RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE
Whitman’s own jottings and records of the period testify to his increasing physical vigour. He goes, for instance, to the Walnut Street Theatre, to a performance of Joaquin Miller’s The Danites, accompanied by his friend the author.[588] In the summer of 1878, and in the succeeding year, he is again a guest both of John Burroughs and of J. H. Johnston.[589] On the second occasion, he had delivered his lecture on the “Death of Lincoln” in the Steck Hall, New York; promising himself anew, that if health permitted, he would even now set forth on the lecture tour which he had so long contemplated.[590] But though, in the autumn, he made, with several friends, an extended tour of some sixteen weeks beyond the Mississippi, he did not accomplish this cherished scheme.
At night on the 10th of September, Whitman and his party left Philadelphia, westward bound. Walt delighted in the magic speed and comfort of the Pullman;[591] in which, lying awake among the sleepers, he was whirled all through the first night up the broad pastoral valley of the Susquehanna, curving with its thousand reedy aits about thick-wooded steeps; and on, over ridge and ridge of the Alleghanies, till morning found them at smoking Pittsburg.
Crossing the Ohio, almost at the point whence he had descended it thirty years before on that fateful southern journey, the good engine, the Baldwin, hurried them all that day through rich and populous Ohio and Indiana. Whitman was not disinclined to acknowledge a personality in the fierce and beautiful locomotive which he had already celebrated in a poem full of fire and of the modern spirit.[592]
They were due next morning at St. Louis, but about nightfall their headlong flight through the broad lands was arrested. The Baldwin ran foul of some obstacle, and suffered serious damage and consequent delay. Spending the third night in the city, they continued through a beautiful autumn day, across the rolling prairies of Missouri, feasting their eyes upon the wide farmlands full of the promise of bread for millions of men.
Nor material bread only. There is something in the vast aerial spaces of these prairie states, their great skies and lonely stretches, which exalts and feeds the soul; something oceanic, Whitman thought, “and beautiful as dreams”.[593] Central in the continent, this country had always seemed to him to correspond with certain central qualities in his ideal America, and to supply the background for the two men whose figures stood out supremely above the struggle for the union, Lincoln and Grant—men of unplumbed and inarticulate depths of character, and of native freedom of spirit and elemental originality of thought.
Whitman stayed for a while with friends upon the road, at Lawrence and Topeka. Many of the boys he had tended in the wards were now hale men out West, and they were always eager for sight of him; so that there were few places in America where he would not have found a hearty welcome.