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                                  THE

                            GOOD GRAY POET.

                             A VINDICATION.

                 *        *        *        *        *

                               NEW YORK:
                BUNCE & HUNTINGTON, 459, BROOME STREET.
                                 1866.




                          THE GOOD GRAY POET.

                             A VINDICATION.

                 *        *        *        *        *

                                 WASHINGTON, D. C., _September 2, 1865_.

Nine weeks have elapsed since the commission of an outrage, to which I
have not till now been able to give my attention, but which, in the
interest of the sacred cause of free letters, and in that alone, I never
meant should pass without its proper and enduring brand.

For years past, thousands of people in New York, in Brooklyn, in Boston,
in New Orleans, and latterly in Washington, have seen, even as I saw two
hours ago, tallying, one might say, the streets of our American cities,
and fit to have for his background and accessories, their streaming
populations and ample and rich façades, a man of striking masculine
beauty—a poet—powerful and venerable in appearance; large, calm,
superbly formed; oftenest clad in the careless, rough, and always
picturesque costume of the common people; resembling, and generally
taken by strangers for, some great mechanic, or stevedore, or seaman, or
grand laborer of one kind or another; and passing slowly in this guise,
with nonchalant and haughty step along the pavement, with the sunlight
and shadows falling around him. The dark sombrero he usually wears was,
when I saw him just now, the day being warm, held for the moment in his
hand; rich light an artist would have chosen, lay upon his uncovered
head, majestic, large, Homeric, and set upon his strong shoulders with
the grandeur of ancient sculpture; I marked the countenance, serene,
proud, cheerful, florid, grave; the brow seamed with noble wrinkles; the
features, massive and handsome, with firm blue eyes; the eyebrows and
eyelids especially showing that fullness of arch seldom seen save in the
antique busts; the flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray, and
tempering with a look of age the youthful aspect of one who is but
forty-five; the simplicity and purity of his dress, cheap and plain, but
spotless, from snowy falling collar to burnished boot, and exhaling
faint fragrance; the whole form surrounded with manliness, as with a
nimbus, and breathing, in its perfect health and vigor, the august charm
of the strong. We who have looked upon this figure, or listened to that
clear, cheerful, vibrating voice, might thrill to think, could we but
transcend our age, that we had been thus near to one of the greatest of
the sons of men. But Dante stirs no deep pulse, unless it be of hate, as
he walks the streets of Florence; that shabby, one-armed soldier, just
out of jail and hardly noticed, though he has amused Europe, is Michael
Cervantes; that son of a vine-dresser, whom Athens laughs at as an
eccentric genius, before it is thought worth while to roar him into
exile, is the century-shaking Æschylus; that phantom whom the wits of
the seventeenth century think not worth extraordinary notice, and the
wits of the eighteenth century, spluttering with laughter, call a
barbarian, is Shakespeare; that earth-soiled, vice-stained ploughman,
with the noble heart and sweet, bright eyes, whom the good abominate and
the gentry patronize—subject now of anniversary banquets by gentlemen
who, could they wander backward from those annual hiccups into Time,
would never help his life or keep his company—is Robert Burns; and this
man, whose grave, perhaps, the next century will cover with passionate
and splendid honors, goes regarded with careless curiosity or phlegmatic
composure by his own age. Yet, perhaps, in a few hearts he has waked
that deep thrill due to the passage of the sublime. I heard lately, with
sad pleasure, of the letter introducing a friend, filled with noble
courtesy, and dictated by the reverence for genius, which a
distinguished English nobleman, a stranger, sent to this American bard.
Nothing deepens my respect for the beautiful intellect of the scholar
Alcott, like the bold sentence, “Greater than Plato,” which he once
uttered upon him. I hold it the surest proof of Thoreau’s insight, that
after a conversation, seeing how he incarnated the immense and new
spirit of the age, and was the compend of America, he came away to speak
the electric sentence, “He is Democracy!” I treasure to my latest hour,
with swelling heart and springing tears, the remembrance that Abraham
Lincoln, seeing him for the first time from the window of the East Room
of the White House as he passed slowly by, and gazing at him long with
that deep eye which read men, said, in the quaint, sweet tone which
those who have spoken with him will remember, and with a significant
emphasis which the type can hardly convey—“Well, _he_ looks like A
MAN!” Sublime tributes, great words; but none too high for their object,
the author of _Leaves of Grass_, Walt Whitman, of Brooklyn.

