated by the academic and Puritan qualities which still gave its principal colour, especially when seen from New York, to intellectual Boston. But both Boston and Whitman had changed—alike with the war and with the advance of time; the provincialism of the former had given place to broader views, and the nobler identification of New England with the whole interests of the nation; while the latter was now able more generously to estimate even New England’s shortcomings, and to recognise among its people that ardour and yearning for the ideal which had always been theirs, but warmed now and humanised, as he thought, by a new joyousness and breadth of tolerance.[610] He felt a sunshine in the streets, which radiated from the men and women who traversed them. This effusive ardour of public spirit set him thinking of Athens in her golden days; and for the first time he, who had so much of the Greek in his nature, felt himself at home in Boston.
The visit was also memorable to him because it introduced him to the works of Millet, and, one may add, to the emotional significance of painting as an art.[611] As I have before noted, New York only became a centre of art collections in comparatively recent years; and it was probably not till Whitman had sat for two hours before some of the Breton artist’s finest studies in the[Pg 280] house of a Bostonian, that he recognised Painting as the true sister of music and of poetry.
It was fitting that this revelation should have come to the poet of Democracy from such canvasses as that of the first “Sower” and the “Watering the Cow”. Surcharged as they are with a primitive emotion new to modern art, the works of Millet reveal the inner nature of that great Republican peasant people whom Whitman always loved.
Much of the early summer, after his return, was spent at Glendale, whither the family from Whitehorse had now removed, Mr. Stafford having taken the store on the cross-roads, some three or four miles from his old home. Directly opposite to it there stands a Methodist chapel, and often on a Sunday morning the young people would laugh as they heard Walt, in the room above, angrily banging down his window sash at the first clanging of the bell. But behind the chapel is a dense wood, and here he spent many a long, happy day.
The heat of July was, as usual, very trying to him; and at the end of the month he accompanied Dr. Bucke on a visit to his old breezy haunts in Long Island. The farm at West Hills had passed out of the family; Iredwell Whitman, the last of Walt’s uncles to hold it, seems to have sold out about 1835. In the little burying ground there is a stone erected to his daughter Mahala, who died eight years later.[612]
While in Boston he seems to have received propositions from the firm of Osgood and Company for the publication of a definitive edition of the Leaves, and about the beginning of September, after completing his manuscript at the home of his friends, Mr. and (the second) Mrs. Johnston, at Mott Haven, New York,[613] he settled down in the New England capital to read proofs and to enjoy himself.
He stayed at the Bullfinch, close to Bowdoin Square, and frequented the water-side.[614] Often he would take[Pg 281] the cars which run through South Boston to City Point, whose pebbly, crescent beach is lapped forever by the Atlantic ripple. And to this place the lover of Whitman may well follow, for it holds memories of him.
On a summer’s evening, after dark, thousands of young Bostonians gather under the lamps, laughing and talking and listening to the band; but, beyond the zone of lights and mirth and music, one finds oneself at once in a mystical solitude. A long bridge or pier stretches out into the bay, terminating in Castle Island and grim Fort Independence; and wandering out along it, surrounded in every direction by distant lights, the illuminated dome of the State House rising afar in the west, and lights moving to and fro mysteriously upon the water, you feel the night wind blowing cool across the black gulf of sea as it carries to you distant sounds of merry-making. Very far away they seem, thus encircled in mysterious spaces which are peopled by sea voices and the stars. The light surf makes upon the shore its constant and delicious murmur—“death, death, death, death, death”[615]—and the lights and the noises of life, with all its passing show, are mysteriously related in that murmur to the sane, star-lighted silence of eternity.
Whitman walked daily on the Common, watching the friendly grey squirrels, and becoming acquainted with each one in turn of the American elms under which he sat.[616] Timber Creek had deepened his knowledge of the life of trees and little creatures since last he walked here with Emerson.
Emerson, too, he saw once again. Mr. Sanborn, the friend at whose trial he had been present on that former visit,[617] took him out through the suburbs and the wooded country to Concord. It was Indian-summer weather, and the meadows, that late Saturday afternoon, were busy and odorous with haymaking; all things spoke of peace. Emerson came over for the evening to Mr. Sanborn’s house, and the two old friends sat silent in the midst of the talk.
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Bronson Alcott, who had brought Thoreau to Brooklyn and had once compared Whitman with Plato,[618] was of the company of illustrious and charming neighbours. The others talked, but Emerson leaned back in his chair under the light, a good colour in his old face, and the familiar keenness; and near by sat Walt, satisfied to watch him without words.
On Sunday the Sanborns and he went over to dinner. His place was by Mrs. Emerson, who entertained him with talk of Thoreau, but though he listened with interest, most of his attention belonged to his beloved host. More than ever, if that were possible, did Whitman lovingly recognise the character of his friend. He had not always been just to Emerson,[619] nor had Emerson always maintained his first generosity;[620] each had said of the other words one cannot but regret, but deeper than such words of partial criticism was the comrade-love which united them.
In a letter, written immediately after this visit to his friend Alma Calder, who had recently become the second Mrs. J. H. Johnston, Whitman wrote: “I think Emerson more significant and glorified in his present condition than in any of his former days”.[621]
The whole family was present, and sitting quietly among them Whitman could understand the natural limitations which his household entailed upon the philosopher, and acknowledging these, felt the personal bond stronger than ever. The relation of the two men had been singular as well as noble, for it was the elder who had sought the younger out and affectionately acknowledged him, and through the years that followed the advances had been made by him.
Whitman’s attachment to Emerson had been one of love and reverence for his person, much more than of intellectual affinity. “I think,” he wrote a few years later to his Boston friend, Mr. W. S. Kennedy, “I think I know B. W. E[merson] better than anybody else knows[Pg 283] him—and love him in proportion.”[622] The evidence does not indicate a similar understanding on Emerson’s part, though the love between them was not unequal. To Emerson, as to Tennyson, Whitman remained “a great big something” of undetermined character.
Whitman met many friends, new and old, upon this visit, but of the old, Thoreau had long been dead; and the strong, homely sailor’s face of Father Taylor drew Boston no longer to the Seamen’s Bethel. Whitman himself attracted much attention as he ............