Chapter VII (1)

At the end of October, 1856, Henry was asked to go down and survey an estate in New Jersey, giving some lectures at the same time. Alcott persuaded him to go. The two friends took the boat at Norwich, Connecticut, so as to reach New York by way of the Sound. Norwich was on the Thames: breezes blew there that seemed to come from afar.

Henry was leading a very dissipated life these days: visits to friends, expeditions, lectures. For here and there, outside of Concord, people were inviting him to come and utter those obscure or unpleasant truths that fell on the fallow ground of their understandings. It was all the same to him: he sowed as chance directed him, and the sower for his pains gathered in a little cash that had a more genuine ring in his ear than the applause of the audience.

Just two years before, during a brief trip to New York, Philadelphia and back to New York, he had had another glimpse of Horace Greeley who had taken him to the new Opera House to hear Grisi. (It was like a dream when you went to the theatre with a man as well-known as Greeley; you didn’t pay for your seat, and you even had a little usher to conduct you to your place as if you were the Ambassador from Brobdingnag.) He could offer as an excuse the long, long period of vegetation from which he was just emerging and the natural desire, as soon as he felt less limp, to get out and see a little of the world. And yet he reproached himself for this dissolute life. You see what it means to have a few dollars in your pocket at last; you squander them as fast as you can, just like the “fortunate ones of this world.” It’s a foolish business, and you will soon deserve to end your days at the Poor Farm with those half-witted souls whom one sees planted about the fields like boundary-posts at the foot of Brister’s Hill.

Surveying.... For he was not just treating himself to these delightful outings. He was obliged to earn his daily bread, even if he no longer baked it in the open air in the woods where its fragrance mingled so well with the aroma of the pines. Of all the various little manual trades that Henry had practised since his youth, surveying had turned out to be the most substantial and profitable. When they spoke of Henry in the village they now said: “Oh, yes, the surveyor....” You were free to suppose that there was a touch of malice in these words and that the good people really meant: “That fool who goes off every afternoon to survey the waste lands instead of making pencils with his father....” Well, perhaps they did mean this--not that it mattered to Henry. As for lecturing, that was just another way of surveying the waste lands, the swamps, property, propriety and the improprieties. It was even a preferable way, for it was much less trying to spin words than to drag the geometer’s chain.

A surveyor: not everybody can boast of becoming that at thirty-five, after having tried many other trades without any dazzling success. Henry was decidedly unjust in accusing his fellow-townsmen of not finding any use for his talents. The people of the village were very glad to turn to him when occasion arose, for they knew he was scrupulously exact in his measurements. To draw up a plan of other people’s land was to remain free to gather there what seemed good to himself, without the knowledge of the owner, whose only desire was to keep within his own little bounds. With his instruments, made to suit himself and partly with his own hands, the compass, the staff and the chain, Henry was ready to make surveys for anyone who asked him, whenever he had the time. It was often in the winter, the slack season on the farms, and then, when he was aiming at the staff, he could no longer distinguish so clearly against the snow the white trunks of the birches which were usually so useful. But the work occurred also at the season when he took off his coat for greater comfort. Sometimes it was a matter of a few days, sometimes an operation that required a week or two weeks of brisk work (a loafer turned then into a model workman ...). There were times, of course, when, in the face of this landscape that flouted them, he consigned all these boundaries, and all this business of fixing them, to the devil; naturally, but no layman could guess all the pleasure this work brought with it, aside from the routine and the wages.

In the first place, you must have a companion to carry the chain, set up the staff, etc. You shout something to your helper over there, and the echo joyously replies as if some practical joker had hidden himself to play a trick on you; whereupon you feel like shouting at the top of your lungs till the rascal shows his mug. And then, no matter how seriously you apply yourself to your work it cannot completely absorb you. You are out of doors and there are two of you; the helper is not always as stupid as a surveying-staff. Sometimes the work lies in the woods, where you are most at home; sometimes through a swamp where you sink in up to your knees. Then at noon you fish out of your pocket a bit of bread and cheese and have your lunch there on the ground. Or you happen to have a meal at your employer’s table with the farm-hands. If your employer is a fool, there is nothing for it but to hold your tongue and enjoy his vulgarity on a bit of bread for your dessert. If he is a really decent farmer, as some of them about here are after all, it is a pleasure to share his simple meal after these hours in the open. In the evening you are certainly tired, after having tramped about all day with your mind fixed on your work; you are much more tired than if you had come back from a long walk. But there is another self within you who is grateful for your rested nerves and head and who suddenly appears, after the day is over, refreshed and keen, ready to catch any sound and gather in any shade of beauty that is entirely free from toil and wages. No, no, you haven’t the slightest idea how light the surveyor’s chain is or how pleasant to carry through the woods or over the wet fields, compared with all those chains that I see you dragging about after you, my friends, condemned as you are to the “liberal professions”.... You don’t know how valuable it is for a writer to survey other people’s lands in this fashion; you don’t know how much else a man measures as he goes about, without the aid of the compass and the staff.

