'Not at all too hot,' was his reply; and he
confided
to me that this was
one of his favourite places and attitudes for composing 'poems.
one of his favourite places and attitudes for composing 'poems.
Whitman
The best sketch that I know of Whitman as an accessible human individual is
that given by Mr. Conway. [4] I borrow from it the following few details.
"Having occasion to visit New York soon after the appearance of Walt
Whitman's book, I was urged by some friends to search him out. . . . The day
was excessively hot, the thermometer at nearly 100? , and the sun blazed
down as only on sandy Long Island can the sun blaze. . . . I saw stretched
upon his back, and gazing up straight at the terrible sun, the man I was
seeking. With his grey clothing, his blue-grey shirt, his iron-grey hair,
his swart sunburnt face and bare neck, he lay upon the brown-and-white
grass--for the sun had burnt away its greenness--and was so like the earth
upon which he rested that he seemed almost enough a part of it for one to
pass by without recognition. I approached him, gave my name and reason for
searching him out, and asked him if he did not find the sun rather hot.
'Not at all too hot,' was his reply; and he confided to me that this was
one of his favourite places and attitudes for composing 'poems. ' He then
walked with me to his home, and took me along its narrow ways to his room.
A small room of about fifteen feet square, with a single window looking out
on the barren solitudes of the island; a small cot; a wash-stand with a
little looking-glass hung over it from a tack in the wall; a pine table
with pen, ink, and paper on it; an old line-engraving representing Bacchus,
hung on the wall, and opposite a similar one of Silenus: these constituted
the visible environments of Walt Whitman. There was not, apparently, a
single book in the room. . . . The books he seemed to know and love best were
the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare: these he owned, and probably had in his
pockets while we were talking. He had two studies where he read; one was
the top of an omnibus, and the other a small mass of sand, then entirely
uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island. . . . The only
distinguished contemporary he had ever met was the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher,
of Brooklyn, who had visited him. . .
