Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 13, no. 3

Presents a previously unpublished letter by Whitman to civil war veteran Reuben Farwell and provides a brief history of the Farwell family and their relationship with Whitman

Murray, Martin G

NOTES 
"I KNEW REUBEN FARWELL AS A FIRST-CLASS SOLDIER": 
AN UNPUBLISHED WHITMAN LETTER 
While researching a presentation for The Historical Society of Washington, 
D.C., on Walt Whitman's hospital service, I came across a previously unpub-
lished letter from Whitman in the pension file of Whitman's soldier-friend 
and Civil War veteran Reuben Farwell (see back cover).1 Written at the re-
quest of Reuben's widow Ann, the 1884 letter is addressed to the Commis-
sioner of Pensions in support of Mrs. Farwell's application for survivor ben-
efits. The letter is written entirely in Whitman's hand, on both sides of a single 
sheet of unlined white paper, 8 by 101/2 inches, folded vertically in thirds, and 
horizontally in half. On one side, in the middle fold, the letter is addressed: 
To the 
Commissioner of Pensions 
Washington DC 
On the opposite side, is written: 
328 Mickle street 
Camden New Jersey 
October 5 1884 
I knew Reuben Farwell as a first-class soldier (it was in 1863 or '64) of a Michigan 
Regiment-he was in Ward A, Armory Square Hospital, Dr Bliss Superintendent-I 
was with him off & on for some months & remember the case perfectly well. He had a 
very bad foot wound, & I should judge it something that would deteriorate his health & 
more or less incapacitate him through life afterward-till his death-& even tend to-
ward that event-which as I understand occurred about a year ago. 
I strongly recommend the granting a pension to his widow Ann E. Farwell. 
Very respectfully 
Walt Whitman 
Armed with Whitman's testimony and other supporting documentation, Mrs. 
Farwell was awarded a government pension for herself and her daughter Nettie. 2 
Saluted in Whitman's Memoranda During the War as a "typical soldier,"3 
Reuben Farwell served with the 1 st Michigan Cavalry. A farmer in Plymouth, 
Michigan, before the war,4 Farwell enlisted as a private on August 16, 1861, 
at the age of twenty-two. 5 His military papers described him as 5 foot 5 inches 
tall, with a light complexion offset by black eyes and brown hair. This "typical 
soldier" of the American Civil War participated in many memorable battles, 
including Second Bull Run (August 30, 1862), Gettysburg Ouly 3, 1863), 
159 
and U. S. Grant's Forty Days Campaign (Spring 1864). While serving with 
the Michigan Brigade under General George Armstrong Custer at Brandy 
Station, Virginia, on October 11, 1863, Farwell received a shell wound in his 
left foot. It landed him in Armory Square Hospital, where Farwell met Walt 
Whitman.6 
Reuben Farwell was one of the scores of soldiers whose recuperation was 
fostered by the "ordinary cheer and magnetism" of Whitman's personality, 
dispensed as a form of medicine by that unique hospital visitor (MD W, 18). 
Indeed, the poet's claim in "The Wound-Dresser," that "Many a soldier's kiss 
dwells on these bearded lips," was literally true in the case of Farwell. Years 
after his release from the military hospital, Reuben longingly remembered 
Whitman's bedside visits: "Walt my dear old Friend = how I would lik [sic]to 
grasp your hand and give you a kiss as I did in the days of yore, what a satisfac-
tion it would be to me."7 
The hospital in which Farwell was a patient received high marks from Whit-
man. "The Wards are very comfortable, with new floors and plaster walls, and 
models of neatness. I am not sure but this is a model hospital, after all, in 
important respects" (MDW, 38). Armory Square's location on the Mall at 7th 
Street, S.W. (the current site of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum), 
provided ready access for the wounded arriving from the Potomac River wharves 
situated a few blocks south. Dr. David Willard Bliss, the hospital's surgeon-
in-charge, was lauded by Whitman as "one of the best surgeons in the army" 
(MDW, 50). Like Farwell, Bliss had been a Michigan Volunteer who served 
originally with that state's 3d Infantry, and later as a surgeon in the U.S. Vol-
unteers. 8 
Farwell was released from Armory Square hospital on April 18, 1864. He 
served the remaining four months of his tour and was mustered out of the 1 st 
Michigan Cavalry on August 22. 
As his military career had been "typical" of a generation of American young 
men, so Farwell's post-War life followed a familiar path. Returning home to 
farm, Farwell soon married, and raised a daughter. 9 Like that of so many War 
veterans, his life was marked by ill health. Farwell's wife recalled that, "Reuben 
... served three years in the Civil War came home almost a cripple never 
able to work I took care of him. We got along as best we could." 10 Sinking 
spells, bouts of chronic diarrhea, and a debilitating stroke eventually forced 
Farwell to lease out his 35-acre Nankin, Michigan, farm to tenants and rely on 
a veteran's disability pension. 
As with many of the soldier patients he befriended, Whitman corresponded 
intermittently with Farwell. A spate of letters between them in 1864 was fol-
lowed by a ten-year silence. Whitman's preparation in 1875 of his Memoranda 
During the War apparently caused him to seek out several soldier friends, in-
cluding Farwell. II A February 5th postcard from Whitman elicited an imme-
diate response from Farwell on the 11 th: "But you have not forgoten your 
littel Michigan friend yet-Well i have not forgotten my Hospital Friend yet 
and I hope that I never will" (Shively, 141). Whitman returned this heartfelt 
sympathy: "0 how I should like to see you, every day, dear Mitch-my own 
dear boy and comrade of the war-the hospital-I have to sit here alone much 
of the time, and think of those old times" (Corr., 2:328). 
160 
Reuben Farwell died on May 19, 1883. Whitman was able to provide one 
last service to his "little Mitch," as the poet called Reuben (MDW, 59), by 
helping Farwell's widow and daughter obtain a pension. Ann Farwell survived 
her husband by 49 years, and never re-married. She joined Reuben in death 
on December 29, 1932, on the couple's 68th wedding anniversary. 
The Washington Friends of Walt Whitman MARTIN G. MURRAY 
NOTES 
See "Pension Record for Reuben Farwell, Company H, 1 st Michigan Cavalry, 1861-
1864," Record Group Number 15, Records of the Veterans Administration, National 
Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter referred to as Farwell's Pension Record). The 
letter does not appear in Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Walt Whitman: The Correspon-
dence (New York: New York University Press, 1961, 1964, 1969, 1977). 
2 Although there is no extant letter from Mrs. Farwell to Whitman requesting his 
help, the fact that Whitman in September 1884 wrote down her address in his notebook 
indicates that she had written to him around that time (Walt Whitman, Daybooks and 
Notebooks, ed. William White [New York: New York University Press, 1978],2:341). 
3 Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Camden: 1875-1876), 59. 
4 Farwell was born in Lyons, Wayne County, New York, one of seven children (all 
boys) born to Leroy and Olive Farwell. Some time before 1860, the family moved to 
Plymouth, Michigan. (Data based on Census Records, National Archives, Record Group 
29.) 
5 See "Compiled Military Service Record of Reuben Farwell, Company H, 1 st Michi-
gan Cavalry, 1861-1864," Record Group Number 94, Records of the Adjutant General's 
Office, National Archives (hereafter referred to as Farwell's Military Service Record). 
6 Farwell was admitted to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., on October 
12, 1863, and given Bed Number 33, in Ward A. He remained in the hospital until 
January 28, 1864, when he was furloughed home for a month, returning again on Feb-
ruary 27. (See Farwell's Military Service Record.) 
7 Charley Shively, Drum Beats (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989), 141. All 
of the extant letters from Farwell to Whitman are included in Shively's collection. 
8 Bliss was thirty-five when he enlisted in the 3rd Michigan Infantry on June 10, 
1861. For Bliss's military career, see "Compiled Military Service Record ofD. W. Bliss, 
Companies F and S, 3rd Michigan Infantry, 1861," and also "Personal Papers of Medi-
cal Officers and Physicians, Medical Officers Files, for D. W. Bliss, Surgeon, U.S. Vol-
unteers, 1861-1865," Record Group Number 94, Records of the Adjutant General's 
Office, National Archives. 
9 Farwell married Ann Knickerbocker, a 22-year-old woman from Livonia, Michi-
gan, on December 29, 1864. Ann Farwell gave birth to the couple's first and only child, 
a daughter they named Nettie, on March 28, 1870. (See Farwell's Pension Record.) 
10 See September 18, 1916, letter in Farwell's Pension Record. 
11 In 1874 and 1875, Whitman corresponded with Benton Wilson, William Stansberry, 
Manvill Winterstein, and Bethuel Smith. With Farwell, they were included in Whitman's 
list of typical soldiers in MDW, 59. 
161 