On the 30th of June last, this true American man and author was
dismissed, under circumstances of peculiar wrong, from a clerkship he
had held for six months in the Department of the Interior. His dismissal
was the act of the Hon. James Harlan, the Secretary of the Department,
formerly a Methodist clergyman, and President of a Western college.

Upon the interrogation of an eminent officer of the Government, at whose
instance the appointment had, under a former Secretary, been made, Mr.
Harlan averred that Walt Whitman had been in no way remiss in the
discharge of his duties, but that, on the contrary, so far as he could
learn, his conduct had been most exemplary. Indeed, during the few
months of his tenure of office, he had been promoted. The sole and only
cause of his dismissal, Mr. Harlan said, was that he had written the
book of poetry entitled _Leaves of Grass_. This book Mr. Harlan
characterized as “full of indecent passages.” The author, he said, was
“a very bad man,” a “Free-Lover.” Argument being had upon these
propositions, Mr. Harlan was, as regards the book, utterly unable to
maintain his assertions; and, as regards the author, was forced to own
that his opinion of him had been changed. Nevertheless, after this
substantial admission of his injustice, he absolutely refused to revoke
his action. Of course, under no circumstances would Walt Whitman, the
proudest man that lives, have consented to again enter into office under
Mr. Harlan: but the demand for his reinstatement was as honorable to the
gentleman who made it, as the refusal to accede to it was discreditable
to the Secretary.

The closing feature of this transaction, and one which was a direct
consequence of Mr. Harlan’s course, was its remission to the scurrilous,
and in some instances libellous, comment of a portion of the press. To
sum up, an author, solely and only for the publication, ten years ago,
of an honest book, which no intelligent and candid person can regard as
hurtful to morality, was expelled from office by the Secretary, and held
up to public contumely by the newspapers. It remains only to be added
here, that the Hon. James Harlan is the gentleman who, upon assuming the
control of the Department, published a manifesto, announcing that it was
thenceforth to be governed upon the principles of Christian
civilization.

This act of expulsion, and all that it encloses, is the outrage to which
I referred in the opening sentence of this letter.

