Early in 1860 Whitman made arrangements with a firm of young and enterprising Boston publishers for the issue of a third edition of his book. It had now been out of print for nearly three years, and new material had all that time been accumulating, amounting to about two-thirds of what had already been published.
He went over to Boston and installed himself in a little room at the printing office, where he spent his days carefully correcting and revising the proofs. A friend who found him there speaks of his very quiet manners.[255] He rarely laughed, and never loudly. He seemed to be provokingly indifferent to the impression he was creating, and made no effort to talk brilliantly. He was indeed quite bare of the small change of conversation, and gave no impression of self-consciousness. At the time of this interview he was accompanied by a sickly listless lad whom he had found at the boarding-house where he stayed. Whitman had compassion on him and carried him along, in order that he might communicate something of his own superabundant vitality to him.
During his stay in Boston, Walt frequently attended the services then conducted at the Seamen’s Bethel by Father Taylor.[256] As a rule, he avoided churches of every sort, feeling acutely the ineffectiveness of what is grimly called “Divine Service,” feeling also that worship was for the soul in its solitude.[257] Not that he was ignorant of that social passion which finds its altar in communion of spirit, or was blind to the deepest mysteries of fellowship. To these, as we shall see, he was particularly sensitive. But the formalities of a church must have seemed foolish and irksome to one for whom all fellowship was a kind of worship, and all desire was a prayer. In the preaching of Father Taylor there was nothing formal or ineffective. In it Walt felt anew the passionate sense of reality which had thrilled him as a child in the preaching of old Elias Hicks.
Father Taylor was now nearly seventy;[258] a southerner by birth, he had been a sailor, and became upon conversion a “shouting Methodist”. The earnestness of his first devotion remained with him to the last; and his prayers were especially marked by the power which flowed from him continually. Behind the high pulpit in the quaint heavily-timbered, wood-scented chapel was painted a ship in distress, in vivid illustration of his words which were ever returning to the sea. All his ways were eloquent, unconventional, picturesque and homely like his face, so that he won the hearts of all conditions of men, and became one of the idols of Boston.
The old man’s power of fascination seemed almost terrible to his hearers; one young sailor opined that he must be the actual Holy Ghost. Walt himself was always moved to tears by the marvellous intimacy of his passionate pleading in prayer.[259] He spoke straight to the Soul, and not at all, as do common preachers, to the intelligence or the superficial emotions; and the Soul of his hearers answered, with the awful promptitude of an unknown living presence within. His passion of love was at once tender and remorseless; Whitman compares him with a surgeon operating upon a beloved patient.
In this man, before whom all the elocution of the platform was mere trickery, Walt recognised the one “essentially perfect orator” whom he had ever heard, the only one who fulfilled the demands of his own ideal. And be it remembered, Theodore Parker was in his power in those days, while Father Taylor was an evangelical of the old school. It is, after all, not mysticism but orthodoxy which is exclusive; and though he was wholly a heretic, Whitman was able fully to love and appreciate those who were farthest removed from his own point of view.
Upon this visit Emerson and Whitman saw much of one another. They were both men in middle life—Emerson had passed his fiftieth year—and each entertained for the other a feeling of warm and affectionate regard. Whitman felt toward the older man almost as to an elder brother,[260] and the sweet and wise and kindly spirit of Emerson frequently sought out the younger in brotherly solicitude for his welfare.
Their intimacy had sprung from Emerson’s letter, and it was always Emerson who pressed it. Something in the mental atmosphere in which the Concord philosopher moved was very repellant to Whitman: he positively disliked “a literary circle,” and blamed it for all the real or imagined shortcomings of his friend. He himself would not go to Concord from his horror of any sort of lionizing.