It is not often that a great-grandmother, after a long life of service to others, sees her first book published on her eighty-second birthday.
Mrs. Keller uses her pen as if she were twenty or thirty years younger. Her letters are simple but cheery, her outlook on life contented but in no way obscured. Not deliberately, but through a natural gift, she conveys vivid impressions of the world as it now appears to her, just as she conveys so unpretentiously but unforgettably in her book the whole atmosphere of Walt Whitman's world, when it had been narrowed to the little frame house in Mickle Street, and finally to a bed of suffering in one room of that little house.
Whatever else her book may be, it is an extraordinary instance of revelation through simplicity; the picture stands out with all its details, not as a work of conscious art, but assuredly as a work that the artist, the student of life and of human nature, will be glad to have.
Charles Vale
[PREFACE]
HAD it ever occurred to me that the time might come when I should feel impelled to write something in regard to my late patient, Walt Whitman, I should have taken care to be better prepared in anticipation; would have kept a personal account, jotted down notes for my own use, observed his visitors more closely, preserved all my correspondence with Dr. Bucke, and recorded items of more or less interest that fade from memory as the years go by. Still, I have my diary, fortunately, and can be true to dates.
After I had been interviewed a number of times, and had answered various questions to the best of my knowledge and belief, I was surprised to see several high-flown articles published, all based on the meagre information I had furnished, and all imperfect and unsatisfactory.