Here Mr. Warner spent his forenoons and did his literary work. He was very industrious, and was an unusually rapid writer. Some of his most enjoyed sketches that are apt to be quoted as specimens of his best work, peculiarly exhibiting his delicate and amiable humor and the characteristic merits of his style, were finished at a sitting. In the afternoon he was “down town” on duty as editor-in-chief of The Hartford Courant—the oldest newspaper in continuous existence in this country, having been founded in 1764. His associate editor-in-chief was Gen. Joseph R. Hawley, of the United States Senate. The main pursuit of Mr. Warner’s life was journalism. His native turn was literary. The ink began to stir in his veins when he was a boy. In his youth he was a contributor to the old Knickerbocker and Putnam’s Magazine. But circumstances did not permit him to follow his bent. After graduating at college, he engaged for awhile in railroad surveying in the West; then studied, and for a short time practised, law; but finally, at the call of his friend Hawley, came to Hartford and settled down to the work of an editor, devoting his whole strength to it, with marked success from the outset, and so continued for the years before, during and after the War, supposing that as a journalist he had found his place and his career. His editorial work, however, was such as to give him a distinctly literary reputation; and a share of it was literary in form and motive. People used to preserve his Christmas stories and letters of travel in their scrap-books. The chapters of “My Summer in a Garden” were originally a series of articles written for his paper, without a thought of further publication. It was in response to numerous suggestions coming to him from various quarters that they were made into a book. The extraordinary favor with which the little volume was received was a surprise to Mr. Warner, who insisted that there was nothing in it better than he had been accustomed to write. He was much disposed to view the hit he had made as an accident, and to doubt if it would lead to anything further in the line of authorship. But he was mistaken. The purveyors of literature were after him at once. That was in 1870. Since then his published works have grown to a considerable list.
His stock of material was ample and was constantly replenished. His mind was eminently of the inquiring and acquisitive order. His travels were fruitful of large information to him. He returned from his journey to the East, which produced “My Winter on the Nile” and “In the Levant,” with a knowledge of Egyptian art and history such as few travellers gain, and with a rare insight into the intricate ins and outs of the Eastern question, past and present. Though not an orator, hardly a season passed that he was not invited to give an address at some college anniversary—an invitation which he several times accepted. He once also delivered, in various colleges, a course of lectures of great interest and value, on “The Relation of Literature to Life.” He was an enthusiastic believer in the classic culture, and has repeatedly written and spoken in its defense. His humor was in his grain, and was the humor of a man of very deep convictions and earnest character. Mr. Warner was highly esteemed among his fellow-citizens, and was often called to serve in one public capacity or another. He was for a number of years a member of the Park Commission of the city of Hartford; and he at one time rendered a report to the Connecticut Legislature, as chairman of a special Prison Commission appointed by the State. He was a communicant in the Congregational Church, and until his death in 1900, a constant attendant on public worship.
Mr. Warner was a good-looking man; tall, spare, and erect in frame, with a strong countenance indicative of thought and refinement. His head was capacious, his forehead high and clear, and the kindly eyes behind his eye-glasses were noticeably wide-open. He was remarked anywhere as a person of decidedly striking appearance. The years powdered his full beard and abundant clustering hair, but he walked with a quick, energetic step, with his head thrown back, and pushing on as if he were after something. In going back and forth daily between his house and his editorial room in the Courant Building, he disdained the street railway service, habitually making the trip of something over a mile each way afoot, in all weathers. His pedestrian powers were first-rate, and he took great pleasure in exerting them. He liked to shoulder a knapsack and go off on a week’s tramp through the Catskill or White Mountains, and whoever went with him was sure of enough exercise. He was fond of exploration, and once made, in successive seasons, two quite extensive horseback excursions—with Prof. T. R. Lounsbury, of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, for his companion—through the unfrequented parts of Pennsylvania, Tennessee and North Carolina. Of the second of these excursions he prepared an account in a series of articles for The Atlantic. He had the keenest relish for outdoor life, especially in the woods. His favorite vacation resort was the Adirondack region, where, first and last, he has camped out a great many weeks. His delectable little book, “In the Wilderness,” came of studies of human and other nature there made. He was an expert and patient angler, but enjoyed nothing so much as following all day a forest trail through some before-unvisited tract, halting to bivouac under the open sky, wherever overtaken by night. He was easily companionable with anybody he chanced to be with, and under such circumstances, while luxuriating around the camp-fire, smoking his moderate pipe, would be not unlikely to keep his guide up half the night, drawing him out and getting at his views and notions on all sorts of subjects.
