MICKLE STREET, CAMDEN IN 1890: THE LITTLE HOUSE ON THE RIGHT IS WHITMAN’S
From time to time special efforts were made by his friends to remove any immediate pressure of financial anxiety. Whitman, who was on the one hand generous to a fault, and on the other not without a pride which consented with humiliation to receive some of the gifts bestowed, manifested a boyish delight in money of his own earning, and it did his friends good to see his merriment over the dollars taken—six hundred of them[688]—at his Lincoln lecture of 1886 in the Chestnut Street Opera House. By way of profit-sharing he insisted on presenting each of the theatre attendants with two dollars.
The repetition of the lecture in New York the following spring, at the Madison Square Theatre, before a brilliant company of distinguished people, including Mr. James Russell Lowell, “Mark Twain,” Mr. Stedman, and Whitman’s staunch admirer, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, brought him a similar sum;[689] while Colonel Ingersoll’s lecture for his benefit in 1890 was yet more productive, and the birthday dinners also contributed something to his funds. But the mention of these financial matters must not be construed into a pre-occupation with the subject in the old man’s later years; it troubled his friends far more than it troubled him.
After the gift of the horse and waggon, Mr. W. S. Kennedy and others planned to provide Whitman with a cottage at Timber Creek.[690] The idea delighted him; he craved for the pure air and the living solitude of the woods. But his health became too uncertain for the realisation of the scheme, and the remainder of his days was spent in Camden.
The little house in quiet, grassy Mickle Street,[691] standing modestly between its taller neighbours, with the brass plate, “W. Whitman,” on the door, and the mounting-stone opposite, was becoming a place of frequent pilgrimage, and it has often been lovingly described.
During the earlier years, Walt’s favourite seat was at the left-hand lower window, and there the children would call out to him, and he would answer brightly as they went by to school. The walls and mantel-shelf were covered with portraits, and as to the books and papers, so long as he used the room, it was beyond the wit of any woman to keep them within bounds. But it was afterwards, when he was more confined to his bedroom, that they fairly broke loose.
He seems to have enjoyed this native disorder, for in the big, square, three-windowed upper room they occupied not only the shelves and chairs and table but the floor itself. “His boots,” says a friend—who, when Mrs. Davis was out, used to effect an entrance at the window to save her host descending the stairs—“his boots would be standing on piles of manuscript on a chair, a half-empty glass of lemonade or whiskey toddy on another, his ink-bottle on still another, his hat on the floor, and the whole room filled with an indescribable confusion of scraps of paper scrawled over with his big writing, with newspapers, letters and books. He was not at all eager to have order restored, and used to grumble in a good-natured way when I insisted upon clearing things up a bit for him.”[692]