I have had the honor, which I esteem a very high one, to know Walt
Whitman intimately for several years, and am perfectly conversant with
the details of his life and history. Scores and scores of persons, who
know him well, can confirm my own report of him, and I have therefore no
hesitation in saying that the scandalous assertions of Mr. Harlan,
derived from whom I know not, as to his being a bad man, a Free-Lover,
&c., belong to the category of those calumnies at which, as Napoleon
said, innocence itself is confounded. A better man in all respects, or
one more irreproachable in his relations to the other sex, lives not
upon this earth. His is the great goodness, the great chastity of
spiritual strength and sanity. I do not believe that from the hour of
his infancy, when Lafayette held him in his arms, to the present hour,
in which he bends over the last wounded and dying of the war, that any
one can say aught of him that does not consort with the largest and
truest manliness. I am perfectly aware of the miserable lies which have
been put into circulation respecting him, of which the story of his
dishonoring an invitation to dine with Emerson, by appearing at the
table of the Astor House in a red shirt, and with the manners of a
rowdy, is a mild specimen. I know, too, the inferences drawn by wretched
fools, who, because they have seen him riding upon the top of an
omnibus; or at Pfaff’s restaurant; or dressed in rough clothes suitable
for his purposes, and only remarkable because the wearer was a man of
genius; or mixing freely and lovingly, like Lucretius, like Rabelais,
like Francis Bacon, like Rembrandt, like all great students of the
world, with low and equivocal and dissolute persons, as well as with
those of a different character, must needs set him down as a brute, a
scallawag, and a criminal. Mr. Harlan’s allegations are of a piece with
these. If I could associate the title with a really great person, or if
the name of man were not radically superior, I should say that for solid
nobleness of character, for native elegance and delicacy of soul, for a
courtesy which is the very passion of thoughtful kindness and
forbearance, for his tender and paternal respect and manly honor for
woman, for love and heroism carried into the pettiest details of life,
and for a large and homely beauty of manners, which makes the civilities
of parlors fantastic and puerile in comparison, Walt Whitman deserves to
be considered the grandest gentleman that treads this continent. I know
well the habits and tendencies of his life. They are all simple, sane,
domestic; worthy of him as one of an estimable family and a member of
society. He is a tender and faithful son, a good brother, a loyal
friend, an ardent and devoted citizen. He has been a laborer, working
successively as a farmer, a carpenter, a printer. He has been a stalwart
editor of the Republican party, and often, in that powerful and nervous
prose of which he is master, done yeoman’s service for the great cause
of human liberty and the imperial conception of the indivisible Union.
He has been a visitor of prisons; a protector of fugitive slaves; a
constant voluntary nurse, night and day, at the hospitals, from the
beginning of the war to the present time; a brother and friend through
life to the neglected and the forgotten, the poor, the degraded, the
criminal, the outcast; turning away from no man for his guilt, nor woman
for her vileness. His is the strongest and truest compassion I have ever
known. I remember here the anecdote told me by a witness, of his meeting
in a by-street in Boston a poor ruffian, one whom he had known well as
an innocent child, now a full-grown youth, vicious far beyond his years,
flying to Canada from the pursuit of the police, his sin-trampled
features bearing marks of the recent bloody brawl in New York in which,
as he supposed, he had killed some one; and having heard his hurried
story, freely confided to him, Walt Whitman, separated not from the bad
even by his own goodness, with well I know what tender and tranquil
feeling for this ruined being, and with a love which makes me think of
that love of God which deserts not any creature, quietly at parting,
after assisting him from his means, held him for a moment, with his arm
around his neck, and, bending to the face, horrible and battered and
prematurely old, kissed him on the cheek; and the poor hunted wretch,
perhaps for the first time in his low life, receiving a token of love
and compassion like a touch from beyond the sun, hastened away in deep
dejection, sobbing and in tears. It reminds me of the anecdotes Victor
Hugo, in his portraiture of Bishop Myriel, tells, under a thin veil of
fiction, of Charles Miolles, the good Bishop of Rennes.—I know not what
talisman Walt Whitman carries, unless it be an unexcluding friendliness
and goodness which is felt upon his approach like magnetism; but I know
that in the subterranean life of cities, among the worst roughs, he goes
safely; and I could recite instances where hands that, in mere
wantonness of ferocity, assault anybody, raised against him, have of
their own accord been lowered almost as quickly, or, in some cases, been
dragged promptly down by others; this, too, I mean, when he and the
assaulting gang were mutual strangers. I have seen singular evidence of
the mysterious quality which not only guards him, but draws to him with
intuition, rapid as light, simple and rude people, as to their natural
