The presidential election of the autumn of 1884 brought the long Republican régime to an end. During the twenty-four years of its continuance the old party cries had become almost meaningless, and the parties themselves ineffective, while political life had grown increasingly corrupt from top to bottom.[676] The only practical demand of the hour was for a good government, and this required a change of party. Whitman, with a number of independent Republicans known as “Mugwumps,” supported the Democrat, Mr. Grover Cleveland. With his return to the White House the South may be said to have returned to the union, after a generation of bitter estrangement.

In the following summer Whitman had a slight sun-stroke, which rendered walking much more difficult.[677] For several months he was a good deal confined to his little house, but his friends promptly came to the rescue with a horse and light American waggon.[678]

He was overcome with gratitude for the gift—driving, as we have seen, was one of his delights—and he promptly began to make full use of his new toy. He soon disposed of the quiet steed, thoughtfully provided, and substituted one of quicker paces, which he drove furiously along the country roads at any pace up to eighteen miles an hour.[679] Rapid movement brought him exhilaration, and he displayed admirable nerve upon emergency.

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One page of a hand written letter from Whitman to Mr. R. Pearsall Smith, Mar. 4, 1884.

FAC-SIMILE OF PORTION OF LETTER FROM WHITMAN TO THE LATE MR. R. PEARSALL SMITH, MAR. 4, 1884

Though he was getting old, his capacity for enjoyment was as great as ever. He enjoyed everything, especially now that at sixty-five he was, for the first time in his life, a householder; he enjoyed his quarters, his friends, his food, and in a grim way his very suffering. “Astonishing what one can stand when put to one’s trumps,”[680] he wrote on a black day. While he could rattle along the roads in his waggon, he was naturally happy enough, and he encouraged all opportunities for pleasure. He enjoyed his food, and he now relaxed some of the stricter rules of temperance which hitherto he had followed.

During periods of his life, as a young man and through the years at Washington, he was practically a total abstainer, and till he was sixty he only drank an occasional toddy, punch, or glass of beer. After that he followed the doctor’s advice and his own taste, enjoying the native American wines, and at a later period, champagne.

Stories of heavy drinking were circulated by the gossips, and were tracked at last to the habits of a local artist, who imitated Whitman in his garb, and somewhat resembled him.[681] Walt’s head was remarkably steady, and it need hardly be said that he was always most jealous of anything which could dispute with him his self-control.

In 1885 and several subsequent years[682] a popular caterer on the river-side, a mile or two below Camden, opened the summer season, about the end of April, with a dinner to some of his patrons, and Whitman was one of those who did fullest justice to his planked shad and champagne. For the latter he would smilingly admit an “incidental weakness”.[683]

His temperance had given him a keen relish for fine flavours, and he enjoyed all the pleasures of the senses without disguise, and with a frank, childlike response to them. This responsiveness, more almost than any[Pg 316] other thing, kept his physical nature supple and young. His consciousness was never imprisoned in his brain, among stale memories and thoughts whose freshness had faded; it was still clean and sensitive to its surroundings, and found expression in the noticeably fresh, rich texture of his skin.

It was well that he should practise these simple pleasures, for apart from his own ailments, which increased with time, he was still troubled with financial difficulties. The purchase of the house had not been exactly prudent, as it added considerably to his expenses, and the success of the Philadelphia edition was not long continued. The royalty receipts soon dwindled to a very little stream, and his other earnings—though he was well paid for such contributions as the magazines accepted, and was retained on the regular staff of the New York Herald—were not large.[684]

Word went round among his friends, both in America and in England, that the old man was hard up again, and a second time there was a hearty response. A fund, promoted by the Pall Mall Gazette at the end of 1886, brought him a New Year’s present of ￡80,[685] and individual friends on both sides of the sea frequently sent thank-offerings to him.

Some Boston admirers attempted at this time to secure for him a Government pension of ￡60 a year,[686] in recognition of his hospital work. But Whitman disliked the plan, and though it was favourably reported upon by the Pensions Committee of the House of Representatives, he wrote gratefully but peremptorily refusing to become an applicant for such a reward, saying quite simply, “I do not deserve it”.[687] His services in the Attorney-General’s Department seem to have been adequately paid, and one is glad the matter was not pressed. The hospital ministry could not have been remunerated by an “invalid pension”; it was given as a free gift, and now it will always remain so.

