In a letter, written immediately after this visit to his friend Alma Calder, who had recently become the second Mrs. J. H. Johnston, Whitman wrote: “I think Emerson more significant and glorified in his present condition than in any of his former days”.[621]
The whole family was present, and sitting quietly among them Whitman could understand the natural limitations which his household entailed upon the philosopher, and acknowledging these, felt the personal bond stronger than ever. The relation of the two men had been singular as well as noble, for it was the elder who had sought the younger out and affectionately acknowledged him, and through the years that followed the advances had been made by him.
Whitman’s attachment to Emerson had been one of love and reverence for his person, much more than of intellectual affinity. “I think,” he wrote a few years later to his Boston friend, Mr. W. S. Kennedy, “I think I know B. W. E[merson] better than anybody else knows him—and love him in proportion.”[622] The evidence does not indicate a similar understanding on Emerson’s part, though the love between them was not unequal. To Emerson, as to Tennyson, Whitman remained “a great big something” of undetermined character.
Whitman met many friends, new and old, upon this visit, but of the old, Thoreau had long been dead; and the strong, homely sailor’s face of Father Taylor drew Boston no longer to the Seamen’s Bethel. Whitman himself attracted much attention as he sauntered along among the fashionable shoppers on Washington Street; tall, erect and noble, one could not pass him without notice. I have heard a lady tell how, being familiar with his portraits, she recognised him at once. Seeing him mount a car she followed, taking a seat where for several miles she could, without rudeness, study and enjoy that splendid ruddy face, through which, lamp-like, there shone and glowed an inner light of spiritual ecstasy.
And for Whitman himself, those were happy days.[623] The paralysis and the other ailments, more or less serious and painful, by which it had been enforced, troubled him less than usual. In his little room at Messrs. Rand & Avery’s printing house, or out-of-doors in the woods with a fallen tree for his table,[624] he was revising the proofs of his Leaves with a deliberation and particularity worthy of their final form.
For now this singular book, slowly built up through the continual inspiration, thought and labour of a quarter of a century, had come to its completion, and the final plates were to be cast. Or better, we may say that for the first time it was to be really published, all other efforts in that direction having been but tentative, and more or less unsuccessful. Hitherto, despised and rejected of publishers, it had issued with an innocent air from strange places, unvouched by any name which was recognised by the bookselling world. The edition of 1860 is the only exception; and almost immediately after its publication, the enterprising house which guaranteed it sank into ruins.[625]
Now at last, the plan of the book had been, as far as health and strength permitted, brought to completion[626]—a plan amended since the previous Boston visit, and qualified to admit those poems which had since been written, and at first designed for a supplementary book. The cargo was filled, and the good ship ready to sail.
After a visit to the Globe Theatre to see Rossi in “Romeo and Juliet,”[627] and a supper with his co-operators, the printers and proof-readers, whose aid he was always eager to acknowledge, Whitman set out again for New York, returning home about the beginning of November. Late in the same month, the book, his vessel as he loved to think of it, set out upon its voyage; but in spite of favourable presages and a happy commencement, it was soon shrouded about in fog, which only yielded to a storm.
Some 2,000 copies were sold during the winter, but early in the New Year (1882)[628] the trouble, which seemed to have passed over when the Postmaster-General decided that the book was not so obscene as to be “unmailable,” began to threaten anew. The Boston District Attorney,[629] urged by certain agents of the Society for the Suppression of Vice—as though, forsooth, vice could be “suppressed”!—objected to the publication, and demanded the withdrawal of certain passages.