No dainty dolce affettuoso I,
Bearded, sun-burnt, gray-neck'd, forbidding, I have arrived.
As breakfast passed, he spoke but little to his companions. His ordinary mood of "quiet yet cheerful serenity," lay gently on him, and he was content to sit almost silent, emanating that radiant power, that "effluence and inclusiveness as of the sun," which none could fail to note in him. When addressed, he only replied with the brief monosyllable "Ay? Ay?" (which he pronounced Oy? Oy?), and which, slightly inflected to answer various purposes, served him for all response.
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen'd long and long....,.
(Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.)
The meal was not yet over, for most of the family, when Whitman, rising abruptly with that startling brusquerie which occasionally offended his friends, observed "Ta-ta!" to everybody in general and departed—"as if he didn't care if he never saw us again!" remarked one of the young men. He left the house and strolled down the green lane, to a wide wooded hollow, where the stream called Timber Creek went winding among its lily-leaves beneath the trees. Here Whitman had found, a year before, "a particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek ... filled with bushes, trees, grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here (he) retreated every hot day" (Specimen Days),—and here, while the summer sun drew sweet aromatic odours from the tangled water-mints and cresses, he proceeded slowly now, carrying a portable chair, and with his pockets filled with note-books; for, as he truly avowed, "Wherever I go, winter or summer, city or country, alone at home or travelling, I must take notes." He was about to make sure of a morning's unmitigated delight,—in the spot where he sought, "every day, seclusion—every day at least two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no manners."
And each step of the way was a pure joy to him. "What a day!" he murmured, "what an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never before so filling me body and soul!" So rhapsodizing inwardly and drinking in the beauty of sight and sound, he proceeded, "still sauntering on, to the spring under the willows—musical as soft clinking glasses—pouring a sizeable stream, pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth-roof—gurgling, gurgling ceaselessly; meaning, saying something, of course (if one could only translate it.)" (Specimen Days.)
Here he sat down awhile and revelled in sheer joy of summer opulence. He enumerated to himself,—laying a store of lovely recollections for future reference in darker days,—"The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves, the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence: the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils,—and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue," (Specimen Days,) and, "from old habit, pencilled down from time to time, almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines, on the spot." Minutes like these were the seed time of his art, if that can be called art which was almost one with Nature. For Walt Whitman had, from the very outset, striven to obtain that fusion of identity with Natura Benigna, which, even if only momentary, bequeathes a lasting impression on the mind. He had always felt, with regard to his productions, that "There is a humiliating lesson one learns, in serene hours, of a fine day or night. Nature seems to look on all fixed-up poetry and art as something almost impertinent.... If I could indirectly show that we have met and fused, even if but only once, but enough—that we have really absorbed each other and understood each other,"—it sufficed him. Nothing less did: for he recognised that "after you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains: to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night." And, while confessing, "I cannot divest my appetite of literature, yet I find myself eventually trying it all by Nature—first premises many call it, but really the crowning results of all, laws, tallies and proofs.... I have fancied the ocean and the daylight, the mountain and the forest, putting their spirit in a judgment on our books. I have fancied some disembodied soul giving its verdict." (Specimen Days.) He was "so afraid," as he phrased it, "of dropping what smack of outdoors or sun or starlight might cling to the lines—I dared not try to meddle with or smooth them." To be "made one with Nature," in a deeper sense than ever any man yet had known, was, in short, his ideal,—and, one may say, his achievement. For the verdict of the average person, vacant of his glorious gains, he did not care. Regardless of ridicule, calumny, contumely, he had pursued his own way to his own goal: till he was able at last to realize his dream of—
Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,
Master of all, or mistress of all—aplomb in the midst of irrational things.