Joseph H. Twichell.
WALT WHITMAN
WALT WHITMAN
IN CAMDEN
It is not a little difficult to write an article about Walt Whitman’s home, for it was once humorously said by himself that he had all his life possessed a home only in the sense that a ship possesses one. Hardly, indeed, till the year 1884 could he be called the occupant of such a definite place, even the kind of one I shall presently describe. To illustrate his own half-jocular remark as just given, and to jot down a few facts about the poet in Camden in the home where he died, is my only purpose in this article. I have decided to steer clear of any criticism of “Leaves of Grass,” and confine myself to his condition and a brief outline of his personal history. I should also like to dwell a moment on what may be called the peculiar outfit or schooling he chose, to fulfill his mission as poet, according to his own ideal.
In the observation of the drama of human nature—if, indeed, “all the world’s a stage”—Walt Whitman had rare advantages as auditor, from the beginning. Several of his earlier years, embracing the age of fifteen to twenty-one, were spent in teaching country schools in Queens and Suffolk counties, New York, following the quaint old fashion of “boarding round,” that is, moving from house to house and farm to farm, among high and low, living a few days alternately at each, until the quarter was up, and then commencing over again. His occupation, for a long period, as printer, with frequent traveling, is to be remembered; also as carpenter. Quite a good deal of his life was passed in boarding-houses and hotels. The three years in the Secession War of course play a marked part. He never made any long sea-voyages, but for years at one period (1846-60) went out in their boats, sometimes for a week at a time, with the New York Bay pilots, among whom he was a great favorite. In 1848-9 his location was in New Orleans, with occasional sojourns in the other Gulf States besides Louisiana. From 1865 to ’73 he lived in Washington. Born in 1819, his life through childhood and as a young and middle-aged man—that is, up to 1862—was mainly spent, with a few intervals of Western and Southern jaunts, on his native Long Island, mostly in Brooklyn. At that date, aged forty-two, he went down to the field of war in Virginia, and for the three subsequent years he was actively engaged as volunteer attendant and nurse on the battle-fields, to the Southern soldiers equally with the Northern, and among the wounded in the army hospitals. He was prostrated by hospital malaria and “inflammation of the veins” in 1864, but recovered. He worked “on his own hook,” had indomitable strength, health, and activity, was on the move night and day, not only till the official close of the Secession struggle, but for a long time afterward, for there was a vast legacy of suffering soldiers left when the contest was over. He was permanently appointed under President Lincoln, in 1865, to a respectable office in the Attorney-General’s department. (This followed his removal from a temporary clerkship in the Indian Bureau of the Interior Department. Secretary Harlan dismissed him from that post specifically for being the author of “Leaves of Grass.”) He worked on for some time in the Attorney-General’s office, and was promoted, but the seeds of the hospital malaria seem never to have been fully eradicated. He was at last struck down, quite suddenly, by a severe paralytic shock (left hemiplegia), from which—after some weeks—he was slowly recovering, when he lost by death his mother and a sister. Soon followed two additional shocks of paralysis, though slighter than the first. Summer had now commenced at Washington, and his doctor imperatively ordered the sick man an entire change of scene—the mountains or the sea-shore. Whitman accordingly left Washington, destined for the New Jersey or Long Island coast, but at Philadelphia found himself too ill to proceed any farther. He was taken over to Camden, and lived there until his death in 1892. It is from this point that I knew him intimately, and to my household, wife and family, he was an honored and most cherished guest.
