[556] Bucke, 46.
CHAPTER XVI
CONVALESCENCE
All through 1875 the weakness continued; but in November he was well enough to pay a visit to Washington, accompanied by John Burroughs; and, the public re-burial of Poe taking place about that time in Baltimore, Doyle appears to have convoyed him thither.[557] There, sitting silently on the platform at the public function, he seems once again to have been cordially greeted by Emerson, but O’Connor, who was also present, made no sign.[558]
It was not till the following summer that Whitman’s old spirits began to return. Since his mother died he had passed three years in the valley of the shadow, and he was still lonely, sick and poor when his English friends came to his rescue.
He and his writings had been pulverised between the heavy millstones of Mr. Peter Bayne’s adjectives in the Contemporary Review for the month of December. In England, as well as in America, he had literary enemies in high places. But on the 13th of March the Daily News[559] published a long and characteristically fervid letter, full of generous feeling, from Mr. Robert Buchanan, who dilated upon the old poet’s isolation, neglect and poverty. It aroused wide comment, and some indignation on both sides of the Atlantic, among Whitman’s friends as well as among his enemies.