



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Katie Hernandez and the
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    [Illustration]



    [Illustration: THE OPEN ROAD.

      Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
      Healthy, free, the world before me,
      The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

                                     (_Song of the Open Road_).]



    A. DAY. WITH
    WALT
    WHITMAN

    BY MAURICE CLARE

    [Illustration]

    LONDON
    HODDER & STOUGHTON




_In the same Series._


  _Tennyson._
  _Wordsworth._
  _Browning._
  _Burns._
  _Byron._
  _Keats._
  _E. B. Browning._
  _Whittier_.
  _Rossetti._
  _Shelley._
  _Longfellow._
  _Scott._
  _Coleridge._
  _Morris._




A DAY WITH WALT WHITMAN.


About six o'clock on a midsummer morning in 1877, a tall old man awoke,
and was out of bed next moment,--but he moved with a certain slow
leisureliness, as one who will not be hurried. The reason of this
deliberate movement was obvious,--he had to drag a paralysed leg, which
was only gradually recovering its ability and would always be slightly
lame. Seen more closely, he was not by any means so old as at first
sight one might imagine. His snow-white hair and almost-white grey beard
indicated some eighty years: but he was vigorous, erect and rosy: his
clear grey-blue eyes were bright with a "wild-hawk look,"--his face was
firm and without a line. An air of splendid vital force, despite his
infirmity, was diffused from his whole person, and defied the fact of
his actual age, which was two years short of sixty.

Dressing with the same large, leisurely gestures as characterized him in
everything, Walt Whitman was presently attired in his invariable suit of
grey: and by the time the clock touched half-past seven, he was seated
in the verandah, comfortably inhaling the sweet, fresh morning air, and
quite ready for his simple breakfast.

In this old farmhouse, in the New Jersey hamlet of White Horse, Walt
Whitman had been long an inmate. He was recovering by almost
imperceptible degrees from the breakdown induced by over-strain, mental
and physical, which had culminated in intermittent paralytic seizures
for the last eight years, and had left his robust physique a mere wreck
of its former magnificence. Here, in the absolute peace and seclusion of
the little wooden house, with its few fields and fruit-trees, he lived
in lovable companionship with the farmer-folk, man, wife and sons: and
here, the level, faintly undulated country, "neither attractive nor
unattractive," supplied all the needs of his strenuous nature and healed
him with its calm, curative influences. He steeped himself, month by
month, season after season, in "primitive solitudes, winding stream,
recluse and woody banks, sweet-feeding springs and all the charms that
birds, grass, wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks,
walnut-trees, etc., can bring." Simple fare, these charms might seem to
a townsman: to the "good grey poet" they were not only sufficient but
inexhaustible. Dearly as he loved the "swarming and tumultuous" life of
cities, the tops of Broadway omnibuses, the Brooklyn ferry-boats, the
eternal panorama of the multitude, his true delight was in the vast
expanses, the illimitable spaces, the very earth from which,
Antaeus-like, he drew his vital strength. Out here, in the country
solitudes, alone could he observe how--in a way undreamed of by the
street-dweller,--

  Ever upon this stage
  Is acted God's calm annual drama,
  Gorgeous processions, songs of birds,
  Sunrise that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul,
  The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves,
  The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,
  The lilliput countless armies of the grass.

                                   (_The Return of the Heroes._)

It may be doubted whether any other poet who has been inspired by
outdoor Nature, has approximated so closely as Whitman to the "shows of
all variety," which nature presents,--from the infinite gradations of
microscopic detail, to the enormous range and sweep of dim vastitudes.
His poetry has a huge elemental quality, akin to that of winds and
clouds and seas. "To speak with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of
the movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of
trees in the