In the mid-winter of 1852-3, Henry had even given himself a stronger dose of surveying than he could have wished. In his finances the debits and credits were usually in a sound equilibrium, but at this time he found himself confronted with a large debt. He had to settle with the publisher for his book.

The matter was quite simple. They had printed a thousand copies and in three years had sold some two hundred. Since the cost of publishing had not been covered, the author remained in debt for the balance, according to the contract. It was all as smooth as silk. The method of publishing “at the author’s risk” is just as simple a bit of machinery as the “royalty” method: the only difference is that instead of receiving money you spend it. You see? There’s nothing complicated about that. Two hundred-odd copies sold of a work of which at least three reviews (in the _Athenæum_, the _Tribune_ and the _Massachusetts Quarterly_, all well-established publications) on all the press copies that had been sent out had served to launch it, was a very impressive result for an author who was making his debut before the public. But the summer before, after various disappointments in regard to articles on which he had built some reasonable hopes, the happy author, in order to meet a note that was falling due, had been obliged to borrow eighty dollars from his friend Horace Greeley--merely a small advance which he had expected to be able to repay shortly. A responsible magazine had just accepted his _Yankee in Canada_. And then, lo and behold, after printing the first part of it, without his name (houses like this are so discreet, you know), and adorned with fearful misprints, the magazine proposed, for the remainder, to exercise its right to make cuts--owing to certain bold statements that were too shocking for a respectable review. The author would not hear of this and simply demanded that his article should be returned to him, neither more nor less: in this way the sensibilities of the readers of _Putnam’s Magazine_ would not suffer and Henry would keep his manuscript intact for better days. As you please, dear editors. Literature was decidedly a paying business. Henry was sailing before the wind. Just one more little effort and he would get there.

But what was the use of cultivating sarcasm? The thing to do was to pay his debts. He didn’t owe Horace the whole State of California, but just the same the sum was large enough for a man who as a rule owned nothing in the world but his own joy in living, a stout pair of corduroy trousers and a boat. When you have hands you use them to pay your debts, instead of attempting, like a mere government, to make a new loan in order to pay off the first one. A man has more decency than a government. Manual labour is quite willing to pay for the loving labour of the soul.

With a will he set to work surveying in mid-winter for sixty, eighty days without intermission, at a dollar a day. To pay for that _Week on the Concord_ he spent fortnights tramping over the snow-covered ground, measuring and calculating, forgetting all about his reading, his Journal, everything. It was all in the day’s work. Penal servitude, if you like. But you take it in good part if you are a man. Deprivations like this toughen your hide. They are like a long journey into the land of trivialities--from which you never return empty-handed if you have the eye of a good huntsman; on your return, you have a better perception of some things, including your own naked self. Besides, if literature fed its servitors too well, wouldn’t it be setting a premium on obesity, on growing fat and flabby? That thought soon lightens the snow-clogged steps of a man who, while he spends a winter day surveying, is thinking all the time of the evening when he will relight his little stove in the attic and find himself alone once more with his abandoned meditations.... For the rest, these months of intensive geometry were only a stage along the road he would have to survey to be quits with the publisher. Two years before, to pay off a former instalment, he had had to set to work with all his might making pencils, grosses and grosses of them, which were worth hundreds of dollars. And then, unable to dispose of all this merchandise quickly enough, he found himself reduced to carting it to New York and selling the lot for a hundred dollars. A bad stroke of business, but what are you to do when you have to get hold of money at any price?... At the time he had even considered speculating on his friends the cranberries in order to meet that confounded debt. A vile thought, as vain as it was impious, for after looking up the market price in both Boston and New York he had quickly perceived that it was the same with cranberries as it was with pencils: those mean souls would only take them at the meanest price. And now, after these bouts of surveying, he had still to make up the full sum that was due to Munroe. It was costing him $290, that precious book.

But after all these troubles he had a substantial reward. For more than a year Munroe had been asking him what he should do with the unsold copies that were encumbering his basement. Space comes high in Boston, as you know. And Henry, who had nothing but his attic, had at last taken pity on his poor over-burdened publisher and told him to send all the unsold copies to Concord. So one fine day the express-wagon unloaded all this merchandise on the Thoreaus’ doorstep, like riches fallen from the skies. They kept pouring out of the wagon as if there were enough of these poor _Weeks_ to fill a century. Take them all, Henry; they are your property. They are like the waste lands; no one will dispute them with you. In the end the work returns to the worker. Isn’t that fair? Don’t despise your work. It is a weighty book. You will have the best proof of this presently when you lug these bundles up to the third floor. See, there’s the receipt--seven hundred and six copies--most of them in sheets. This Munroe is certainly an honest man.

