Specimen Days & Collect

by Walt Whitman

  § “On the visit of General Lafayette to this country, in 1824, he came over to Brooklyn in state, and rode through the city. The children of the schools turn’d out to join in the welcome. An edifice for a free public library for youths was just then commencing, and Lafayette consented to stop on his way and lay the corner-stone. Numerous children arriving on the ground, where a huge irregular excavation for the building was already dug, surrounded with heaps of rough stone, several gentlemen assisted in lifting the children to safe or convenient spots to see the ceremony. Among the rest, Lafayette, also helping the children, took up the five-year-old Walt Whitman, and pressing the child a moment to his breast, and giving him a kiss, handed him down to a safe spot in the excavation.” —John Burroughs.

  ǁ Of the Brooklyn of that time (1830–40) hardly anything remains, except the lines of the old streets. The population was then between ten and twelve thousand. For a mile Fulton street was lined with magnificent elm trees. The character of the place was thoroughly rural. As a sample of comparative values, it may be mention’d that twenty-five acres in what is now the most costly part of the city, bounded by Flatbush and Fulton avenues, were then bought by Mr. Parmentier, a French emigré, for $4,000. Who remembers the old places as they were? Who remembers the old citizens of that time? Among the former were Smith & Wood’s, Coe Downing’s, and other public houses at the ferry, the old Ferry itself, Love lane, the Heights as then, the Wallabout with the wooden bridge, and the road out beyond Fulton street to the old toll-gate. Among the latter were the majestic and genial General Jeremiah Johnson, with others, Gabriel Furman, Rev. E. M. Johnson, Alden Spooner, Mr. Pierrepont, Mr. Joralemon, Samuel Willoughby, Jonathan Trotter, George Hall, Cyrus P. Smith, N. B. Morse, John Dikeman, Adrian Hegeman, William Udall, and old Mr. Duflon, with his military garden.

  a MR. GARFIELD (In the House of Representatives, April 15, ’79.) “Do gentlemen know that (leaving out all the border States) there were fifty regiments and seven companies of white men in our army fighting for the Union from the States that went into rebellion? Do they know that from the single State of Kentucky more Union soldiers fought under our flag than Napoleon took into the battle of Waterloo? more than Wellington took with all the allied armies against Napoleon? Do they remember that 186,000 color’d men fought under our flag against the rebellion and for the Union, and that of that number 90,000 were from the States which went into rebellion?”

  b In the U.S. Surgeon-General’s office since, there is a formal record and treatment of 253,142 cases of wounds by government surgeons. What must have been the number unofficial, indirect—to say nothing of the Southern armies?

  c From a review of “Andersonville, A Story of Southern Military Prisons,” published serially in the “Toledo Blade,” in 1879, and afterwards in book form.

  “There is a deep fascination in the subject of Andersonville—for that Golgotha, in which lie the whitening bones of 13,000 gallant young men, represents the dearest and costliest sacrifice of the war for the preservation of our national unity. It is a type, too, of its class. Its more than hundred hecatombs of dead represent several times that number of their brethren, for whom the prison gates of Belle Isle, Danville, Salisbury, Florence, Columbia, and Cahaba open’d only in eternity. There are few families in the North who have not at least one dear relative or friend among these 60,000 whose sad fortune it was to end their service for the Union by lying down and dying for it in a southern prison pen. The manner of their death, the horrors that cluster’d thickly around every moment of their existence, the loyal, unfaltering steadfastness with which they endured all that fate had brought them, has never been adequately told. It was not with them as with their comrades in the field, whose every act was perform’d in the presence of those whose duty it was to observe such matters and report them to the world. Hidden from the view of their friends in the north by the impenetrable veil which the military operations of the rebels drew around the so-called confederacy, the people knew next to nothing of their career or their sufferings. Thousands died there less heeded even than the hundreds who perish’d on the battle-field. Grant did not lose as many men kill’d outright, in the terrible campaign from the Wilderness to the James river—43 days of desperate fighting—as died in July and August at Andersonville. Nearly twice as many died in that prison as fell from the day that Grant cross’d the Rapidan, till he settled down in the trenches before Petersburg. More than four times as many Union dead lie under the solemn soughing pines about that forlorn little village in southern Georgia, than mark the course of Sherman from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The nation stands aghast at the expenditure of life which attended the two bloody campaigns of 1864, which virtually crush’d the confederacy, but no one remembers that more Union soldiers died in the rear of the rebel lines than were kill’d in the front of them. The great military events which stamp’d out the rebellion drew attention away from the sad drama which starvation and disease play’d in those gloomy pens in the far recesses of sombre southern forests.”

  From a letter of “Johnny Bouquet,” in N. Y. Tribune, March 27, ’81.