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Picture of Mickle Street, Camden in 1890.

MICKLE STREET, CAMDEN IN 1890: THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE RIGHT IS WHITMAN’S

From time to time special efforts were made by his friends to remove any immediate pressure of financial anxiety. Whitman, who was on the one hand generous to a fault, and on the other not without a pride which consented with humiliation to receive some of the gifts bestowed, manifested a boyish delight in money of his own earning, and it did his friends good to see his merriment over the dollars taken—six hundred of them[688]—at his Lincoln lecture of 1886 in the Chestnut Street Opera House. By way of profit-sharing he insisted on presenting each of the theatre attendants with two dollars.

The repetition of the lecture in New York the following spring, at the Madison Square Theatre, before a brilliant company of distinguished people, including Mr. James Russell Lowell, “Mark Twain,” Mr. Stedman, and Whitman’s staunch admirer, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, brought him a similar sum;[689] while Colonel Ingersoll’s lecture for his benefit in 1890 was yet more productive, and the birthday dinners also contributed something to his funds. But the mention of these financial matters must not be construed into a pre-occupation with the subject in the old man’s later years; it troubled his friends far more than it troubled him.

After the gift of the horse and waggon, Mr. W. S. Kennedy and others planned to provide Whitman with a cottage at Timber Creek.[690] The idea delighted him; he craved for the pure air and the living solitude of the woods. But his health became too uncertain for the realisation of the scheme, and the remainder of his days was spent in Camden.

The little house in quiet, grassy Mickle Street,[691] standing modestly between its taller neighbours, with the brass plate, “W. Whitman,” on the door, and the mounting-stone opposite, was becoming a place of frequent pilgrimage, and it has often been lovingly described.

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During the earlier years, Walt’s favourite seat was at the left-hand lower window, and there the children would call out to him, and he would answer brightly as they went by to school. The walls and mantel-shelf were covered with portraits, and as to the books and papers, so long as he used the room, it was beyond the wit of any woman to keep them within bounds. But it was afterwards, when he was more confined to his bedroom, that they fairly broke loose.

He seems to have enjoyed this native disorder, for in the big, square, three-windowed upper room they occupied not only the shelves and chairs and table but the floor itself. “His boots,” says a friend—who, when Mrs. Davis was out, used to effect an entrance at the window to save her host descending the stairs—“his boots would be standing on piles of manuscript on a chair, a half-empty glass of lemonade or whiskey toddy on another, his ink-bottle on still another, his hat on the floor, and the whole room filled with an indescribable confusion of scraps of paper scrawled over with his big writing, with newspapers, letters and books. He was not at all eager to have order restored, and used to grumble in a good-natured way when I insisted upon clearing things up a bit for him.”[692]

He liked to think and speak of the room as his den or cabin; it was his own place, and bustling with his own affairs.[693] Here were his old-time companionable books: the complete Scott of his youth, and a volume of poets which he used in the hospitals; his friend Mr. E. C. Stedman’s Library of American Literature; studies of Spanish and German poets, and Felton’s Greece; translations of Homer, Dante, Omar Khayyam, Hafiz, Saadi; Mr. Rolleston’s Epictetus—a constant friend—Marcus Aurelius and Virgil; with Ossian, Emerson, Tennyson and Carlyle, and some novels, especially a translation of George Sand’s Consuelo; and last, and best read of all, Shakespeare and the Bible. The book of Job was one of his prime favourites in the beloved volume which was always by him in later years.

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Perilously mingled with the papers was wood for his stove, over whose crackling warmth he would sit in the cold weather, ensconced in his great rattan-seated, broad-armed rocker, with the wolf-skin over it; his keen scent relishing the odour of oak-wood and of the printer’s ink on the wet proofs which surrounded him.

Visitors usually waited in the room below for his slow and heavy step upon the stairs. There the canary sang its best, as though to be caged in Whitman’s house was not confinement after all; and a bunch of fragrant flowers stood on t............