At the opening of 1873 Whitman had been just ten years in Washington, and was in the fifty-fourth of his age. Recent letters to his friends had told of more frequent spells of partially disabling sickness and lassitude.[528] On the evening of Thursday, January 23rd, he sat late over the fire in the Library of the Treasury Building, reading Lord Lytton’s What will he do with it?[529] As he left, the guard at the door remarked him looking ill.
His room was close by, just across the street; and he went to bed as usual. Between three and four in the morning, he awoke to find that he could move neither arm nor leg on the left side. Presently he fell asleep again; and later, as he could not rise, lay on quietly, till some friends coming in raised the alarm and fetched a doctor. After some six or seven years of preliminary symptoms,[530] Walt had now had a slight stroke of paralysis.
His first thought was of his mother, to whom he wrote as soon as he was able, reassuring her; for the newspapers had exaggerated his condition. Once before, he reminds her with grim humour, they had killed him off; but he is on the road to recovery; in a few days he will be back at his desk on the other side of the street.
Pete Doyle, Charles Eldridge and John Burroughs[Pg 248] came in to nurse and companion him: Mrs. Ashton would have carried him to her house; Mrs. O’Connor, who did not share in the estrangement of her husband, was often at his bedside. And at the bed-foot, his mother’s picture was always before him.
He had scarcely begun to move about a little in his room before a letter from St. Louis told of the death of Martha, Jefferson Whitman’s wife, to whom the whole family was much attached, and Walt especially. The blow fell heavily on him.
On the last day of March,[531] he crossed the street again to his work; and by the end of April he was having regular electrical treatment, and working for a couple of hours daily, with an occasional lapse. His leg was very clumsy, and he complained of frequent sensations of distress and weakness in his head, but he seemed to be progressing as well as was possible.
Early in May, however, the old mother in Camden fell ill. Walt was very anxious about her;[532] at her age she could hardly recover from a serious illness, and his letters to her are pathetically full of loving solicitude. She grew rapidly worse, and although he was still but feeble, he could not remain away from her. On the 20th he hurried home, and on the 23rd, while he was with her, she died.[533]
The shock to Walt was terrible; and when, dreading the heat, he attempted to reach the coast, he had a serious relapse at the outset, and was brought back to Colonel Whitman’s, to the melancholy little house. And here he too, so it would seem, was to end his life.
Only a year before, in the preface to the reprint of his Dartmouth College poem,[534] he had declared that now—the Four Years’ War being over, and he himself having rounded out the poem of the “Democratic Man or Woman”—he was prepared for a new enterprise. He would now set to work upon fulfilling the pro[Pg 249]gramme of his Democratic Vistas; and put the States of America hand-in-hand “in one unbroken circle in a chant”. He would sing the song for which America waited, the song of the Republic that is yet to be.
Again, a year earlier, he had told in his Passage to India how he was ready to set forth upon the Unknown Sea.
And now, with his labours unaccomplished, his heart stricken and heavy with bereavement, joylessly he seemed to hear the weighing of the anchor and to feel his ship already setting forth. Where now was the old exaltation of spirit; where the eager longing for Divine adventure with which hitherto he had always contemplated death?
Now sorrow claimed him, and for a season he lost hold of joy and faith. He was as one abandoned by the Giver of Life, and isolated from Love. Thus deserted, he became utterly exhausted of vitality. It is as though for a time his soul had parted from his bodily life, and yet the life in the body must go on. If death had come now he would not have refused it; but his hour was not yet. Neither living nor dying, through the sad, dark days of long protracted illness and solitude, of physical debility and mental bewilderment—as it were, through year-long dream-gropings—he waited.
The light of his life seemed suddenly to have gone out.[535] Near as he had dwelt to death, in the tragedy of the war-hospitals and in the habit of his thought, he was wholly unprepared for the death of his mother.
He was a man upon whose large harmonious and resonant nature every tragic experience struck out its fullest note. Philosophy and religion were his, if they were any man’s; but he was not one of those who escape experience in the byways of abstraction. He took each blow full in his breast.
His mother was dead; that was the physical wrench which crippled him body and soul. He could not[Pg 250] accustom himself to her death and departure.[536] He could not understand it, nor why he was so stricken by it. It seemed as though in her life his mother had given to her son something that was essential to that soul-consciousness in which he had lived, and that her death had broken his own life asunder, so that it was no longer harmonious and triumphant.