And how imposing these piles are in your attic! Towering there, they humiliate your few beloved old odd volumes. The latter are quite taken aback at finding themselves all of a sudden the property of a rich man. An army of comrades, free and equal companions, has joined forces with them, and over them all you will henceforth reign, a sceptical and tolerant sovereign. They bear on their brows the stamp of fidelity, these newcomers. You can safely wager that they will be your companions for life. See how firmly their feet rest on the floor. Of course if some of them now and then are seized with a desire to travel you are not the man to hold them back; they are free. For now to his former trades Henry has added that of a bookseller. He will sell his book directly to admirers who send a small sum of money with their order. All he has to do is to tie up the package. There is no commission to be paid to any agent. This simplifies things so much. And the work acquires all the more value, coming straight from the writer without an intermediary. It is wrapped up and addressed by the author of the book in person, and thus you have an autograph in addition for the price of the volume. Purchasers, book-lovers with a real flair, what more do you want? You should order _Weeks_ by the dozen, ten, twenty copies at a time.... Stupid bibliophiles.

Two years went by before another surprise comparable to this befell the master of the library in the attic. It was another enormous bundle of books, but this time it came from across the sea. It smelt not of Munroe’s basement but of the hold of a transatlantic liner. A surprise from that English friend, the tall, fair-haired fellow with the silky beard who had boarded with the Thoreaus the year before and accompanied Henry on his walks. And what books! “Cholmley,” knowing Henry’s taste for the beautiful things of Asia, had sent him all the most famous Oriental books that he had been able to find. Good heavens, what an Arabian Nights’ dream!... The great sacred books of India, translated into English, French, Latin and Greek, and even some in Sanscrit.... This procession entered the house like the three Magi with their retinue, bearers of gifts for heaven knew what new-born being ... forty-four rare volumes, most of them not to be found on a continent that was prodigal in corn and wheat but not in fruits of this kind ... things of which you had dreamed and that appealed to you so powerfully, and now here they were, right under your hand, day and night.... The Hindu side by side with the Indian, your nearest kindred touching one another! Precious stones flashing their fire about your den, lighting up the pale arrow-heads. I can laugh at you now, pretentious libraries!

At first Henry was simply astounded by this patrician generosity, which had gathered together all these treasures for him; astounded by all these illustrious personages who surrounded him, who had come from the other end of the world as friends, come with their veiled faces, great black eyes, wide with dreams, their dark skins, strange faces, slow gestures, to offer the son of a pencilmaker the flower of their wisdom so that he might place it among the flowers of his own country. But the sages of the Orient smiled at the seven hundred _Weeks_ and did not seem to be in the least offended by the pile of nuts in the corner of the little room. Henry soon felt quite at home beside them, and all these presences, the new and the old, mingled in one friendship in the warmth of the old stove.

But when you have distinguished visitors who have made a long voyage in the belly of an ocean liner, you must offer them lodgings that are worthy of them. Henry had some well-seasoned wood, gathered along the river, and he had tools. For these beautiful books he was going to make a new bookcase, a bookcase of honour that would be a sort of Asiatic province royally accommodated on the third floor of the house on Main Street.

There could never be any question of repaying the magnificent Thomas such a debt of gratitude as this. Whole seasons of surveying would not be enough. But he did send him a few American books, among them a novelty--not a rarity, for nobody bought it--that scandalized its few readers, a bewildering book, powerful as a buffalo, multitudinous as a seaport, torrential, insolent, shameless. Henry regarded it as a work of the grandest kind. Emerson also. Thomas would see. A purely American product and, what was astonishing, something that made you think of the Orient. It was written in Biblical verse, like the Song of Songs or the Rig-Veda, and it had the strange title, _Leaves of Grass_. The book was not signed. A very slender present, you see, friend “Cholmley.” You must tell me what you think of my buffalo.

In a den where stones, birds’ eggs and plants had long swamped the books there was now almost an affluence of tops and backs. Among the newcomers there was one which had arrived all alone, quite modestly, the year between the two surprises. It had not come as a surprise, however; it was an expected visitor. It entered there familiarly, as if it had come back from a journey and knew the ways of the house and the fellow who lived there. Its name was Walden. But it was not a pond. It was Henry’s latest born. A responsible publisher had taken charge of it; and this time there was no need to run into debt or do surveying for the sake of a book which the author was the only one to love. The name of Ticknor covered it like a flag.

To be sure, there was no wild scramble to buy it. But it sold a little. And responses came to the unknown author; new friends rose out of the ground along his path. You write a book for your own pleasure, without thought of any good or harm it may do, and lo and behold, it sets out alone, in its own right, and makes conquests for you all over the world. Is it possible that you wrote a book in order to discover your friends? It is as if the book were grateful to you for having brought it to light and courteously wished to show its gratitude.