  “I visited at Salisbury, N. C., the prison pen or the site of it, from which nearly 12,000 victims of southern politicians were buried, being confined in a pen without shelter, exposed to all the elements could do, to all the disease herding animals together could create, and to all the starvation and cruelty an incompetent and intense caitiff government could accomplish. From the conversation and almost from the recollection of the northern people this place has dropp’d, but not so in the gossip of the Salisbury people, nearly all of whom say that the half was never told; that such was the nature of habitual outrage here that when Federal prisoners escaped the townspeople harbor’d them in their barns, afraid the vengeance of God would fall on them, to deliver even their enemies back to such cruelty. Said one old man at the Boyden House, who join’d in the conversation one evening: ‘There were often men buried out of that prison pen still alive. I have the testimony of a surgeon that he has seen them pull’d out of the dead cart with their eyes open and taking notice, but too weak to lift a finger. There was not the least excuse for such treatment, as the confederate government had seized every sawmill in the region, and could just as well have put up shelter for these prisoners as not, wood being plentiful here. It will be hard to make any honest man in Salisbury say that there was the slightest necessity for those prisoners having to live in old tents, caves and holes half-full of water. Representations were made to the Davis government against the officers in charge of it, but no attention was paid to them. Promotion was the punishment for cruelty there. The inmates were skeletons. Hell could have no terrors for any man who died there, except the inhuman keepers.’ ”

  d Without apology for the abrupt change of field and atmosphere—after what I have put in the preceding fifty or sixty pages—temporary episodes, thank heaven!—I restore my book to the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.

  Who knows, (I have it in my fancy, my ambition,) but the pages now ensuing may carry ray of sun, or smell of grass or corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snow-flakes falling fresh and mystic, to denizen of heated city house, or tired workman or workwoman?—or may-be in sick-room or prison—to serve as cooling breeze, or Nature’s aroma, to some fever’d mouth or latent pulse.

  e There is a tulip poplar within sight of Woodstown, which is twenty feet around, three feet from the ground, four feet across about eighteen feet up the trunk, which is broken off about three or four feet higher up. On the south side an arm has shot out from which rise two stems, each to about ninety-one or ninety-two feet from the ground. Twenty-five (or more) years since, the cavity in the butt was large enough for, and nine men at one time, ate dinner therein. It is supposed twelve to fifteen men could now, at one time, stand within its trunk. The severe winds of 1877 and 1878 did not seem to damage it, and the two stems send out yearly many blosso
ms, scenting the air immediately about it with their sweet perfume. It is entirely unprotected by other trees, on a hill.—Woodstown, N. J., “Register,” April 15, ’79.

  f In the pocket of my receptacle-book I find a list of suggested and rejected names for this volume, or parts of it—such as the following:

  As the wild bee hums in May,

  & August mulleins grow,

  & Winter snow-flakes fall,

  & stars in the sky roll round.

  Away from Books—away from Art,

  Now for the Day and Night—the lesson done,

  Now for the Sun and Stars.

  Notes of a half-Paralytic,

  Week in and Week out,

  Embers of Ending Days,

  Ducks and Drakes,

  Flood Tide and Ebb,

  Gossip at Early Candle-light,

  Echoes and Escapades,

  Such as I..… Evening Dews,

  Notes after Writing a Book,

  Far and Near at 63,

  Drifts and Cumulus,

  Maize-Tassels..… Kindlings,

  Fore and Aft..… Vestibules,

  Scintilla at 60 and after,

  Sands on the Shores of 64,

  As Voices in the Dusk,

  from Speakers far or hid,

  Autochthons..… Embryons,

  Wing-and-Wing,

  Notes and Recallés,

  Only Mulleins and Bumble-Bees,

  Pond-Babble..… Tête-a-Têtes,

  Echoes of a Life in the 10th Century in

  the New World,

  Flanges of Fifty Years,

  Abandons..… Hurry Notes,

  A Life-Mosaic..… Native Moments,

  Types and Semi-Tones,

  Oddments..… Sand-Drifts,

  Again and Again.

  g It will be difficult for the future—judging by his books, personal dissympathies, &c.,—to account for the deep hold this author has taken on the present age, and the way he has color’d its method and thought. I am certainly at a loss to account for it all as affecting myself. But there could be no view, or even partial picture, of the middle and latter part of our Nineteenth century, that did not markedly include Thomas Carlyle. In his case (as so many others, literary productions, works of art, personal identities, events,) there has been an impalpable something more effective than the palpable. Then I find no better text, (it is always important to have a definite, special, even oppositional, living man to start from,) for sending out certain speculations and comparisons for home use. Let us see what they amount to—those reactionary doctrines, fears, scornful analyses of democracy—even from the most erudite and sincere mind of Europe.

  h Not the least mentionable part of the case, (a streak, it may be, of that humor with which history and fate love to contrast their gravity,) is that although neither of my great authorities during their lives consider’d the United States worthy of serious mention, all the principal works of both might not inappropriately be this day collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: “Speculations for the use of North America, and Democracy there, with the relations of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the New.”

  i I hope I shall not myself fall into the error I charge upon him, of prescribing a specific for indispensable evils. My utmost pretension is probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims, and general movement and result, of ideas. Something of the latter kind seems to me the distinctive theory of America, of democracy, and of the modern—or rather, I should say, it is democracy, and is the modern.

  j I am much indebted to J. Gostick’s abstract.

  k I have deliberately repeated it all, not only in offset to Carlyle’s ever-lurking pessimism and world-decadence, but as presenting the most thoroughly American points of view I know. In my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Germany, or in the old world at all. While a Carlyle, I should say, is quite the legitimate European product to be expected.

  l Samples of my common-place book down at the creek:

  I have—says old Pindar—many swift arrows in my quiver which speak to the wise, though they need an interpreter to the thoughtless.

