VI

The opportunity for my next visit to Walt Whitman came in the winter of 1887 when we were playing in Philadelphia. On the 22nd December Donaldson and I again found our way over to Mickle Street. In the meantime I had had much conversation about Walt Whitman with many of his friends. The week after my last interview I had been again in Philadelphia for a day, on the evening of which I had dined with his friend and mine, Talcott Williams of the Press. During the evening we talked much of Walt Whitman, and we agreed that it was a great pity that he did not cut certain lines and passages out of the poems. Talcott Williams said he would do it if permitted, and I said I would speak to Walt Whitman about it whenever we should meet again. The following year, 1887, I breakfasted with Talcott Williams, 19th December, and in much intimate conversation we spoke of the subject again.

We found Walt Whitman hale and well. His hair was more snowy white than ever and more picturesque. He looked like King Lear in Ford Madox Brown’s picture. He seemed very glad to see me and greeted me quite affectionately. He said he was “in good heart,” and looked bright though his body had distinctly grown feebler.

I ventured to speak to him what was in my mind as to certain excisions in his work. I said:

“If you will only allow your friends to do this—they will only want to cut about a hundred lines in all—your books will go into every house in America. Is not that worth the sacrifice?” He answered at once, as though his mind had long ago been made up and he did not want any special thinking:

“It would not be any sacrifice. So far as I am concerned they might cut a thousand. It is not that—it is quite another matter:”—here both face and voice grew rather solemn—“when I wrote as I did I thought I was doing right and right makes for good. I think so still. I think that all that God made is for good—that the work of His hands is clean in all ways if used as He intended! If I was wrong I have done harm. And for that I deserve to be punished by being forgotten! It has been and cannot not be. No, I shall never cut a line so long as I live!”

One had to respect a decision so made and on such grounds. I said no more.

When we were going he held up his hand saying, “Wait a minute.” He got up laboriously and hobbled out of the room and to his bedroom overhead. There we heard him moving about and shifting things. It was nearly a quarter of an hour when he came down holding in his hand a thin green-covered volume and a printed picture of himself. He wrote on the picture with his indelible blue pencil. Then he handed to me both book and picture, saying:

“Take these and keep them from me and Good-bye!”

The book was the 1872 edition of the Leaves of Grass—“As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free”—and contained his autograph in ink. The portrait was a photograph by Gutekunst, of Philadelphia. On it he had written:

To

Bram Stoker.

Walt Whitman. Dec. 22, ’87.

That was the last time I ever saw the man who for nearly twenty years had held my heart as a dear friend.