I must forbear expanding on the poet’s career these years, only noting that during them (1880) occurred the final completion of “Leaves of Grass,” the object of his life. The house in which he lived is a little old-fashioned frame structure, situated about gun-shot from the Delaware River, on a clean, quiet, democratic street. This “shanty,” as he called it, was purchased by the poet for $2000—two-thirds being paid in cash. In it he occupied the second floor. I commenced by likening his home to that of a ship, and the comparison might go further. Though larger than any vessel’s cabin, Walt Whitman’s room, at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, had all the rudeness, simplicity, and free-and-easy character of the quarters of some old sailor. In the good-sized, three-windowed apartment, 20 by 20 feet, or over, there were a wood stove, a bare board floor of narrow planks, a comfortable bed, divers big and little boxes, a good gas lamp, two big tables, a few old uncushioned seats, and lots of pegs and hooks and shelves. Hung or tacked on the walls were pictures, those of his father, mother and sisters holding the places of honor, a portrait of a sweetheart of long ago, a large print of Osceola the Seminole chief (given to Whitman many years since by Catlin the artist), some rare old engravings by Strange, and “Banditti Regaling,” by Mortimer. Heaps of books, manuscripts, memoranda, scissorings, proof-sheets, pamphlets, newspapers, old and new magazines, mysterious-looking literary bundles tied up with stout strings, lay about the floor here and there. Off against a back wall loomed a mighty trunk having double locks and bands of iron—such a receptacle as comes over sea with the foreign emigrants, and you in New York may have seen hoisted by powerful tackle from the hold of some Hamburg ship. On the main table more books, some of them evidently old-timers, a Bible, several Shakspeares,—a nook devoted to translations of Homer and Æschylus and the other Greek poets and tragedians, with Felton’s and Symonds’s books on Greece,—a collection of the works of Fauriel and Ellis on mediæval poetry,—a well-thumbed volume (his companion, off and on, for fifty years) of Walter Scott’s “Border Minstrelsy,”—Tennyson, Ossian, Burns, Omar Khayyám, all miscellaneously together. Whitman’s stalwart form itself luxuriated in a curious, great cane-seat chair, with posts and rungs like ship’s spars; altogether the most imposing, heavy-timbered, broad-armed and broad-bottomed edifice of the kind possible. It was the Christmas gift of the young son and daughter of Thomas Donaldson, of Philadelphia, and was specially made for the poet.
Let me round off with an opinion or two, the result of my many years’ acquaintance. (If I slightly infringe the rule laid down at the beginning, to attempt no literary criticism, I hope the reader will excuse it.) Both Walt Whitman’s book and personal character need to be studied a long time and in the mass, and are not to be gauged by custom. I never knew a man who—for all he took an absorbing interest in politics, literature, and what is called “the world”—seemed to be so poised on himself alone. Dr. Drinkard, the Washington physician who attended him in his paralysis, wrote to the Philadelphia doctor into whose hands the case passed, saying among other things: “In his bodily organism, and in his constitution, tastes and habits, Whitman is the most natural man I have ever met.” The primary foundation of the poet’s character, at the same time, was certainly spiritual. Helen Price, who knew him for fifteen years, pronounces him (in Dr. Bucke’s book) the most essentially religious person she ever knew. On this foundation was built up, layer by layer, the rich, diversified, concrete experience of his life, from its earliest years. Then his aim and ideal were not the technical literary ones. His strong individuality, wilfulness, audacity, with his scorn of convention and rote, unquestionably carried him far outside the regular metes and bounds. No wonder there are some who refuse to consider his “Leaves” as “literature.” It is perhaps only because he was brought up a printer, and worked during his early years as newspaper and magazine writer, that he put his expression in typographical form, and made a regular book of it, with lines, leaves and binding.