  Such a man as it takes ages to make, and ages to understand.

  H. D. Thoreau.

  If you hate a man, don’t kill him, but let him live. —Buddhistic.

  Famous swords are made of refuse scraps, thought worthless.

  Poetry is the only verity—the expression of a sound mind speaking after the ideal—and not after the apparent. —Emerson.

  The form of oath among the Shoshone Indians is, “The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?”

  The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of a man the country turns out. —Emerson.

  The whole wide ether is the eagle’s sway:

  The whole earth is a brave man’s fatherland. —Euripides.

  Spices crush’d, their pungence yield,

  Trodden scents their sweets respire;

  Would you have its strength reveal’d?

  Cast the incense in the fire.

  Matthew Arnold speaks of “the huge Mississippi of falsehood called History.”

  The wind blows north, the wind blows south,

  The wind blows east and west;

  No matter how the free wind blows,

  Some ship will find it best.

  Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent. —Epictetus.

  Victor Hugo makes a donkey meditate and apostrophize thus:

  My brother, man, if you would know the truth,

  We both are by the same dull walls shut in;

  The gate is massive and the dungeon strong.

  But you look through the key-hole out beyond,

  And call this knowledge; yet have not at hand

  The key wherein to turn the fatal lock.

  “William Cullen Bryant surprised me once,” relates a writer in a New York paper, “by saying that prose was the natural language of composition, and he wonder’d how anybody came to write poetry.”

  Farewell! I did not know thy worth;

  But thou art gone, and now ’tis prized:

  So angels walk’d unknown on earth,

  But when they flew were recognized. —Hood.

  John Burroughs, writing of Thoreau, says: “He improves with age—in fact requires age to take off a little of his asperity, and fully ripen him. The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and accepter—only it likes him farther off.”

  Blanqui drill’d his body to subjection to his grand conscience and his noble passions, and commencing as a young man, broke with all that is sybaritish in modern civilization. Without the power to sacrifice self, great ideas will never bear fruit.

  Louise Michel at the burial of Blanqui, (1881.)

  Out of the leaping furnace flame

  A mass of molten silver came;

  Then, beaten into pieces three,

  Went forth to meet its destiny.

  The first a crucifix was made,

  Within a soldier’s knapsack laid;

  The second was a locket fair,

  Where a mother kept her dead child’s hair;

  The third—a bangle, bright and warm,

  Around a faithless woman’s arm.

  A mighty pain to love it is,

  And ’tis a pain that pain to miss;

  But of all pain the greatest pain,

  It is to love, but love in vain.

  Maurice F. Egan o
n De Guérin.

  A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he,

  He follow’d Christ, yet for dead Pan he sigh’d,

  Till earth and heaven met within his breast:

  As if Theocritus in Sicily

  Had come upon the Figure crucified,

  And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest.

  And if I pray, the only prayer

  That moves my lips for me,

  Is, leave the mind that now I bear,

  And give me Liberty. —Emily Brontë.

  I travel on not knowing,

  I would not if I might;

  I would rather walk with God in the dark,

  Than go alone in the light;

  I would rather walk with Him by faith

  Than pick my way by sight.

  Prof. Huxley in a late lecture.

  I myself agree with the sentiment of Thomas Hobbes, of Malmesbury, that “the scope of all speculation is the performance of some action or thing to be done.” I have not any very great respect for, or interest in, mere “knowing,” as such.

  m “Fifty thousand years ago the constellation of the Great Bear or Dipper was a starry cross; a hundred thousand years hence the imaginary Dipper will be upside down, and the stars which form the bowl and handle will have changed places. The misty nebulæ are moving, and besides are whirling around in great spirals, some one way, some another. Every molecule of matter in the whole universe is swinging to and fro; every particle of ether which fills space is in jelly-like vibration. Light is one kind of motion, heat another, electricity another, magnetism another, sound another. Every human sense is the result of emotion; every perception, every thought is but motion of the molecules of the brain translated by that incomprehensible thing we call mind. The processes of growth, of existence, of decay, whether in worlds, or in the minutest organisms, are but motion.”

  COLLECT.

  ONE OR TWO INDEX ITEMS.

  Though the ensuing Collect and preceding Specimen Days are both largely from memoranda already existing, the hurried peremptory needs of copy for the printers, already referr’d to—(the musicians’ story of a composer up in a garret rushing the middle body and last of his score together, while the fiddlers are playing the first parts down in the concert-room)—of this haste, while quite willing to get the consequent stimulus of life and mo-tion, I am sure there must have resulted sundry technical errors. If any are too glaring they will be corrected in a future edition.