It bears under its title a picture of the cabin (the poor cabin that will never again be able to gossip with the pines--it is doing penance now in the bean-field). It is a book that carries a cabin across the world and invites you to enter and inspect it and inhale the resinous fragrance. It will not carry you off to dance for a week on the water in a nut-shell. It requests your company on a ramble around a transparent pond where you can contemplate your own image in water that is clearer than your mirror. It is not Narcissus that you will see there, returning your own smile to you, but the face of a man who is studying the curious effect of his big nose in the water.

Between Henry’s two offspring there have been more than five years of growth. Although they have both been nourished on the same sap that has been accumulating for fifteen years in the Journal, _Walden_ is the book of a writer who has reached his full stride--a little too full, if you like--with the same unpardonable waywardness in his composition. You will never turn a pate like that into the saw-mill of a _littérateur_. Well then, call him a liberator instead. That is the way Henry himself expresses it.

* * * * *

To return, then, towards the end of October, 1856, the surveyor set out with all his paraphernalia for Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He didn’t want to pass through New York without seeing that good Greeley, but not finding him at his newspaper office he walked up Broadway, meeting a friend, and then went and settled himself in the Astor Library. You can’t study these great brawling cities as you can study a book in a sanctuary of silence; coming from Concord, you are deafened by the ’busses and the trampling crowds. Whither are all those feet rushing? Who is waiting for them at their appointed meeting-places? That is, unless these people are not all simply out of their heads. Here is a blissful refuge! Let’s go and sit down for a while and read.

Perth Amboy, on Raritan Bay, faces the island, shaped like a bunch of grapes, that recalls to Henry the rather melancholy days when he was a tutor. A mile and a quarter from the town a friend of Margaret Fuller’s, Marcus Spring, whom he had seen on his journey to find the poor woman’s remains, owned some property: the estate was situated on the edge of the bay and was called Eagleswood. They had tried to start a phalanstery there, and now the eagles had gathered to establish a “colony.”

The question was one of drawing up plans for the future village, a very proper task for a surveyor who had come expressly from Concord. When you happen to know a good surveyor, nothing can be more natural than to have recourse to his compass. Henry’s friends had not forgotten him--for instance, there was Marston Watson, who had asked him two years before to come and survey his park on the hillside above Plymouth (no need of a helper that time, for Alcott himself, with his tall frame, platonically carried the chain, assisted by the owner in person). Henry assuredly had very noble friends who not only appreciated his talents but loaded him down with little gifts: in the space of a few days had he not received from Marston, who had presented him with those magnificent big glow-worms the previous summer, some pear-trees the very name of which was like a juicy fruit that melted in your mouth, and a hummingbird’s nest from Blake, and a box of mayflowers from somebody else? Quite apart from the Christmas season, the express-company evidently had permanent agencies in fairyland.

The surveyor set to work, plunged into the woods and salt marshes, regardless of rips and tears; before each meal it took him fifteen minutes to pick off the burs that clung to him. These are the little pleasures of the trade. While it awaits the promised village, Eagleswood contains an old farmhouse and a big stone building, together with Marcus Spring’s private residence, and it glories in some shops and offices and a school where the teaching is done by various dignified greybeards. Rather too many people and rather too much dignity to suit the taste of Henry, who prefers the informality of the burs; and creditable as the work may be, he longs to have done with it and get home again. There is an accursed wood-pigeon that begins to coo every night at the slightest sound from the house. Perhaps it is the former janitor of the phalanstery.

Yes, the work begins to drag, and he cannot drop it because it has been entrusted to him. Nor does the society of these worthy greybeards, the atmosphere of the “colony,” offer any great attraction. The big city, where Alcott has stayed behind, is close at hand, and Henry feels like a molecule subject to the law of gravitation. He longs to make a trip to New York and go and see his friend and have a little vacation from these old fossils. Just for one little week-end. On Friday, November 7th, he enters Alcott’s room and finds a guest there, to whom he is introduced, John Swinton. This young man, a delightful fellow, full of fire and revolutionary instinct, is a good friend of the author of _Leaves of Grass_. Do tell us something about your friend. Alcott has already seen this Walt Whitman who sounds his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Henry is most anxious to meet him.

To-day he is invited to go with Alcott to a certain lady’s house, but he means to let his friend go alone: a drawing-room and a lady in New York must be very much like a lady and a drawing-room anywhere else. He knows all about such things even at Concord, in a small way, and he has very little desire to see them in a large.