His mother was dead, and he was alone in Camden. Not perhaps actually alone, for his new sister, George’s wife, was always kindly; and so, indeed, was George himself. But spiritually he was alone. He had lost something, it seems, of the spiritual companionship which had made the world a home to him wherever he went. And now the human comrades who had come so close were far away. Washington and New York were equally out of reach; and he had lost O’Connor. Letters, indeed, he had; but they did not make up to him for the daily magnetic contact with the men and women whom he loved. Touch and presence meant more to him than to others, and these he had lost.
He was, then, very much alone; bereft at once, so it would seem, of the material and the spiritual consciousness of fellowship; standing wholly by himself, in the attitude of that live-oak he had once wondered at in Louisiana, because it uttered joyous leaves of dark green though it stood solitary.[537] He was like a tree blasted by lightning; yet he too continued to put forth his leaves one and one, letters of cheery brief words to his old comrades, and especially to Pete.[538] He was an old campaigner worsted at last, standing silently at bay; only determined, come what might, that he would not grumble or complain.
His circumstances were not all gloomy. Through the summer of 1873, Whitman remained with his brother, at number 322, Stevens Street, in the pleasant room his mother had occupied upon the first floor. Around him were the old familiar objects dear to him from childhood.
[Pg 251]
He was not wholly house-tied: two lines of street-cars ran near by,[539] and by means of one or other he contrived to reach the ferry, which he loved to cross and cross again, revelling in the swing of the tawny Delaware, and all the comings and goings of the river and ocean craft. Hale old captains still remember him well as he was in those days. Sometimes also he would extend his jaunt, taking the Market Street cars on the Philadelphia side of the river, and going as far as the reading-room of the Mercantile Library upon Tenth Street.[540]
But often he was too weak to go abroad for days together. His brain refused to undertake the task of leadership or co-ordination, and there was no friend to assist him. With his lame leg and his giddiness, he had at the best of times hard work to move about; but as he wrote to Pete, “I put a bold face on, and my best foot foremost”.[541]
During bad days he sat solitary at home, trying to maintain a good heart, his whole vitality too depressed to do more. “If I only felt just a little better,” he would say, “I should get acquainted with many of the [railroad] men,”[542] a class who affected this particular locality. But feeble as he was, it was long before he made any friends to replace the lost circle at Washington. Now and again some kindly soul, hearing that he was ill, would call upon him:[543] or Jeff would look in on his way to New York, or Eldridge or Burroughs, coming and going between Washington and New England.
Walt could not readily adjust himself to his new circumstances. His was not an elastic, pliable temper; but on the contrary, very stubborn, and apt to become set in ways; the qualities of adhesion and inertia increasing in prominence as his strong will and initiative ebbed. He kept telling himself between the blurs that disabled his brain, that he might be in a much more deplorable fix; that his folks were good to him; that his post was[Pg 252] kept open for his return, and that his friends were only waiting to welcome him back to Washington.
But he could not pass by or elude the ever-present consciousness and problem of his mother’s death. At the end of August he wrote to Pete: “I have the feeling of getting more strength and easier in the head—something like what I was before mother’s death. (I cannot be reconciled to that yet: it is the great cloud of my life—nothing that ever happened before has had such an effect on me.)”[544] When we remember his separation from the woman and the children of his love, and all the experiences of the war, we may a little understand the meaning of these soberly written words, and the strength of the tie which bound together mother and son. Who knows or can estimate the full meaning of that relationship which begins before birth, and which all the changes and separations of life and death only deepen?
It is difficult to look calmly at this period of Whitman’s life. One resents, perhaps childishly, the fate which overtook this sane and noble soul. Surely he, of all men, had been faithful to the inner vision, and generous to all. He had fulfilled the Divine precept; he had loved the Lord his God with all the might of soul and body, and his neighbour as himself. From childhood up he had been clean and affectionate, independent and loyal, whole-heartedly obedient to the law as it was written in his heart, undaunted by any fear or convention.
He had prized health, and held it sacred, as the essential basis of freedom and sanity of spirit. And he had hazarded it without reserve and without fear, in the infectious............