mate and friend. I remember, as I passed the White House with him one
evening, the startled feeling with which I saw the soldier on guard
there—a stranger to us both, and with something in his action that
curiously proved that he was a stranger—suddenly bring his musket to
the “present,” in military salute to him, quickly mingling with this
respect due to his colonel, a gesture of greeting with the right hand as
to a comrade; grinning, meanwhile, good fellow, with shy, spontaneous
affection and deference; his ruddy, broad face glowing in the flare of
the lampions. I remember, on another occasion, as I crossed the street
with him, the driver of a street car, a stranger, stopping the
conveyance, and inviting him to get on and ride with him. Adventures of
this kind are frequent, and, “I took a fancy to you,” or, “You look like
one of my style,” is the common explanation he gets upon their
occurrence. It would be impossible to exaggerate the personal adhesion
and strong, simple affection given him, in numerous instances on sight,
by multitudes of plain persons—sailors, mechanics, drivers, soldiers,
farmers, sempstresses, old people of the past generation, mothers of
families—those powerful, unlettered persons, among whom, as he says in
his book, he has gone freely, and who never in most cases even suspect
as an author him whom they love as a man, and who loves them in
return.—His intellectual influence upon many young men and
women—spirits of the morning sort, not willing to belong to that
intellectual colony of Great Britain which our literary classes compose,
nor helplessly tied like them to the old forms—I note as kindred to
that of Socrates upon the youth of ancient Attica, or Raleigh upon the
gallant young England of his day. It is a power at once liberating,
instructing, and inspiring.—His conversation is a university. Those who
have heard him in some roused hour, when the full afflatus of his spirit
moved him, will agree with me that the grandeur of talk was
accomplished. He is known as a passionate lover and powerful critic of
the great music and of art. He is deeply cultured by some of the best
books, especially the Bible, which he prefers above all other great
literature; but principally by contact and communion with things
themselves, which literature can only mirror and celebrate. He has
travelled through most of the United States, intent on comprehending and
absorbing the genius and meaning of his country, that he might do his
best to start a literature worthy of her, sprung from her own polity,
and tallying her own unexampled magnificence among the nations. To the
same end, he has been a long, patient, and laborious student of life,
mixing intimately with all varieties of experience and men, with
curiosity and with love. He has given his thought, his life, to this
beautiful ambition, and, still young, he has grown gray in its service.
He has never married; like Giordano Bruno, he has made Thought in the
service of his fellow-creatures his _bella donna_, his best beloved, his
bride. His patriotism is boundless. It is no intellectual sentiment; it
is a personal passion. He performs with scrupulous fidelity and zeal,
the duties of a citizen. For eighteen years, not missing once, his
ballot has dropped on every national and local election day, and his
influence has been ardently given, for the good cause. Of all men I
know, his life is most in the life of the nation. I remember, when the
first draft was ordered, at a time when he was already performing an
arduous and perilous duty as a volunteer attendant upon the wounded in
the field—a duty which cost him the only illness he ever had in his
life, and a very severe and dangerous illness it was, the result of
poison absorbed in his devotion to the worst cases of the hospital
gangrene; and when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to
evade duty, for though then only forty-two or three years old, and
subject to the draft, he looked a hale sixty, and no enrolling officer
would have paused for an instant before his gray hair—I remember, I
say, how anxious and careful he was to get his name put on the
enrollment lists, that he might stand his chance for martial service.
This, too, at a time when so many gentlemen were skulking, dodging,
agonizing for substitutes, and practising every conceivable device to
escape military duty. What music of speech, though Cicero’s own—what
scarlet and gold superlatives could adorn or dignify this simple antique
trait of private heroism?—I recall his love for little children, for
the young, and for very old persons, as if the dawn and the evening
twilight of life awakened his deepest tenderness. I recall the affection
for him of numbers of young men, and invariably of all good women. Who,
knowing him, does not regard him as a man of the highest spiritual
culture? I have never known one of greater and deeper religious feeling.
To call one like him good, seems an impertinence. In our sweet country
phrase, he is one of God’s men. And as I write these hurried and broken
memoranda—as his strength and sweetness of nature, his moral health,
his rich humor, his gentleness, his serenity, his charity, his
simple-heartedness, his courage, his deep and varied knowledge of life
and men, his calm wisdom, his singular and beautiful boy-innocence, his
personal majesty, his rough scorn of mean actions, his magnetic and
exterminating anger on due occasions—all