The next day they meet Horace Greeley at the station and go and spend the day at his farm at Chappaqua. For every Saturday the editor-in-chief of the _Tribune_ shakes the dust of the city and his editorial office off his feet and hurries out to look after his little farm, of which he is very proud (his turnips have taken the prize at the County Fair). A friend, the poetess Alice Cary, is also one of the party. For some ten years Horace has more than once shown his friendship for Henry; he would have liked very much to keep him in his family as a tutor for his children. (Horace is a great man who has already had a big book written about him in his own lifetime, and Henry is fond of him and grateful for all the attention he shows a little village scribbler, but ... but to give up once more that precious independence, to leave Concord where there are so many friends, from Easterbrook to Nine Acre Corner, who have only himself to count upon ... no, never, Horace must excuse him....) At Chappaqua the guests admire the crops and the farm-buildings, but when he sees how much trouble and expense it has cost the owner to transform swamp-land into fertile ground, Henry remarks to himself how much more attractive a beautiful swamp is than a model farm. And they come back to town for the night.

It is Sunday, and they cannot begin the Lord’s Day better than by going to hear an astonishing man who is preaching at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. There are crowds to listen to him, crowds that have come there to be thrilled by this magician who makes them turn pale, laugh, weep or exult as he wills, as if he were developing and unfolding before them the most moving drama. But it is not the art of an actor, even the greatest actor, that makes such an impression here; it is an elemental force. It is such a beautiful spectacle in that pulpit that you forget you are in the presence of a churchman. He is something better than that--a man, Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet, author of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. Henry thinks this other Henry deserves to be called a pagan; the whole ghastly race of preachers is forgotten, the setting of the church disappears, a great wind has passed over these people to purify and uplift them, like a rush of autumn leaves. Henry is thoroughly delighted.

Such a capital Sunday must have a worthy finish. Suppose they go and see Walt Whitman, since he lives in Brooklyn? So, after lunching with a lady who knows Alcott, the two companions set out for his house. Here’s Portland Avenue, where the buffalo lives, and here is his number. Disillusionment; he has gone out. The mother, with her kind face, tells them this and asks them to come in. Henry has a mother too over yonder, a lively mother who would be only too happy to talk to two visitors who had come to see her son; and she too would be unlikely to say anything unkind to them about her boy. He thinks of her as he listens to this smiling woman of sixty, as simply dressed as a farmer’s wife, uttering a maternal eulogy on her son Walter. These gentlemen have come to see him because he is the author of a book; and she, who is the author of the author of the book, can only tell them how proud she is of this son, and how much he means to his brothers and sisters, and what a blessing his presence is to them all at home. “If you can come back to-morrow morning, not too late, you will be sure to find him, for he will be very sorry to have missed you to-day.” All right, Mother Whitman, we shall be back to-morrow, and thank you for your welcome. We have not seen your Walter, but in the little wrinkles about your eyes and lips there is something that seems to foretell what he is like.

On Monday morning there are three of them to take the ferry and make their way to Portland Avenue, through streets that sound like a country town after the jam they have left; a lady from Philadelphia has asked to go with them. They knock at the door and are invited to come in just as they were the day before. Walter is at home, expecting them. Presently the three visitors are sitting face to face with a great hairy, ruddy animal, who has nothing sinister about him at all. Strange, this fellow is simplicity itself and everything in the room is quite ordinary, but from the very first instant, seeing him planted there, you think of a great sailing ship at sea or of a beautiful tall tree in summer. You would think you were out of doors. Henry feels quite at home in a house where you drink in the fresh air as freely as you do the friendly glass on the table.

It is a house like many other houses that has gathered under its roof to-day Walt and Henry, the Manhattanese and the Concordian.... But the walls of the house still stand, they bear up bravely under the shock. It is roomy, the Whitmans’ house, and built by the hand of a clever workman, as strong as if the father, who died last year, had set up the frame himself. But that muffled sound which echoes and rolls away, very far away, is the detonation of these mingling spirits, though no one hears anything in the house or the neighbourhood but the sounds of a quiet street.

Four persons are talking together as friends in the innocence of Monday morning, three of them observing and the other, without the least embarrassment, allowing himself to be observed. The appointments of the room, the old, worn furniture which has known so many dwellings are swallowed up in this masculine figure, which is enigmatic because of its very nonchalance and abundant ease. There are so many questions one might address to the high vault of that pronounced eyebrow, the right one. The visitors ask him this and that, seeking to penetrate beneath the brick-coloured skin of the enigma, tanned by all the suns of Long Island; all constraint has vanished, so complete is the absence of ceremony in the man they have come to see, so strong his expression of virile goodness. In a rich, musical voice, in direct, everyday words, he speaks of what he loves--the ever-changing crowds of his city, the ebb and flow at the foot of those cliffs with their myriad windows, the human flood rolling through the ferry-boats, the stages, the popular theatres, the squares. The enigma does not give up its secret, but it becomes more and more attractive. Henry also has loves that he might confess, but he only asks the lover of the poetry of the streets if he has read the great Oriental poems. “No, tell me about them....” It is an encounter in which each puts out these verbal feelers. Their words are less clear perhaps than their attitudes and the expressions of their faces. But the visitors do not dream of going away.

