AUTHORIZED EDITION.
New York;
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,
28 Lafayette Place.
Copyrighted, 1890,
BY
THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY.
TESTIMONIAL
TO
WALT WHITMAN.
Of all the placid hours in his peaceful life, those that Walt Whitman spent on the stage of Horticultural Hall last night must have been among the most gratifying, says the Philadelphia Press of October 22, 1890. To a testimonial, intended to cheer his declining years, not only in a complimentary sense, came some eighteen hundred or more people to listen to a tribute to the aged poet by Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, such as seldom falls to the lot of living man to hear about himself.
On the stage sat many admirers of the venerable torch-bearer of modern poetic thought, as Colonel Ingersoll described him, young and old, men and women. There were white beards, but none were so white as that of the author of "Leaves of Grass." He sat calm and sedate in his easy wheeled chair, with his usual garb of gray, with his cloudy white hair falling over his white, turned-down collar that must have been three inches wide. No burst of eloquence from the orator's lips disturbed that equanimity; no tribute of applause moved him from his habitual calm.
And when the lecturer, having concluded, said, "We have met to-night to honor ourselves by honoring the author of 'Leaves of Grass,'" and the audience started to leave the hall, the man they had honored reached forward with his cane and attracted Colonel Ingersoll's attention.