How had Henry pictured to himself the Manhattanese, “eating, drinking and breeding,” of the _Leaves_--“one of the roughs”? Perhaps he had not pictured him at all. Perhaps he had thought that this rude sketch was only the fantasy of a poet who was enamoured of bright colours and had no prototype in reality. However this may have been, there was the “rough” before him. And he was beautiful, a little coarse, but beautiful. With that whole person, in its radiance of life and vigour, Walt signed his book, signed it with a far more striking truthfulness than the portrait he had used as a frontispiece. Here was the flesh and the blood and the colour. Henry looked and looked again, seeking to fathom the nature of the radiance that passed over him in the presence of the phenomenon. He did not challenge this thing that bathed him and seemed to make him float; he noted his reactions, that was all. This fellow had too much blood in him, perhaps. Perched on a stage beside the driver, amid the hubbub of Broadway, did he not shout out verses as if he were alone on some beach! A wild man indeed!--but with a wildness that did not intimidate Henry’s, like that sullen summit of Ktaadn, but stirred his curiosity, provoked him. That strong aroma of masculine health, which he smelled, did not tell him very much. But how did it happen that with this luxuriance of the flesh, which was brutal enough to be offensive, there mingled an exquisite perfume that utterly defied your power to define it? With a disconcerting naturalness this big fellow spoke or listened (he was a most astonishing listener) as this invitation emanated from his ruddy body to the three others--the tall fellow, the little fellow and the lady sitting opposite: “Do take as much of my health as you like. You can see I shall always have enough. Call this irritating, if you like, but it’s quite real; and mine is a presence that does not wait for your consent to warm you.”

Henry, with his habit of absorbing phenomena, sits there, all eyes--with those eyes that know how to look--seeking to understand, to pierce to the bottom. Henry, the dry little animal, all nerves and tendons, with his drooping shoulders and his narrow chest (look at that great thorax over there, ready for any fist to strike it, where the weariest head might lie without covering it ...); Henry, with his receding chin, lost in the little apish beard which he is allowing to grow just now, his pursed lips, his big, contemptuous nose, his absorbed, reflective, alert air, his whole life gazing with implacable seriousness out of the blue-grey windows of those eyes that are so round, sagacious, keen, vigilant, shining with perpetual use like a spade; Henry whose lean body refuses to speak for his soul, with his frail health and his tempered will, crouching behind his own glance like a hunter on his knees in some thicket, face to face with this demi-god beaming with nonchalance and carnal opulence; Henry, saturated with the woodland life of his village, beside this other whose soul is peopled with his own Broadway.... And each is trying to catch the scent of the other.

With his rather sluggish glance, the big animal absorbs the little as he absorbs everything--tranquilly. He accepts without any mental reservations these friendly people who have come to see him--the tall man, the short man and the lady; there is room for them too in his universe. The Leaves exclude no one from their shadow; they spread out as far as Concord and Philadelphia. He is happy to welcome them, though he sees nothing in them that particularly surprises him. He lets them talk, as his way is, draws his own profit from what the speakers say and replies without opening himself particularly or abandoning his reserve. These two birds have come from the land of phantoms. They are intellectuals, bred in the colleges. Not much of a recommendation in his eyes. It would never occur to you to say to this lanky New Englander: “Henry, let’s go and have a drink.” He’s not cut out for a comrade. Just the same, these fellows are friends of the man to whom he owes enough to call him “master” and who has written, thanking him for his book, that unforgettable letter which he always carries there in his pocket, like a patent of nobility. They are two Yankees, one of whom has begun to sing for himself, who have come on a pilgrimage to greet the boys of Manhattan.

The great animal is not insensible to such an homage and he accepts it cordially, in the name of his own people, as a wholesome response. But Walt’s interest is not aroused. Henry, on his part, would have dearly liked to be alone with this extraordinary fellow so that the two of them might start one of those talks like his old talks in the cabin, when some full-minded friend came to see him and not a syllable that was not sonorous echoed between the plank walls. But there are four of them and the conversation begins to wander. They don’t get hold of one another, and what a pity it is! For surely they have things to say to one another that are worth saying, points of contact they might establish together. Henry’s big grey-blue eyes express this wish and this regret. For isn’t it vexatious to be face to face with such a huge puzzle and not be able to grasp it and turn it round so as to discover in the end, as likely as not, that the same flame burns in that big chest and under that narrow, grouse-like throat? Isn’t it? _Isn’t_ it?

(Ah, my two friends, the future opens out, furrowed with very different paths from this hour that brings you together here.... You have decades to live still, Walt.... You are to pass through the horrors of the great war; you are to see it lying on beds of torture and to be tortured yourself. Will you then be the man who stood for a fight to the finish? In your great ripe heart, a comradeship as ardent as love will have seized upon you, so painful that you will flee from the world, you will take flight with your sorrow by paths untrodden to the shores of pond waters, to gather the fragrant calamus root--(it grows also on the shores of Walden Pond)--and partake of it mystically with your known and unknown friends.... And then, when you are past the age for stormy passions, you will find one day the Passage to India: that little chap found it long ago, you big simpleton.... And many other discoveries are reserved for the consolation of your mellow age: after so many other things have lost their lustre, the trees, the seasons and the skies will offer you their balm and you will voluptuously anoint yourself with it, bathing in the mud of Timber Creek to ease your aching body. Then you will take more pleasure in a squirrel’s play than in the shuffling feet of crowds. And how well you will understand the thought of that old chap who said that he was seldom less alone than when alone! Yes, and then, as you approach your sixtieth year, you will seek by a little pond what men refuse you, and you will find it, and you will be stirred through and through with gratitude, my friend.... And the day will come when, as an old gaffer leaning on a stick, you will visit Concord and receive a whole-hearted welcome in the land of phantoms at a time when the land of the living rejects you, and you will step down from your friend’s carriage and add your stone to the cairn that marks the spot of Henry’s cabin.... You will have your florid complexion still, set off by the bushy, snow-white beard that adorns it.... And you will still be the same Walt, enjoying this miraculous life and rejecting nothing. You will simply have come to understand certain things....

The future opens out, and in the distant perspective paths take shape where your feet, my friends, have left their prints.... Is it possible that lovers like you should never, never meet there? Listen.... How strange it is!... You might think you were listening to words that cross one another.... Does it not sound like an intermittent dialogue in which two voices reply back and forth over some field that catches their harmony?

HENRY:--He would be a poet who ... nailed words to their primitive
senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the
frost has heaved ... whose words were so true and fresh and
natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the
approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between
two musty leaves in a library,--ay, to bloom and bear fruit
there, after their kind, for the faithful reader ...

WALT:--Roots and leaves themselves alone are these.... Frost-mellow’d
berries and Third-month twigs offer’d fresh to young persons
wandering out in the fields when the winter breaks up,

Love-buds put before you and within you whoever you are,

Buds to be unfolded on the old terms.

If you bring the warmth of the sun to them they will open and
bring form, colour, perfume, to you,

If you become the aliment and the wet they will become flowers,
fruits, tall branches and trees.

HENRY:--True verses come toward us indistinctly, as the very breath
of all friendliness, and envelop us in their spirit and
fragrance.... There are two classes of men called poets.
The one cultivates life, the other art--one seeks food for
nutriment, the other for flavour.... The true poem is not
that which the public reads. There is always a poem not
printed on paper ...

WALT:--Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my
poem ...

HENRY:--It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test
of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

WALT:--Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by
trees, stars, rivers ...

HENRY:--I would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for
walkers, and will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted
in the house.

WALT:--I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a
house ...

If you would understand me go to the heights or watershore ...

HENRY:--When I stand in a library ... Alas! that so soon the work of
a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

WALT:--... in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or
dead ...

HENRY:--The very names of the commodities ... poetic, and as
suggestive as if they had been inserted in a pleasing
poem--Lumber, Cotton, Sugar, Hides, Guano, Logwood.

WALT:--Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar,
rice!

Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp!...

HENRY:--I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts
will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky--our
understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our
plains--our intellect generally on a grander scale, like ...
our rivers and mountains and forests--and our hearts shall
even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our
inland seas.

WALT:--... a bard is to be commensurate with a people ... he
incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and
lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes,
Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and St. Lawrence with the
Falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where
they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him ...

HENRY:--There are poets of all kinds and degrees, little known to
each other.... I meet these gods of the river and woods with
sparkling faces (like Apollo’s), late from the House of
Correction, it may be.... What care I to see galleries full
of representations of heathen gods, when I can see actual
living ones by an infinitely superior artist?

WALT:--Accepting the rough deific sketches ...

Discovering as much or more in a framer framing a house,

Putting higher claims for him there with his roll’d-up sleeves
driving the mallet and chisel ...

Lads ... no less to me than the gods of the antique wars ...

HENRY:--There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life
that men lead anywhere.... By another spring I may be a
mail-carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a
Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the
Columbia River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in
Florida, or a mackerel fisher off Cape Sable, or a Robinson
Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent navigator of any sea....
These are but few of my chances, and how many more things may
I do with which there are none to be compared!

WALT:--I am a real Parisian ...

I am a habitan of Vienna ...

I am of Adelaide ...

I am of London ...

I am of Madrid ...

I belong in Moscow ... or in some street in Iceland ...

HENRY:--Whatever is, and is not ashamed to be, is good.

WALT:--I am enamour’d of growing outdoors ...

HENRY:--When I look at the stars, nothing which the astronomers have
said attaches to them, they are so simple and remote.

WALT:--When I heard the learn’d astronomer ...

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself ...

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

HENRY:--A name pronounced is the recognition of the individual to
whom it belongs. He who can pronounce my name aright, he can
call me, and is entitled to my love and service.

WALT:--What am I after all but a child, pleas’d with the sound of my
own name? repeating it over and over ...

HENRY:--You may have the extraordinary for your province, if you
will; let me have the ordinary.

WALT:--The Commonplace I sing ...

And the rest of the dialogue is lost in the distance like the path on which the two drinkers of space have walked a little of the way together, before taking their separate roads, one in this direction, the other in that.

Yes, there are these lost paths that both have trodden, paths where they have only never met because one has followed them a few hours, a few seasons before the other. It is a thousand pities, my friends. If you had encountered each other once, not under the roof of a house in Brooklyn, during a call, but in the fields, while you, Henry, were surveying, or on a beach after the two of you had been bathing in the sea, how much the sand and the tufts of grass would have helped you to the beautiful understanding that is impossible for you now, Henry, withdrawn as you are in your shell, and for you, Walt, great unconscious animal that you are.

But after all, these dreams do not cover an atom of the reality that is in you. How much better it is that the future should close again, that you, Walt, should be there in the house on Portland Avenue with your mother and your family (cherish them, they are so dear to you), ruddy and strong, and that the roar of Broadway should murmur in your ears! How much better it is that you should be there, good soul that you are, the youngest of the three, with your thirty-seven years and your perfect health, your intransigence, your youthful, inordinate faith, and that this little creature should not interest you too much. These are not imaginary beings here but four very ordinary persons of solid flesh and blood, and how much better it is that they are!)

* * * * *

In the course of the conversation, Walt, speaking of his friends, the young fellows of the capital, to whom he owes even more than he owes to Emerson, and of the place they hold in his poems, expresses his conviction that they are America, Democracy, the key of the politics of the New World. At this the tight-lipped Henry discharges a cutting remark. They are the mob, and the mob is like peat. It may give out any amount of heat, but it smokes, it reeks, it goes to your head. A fellow who can make a fire of stumps in a clearing doesn’t care to warm himself at any such blaze as that. The mob, universal suffrage, the rabble marching in procession over the pavements of a big city or wallowing like pigs to keep warm in the litter of a stable.... Can you see that clamorous rout of human insects crowding into the porch of those great W’s that rise at the threshold of your name, Walt Whitman? Don’t you want to close the portal?

And the son of Manhattan says to himself: “That fellow certainly comes from the land of mummies. Those New England people have plenty of brains--if only the gods had given them a little more guts. That clever little devil will never be bowled over by the music of the bugles that grips your very vitals, or the pride of belonging to such a brawny country. He’s too skinny, the poor little chap.”

Walt, though he conceals it, has been wounded to the quick in his affections. The America of his poems is not looking for the homage of apostles like this: it is a lively, warm-blooded America that responds to the passion of males. Walt calmly faces the cold disdain expressed by this little shrimp for a Person whom he loves with a terrible love, not separating the good from the evil. “You don’t understand me,” he says simply. From that moment he is enlightened. They can go on talking amicably enough. Henry can say anything he likes, black or white; Walt has taken his measure. The “no” has worked. A thunderbolt has suddenly dissipated the fog that veiled a gulf between them immensely wider than the East River which the visitors have crossed.

Would you imagine that such a chasm could yawn between two beings who are talking quietly there in a house on Portland Avenue--an apparently impassable chasm, in spite of all the foot-bridges that reach from one to the other?... Between two poets who are united in a sovereign contempt for the literature of the literati--two plebeians, each in his own way--two children who go forth every day, one of whom could no more do without his daily walk on the populous pavements where, from their glances, he gathers in the affection of men and women, than the other could do without his ramble among the people of the trees, the plants and the waters of Concord, with the track of the railroad for his Broadway between trains--two loafers who have remained free and unmarried for “reasons”--both of them drawing as it were from a spring of elemental joy--both passionate idealists who, with equal cheerfulness, might so easily “go and live with animals”--both mystics, with a great appetite for the concrete--both affirming to the point of arrogance their quality as individuals--both equally secretive and reticent--both great friends of the Indian--both poor in money and refusing to earn the bread of galley-slaves--both having to record the practical failure of their first books, printed at their own expense (lucky Henry has disposed of more than two hundred copies of his, while as for that big fellow, his sales can be counted on his ten fingers ...)? Yet there they are, looking at each other, from opposite banks, while the tumultuous tide rushes down between them, scouting the frail bridges they have attempted to fling across its violence. And what an uproar fills the Narrows, as if to affirm that for all time the continent and the island shall remain as they are, two separate worlds!