English

"I Knew Reuben Farwell as a First-Class Soldier": An Unpublished Whitman Letter

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 14, no. 2/3

The Bolton Whitman Collection: A Bibliography

Front Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 14, no. 1

Back Matter, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 13, no. 3

Walt Whitman: A Current Bibliography, Winter 1996

Folsom, Ed

Considers Whitman's literary relationship with Eugene Benson, a writer, painter and self-styled "literary frondeur," who wrote at the same time as Whitman for the New York monthly magazine The Galaxy

Scholnick, Robert J

"Culture" or Democracy: Whitman, Eugene Benson, and The Galaxy

Presents two 1856 reviews of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass not included in Kenneth M. Price's Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews

Olsen-Smith, Steven

TWO VIEWS OF WHITMAN IN 1856: 
UNCOLLECTED REVIEWS OF LEAVES OF GRASS FROM 
THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS AND 
FRANK LESLIE'S ILLUSTRATED NEWSPAPER 
STEVEN OLSEN-SMITH 
AFTER KENNETH M. PRICE'S EDITION of Walt Whitman: The 
Contemporary Reviews went to press,} I discovered new 1856 reviews 
of Leaves of Grass. The first, from the February 27 New York Daily 
News, reviews the first edition of Leaves (not a "new edition" as the 
reviewer claimed.) The second, from the December 20 Frank Leslie's 
Illustrated Newspaper (New York), postdates the second edition of 
Leaves, but the reviewer's physical description of the book indicates 
that he also was noticing the first edition. The zeal of both reviewers, 
distinguished by clashing appraisals of Whitman, makes it particularly 
fortunate that these pieces are now available to supplement Price's 
important collection. 
Here in full is the New York Daily News review of February 27, 
1856, when the paper was edited by Gideon J. Tucker. This review 
will intrigue Whitman enthusiasts for a number of reasons, not least 
the author's description of Whitman's frontispiece portrait in Leaves: 
LEAVES OF GRASS. Entered according to Act of Congress, by Walter Whitman, &c., 
&c. Brooklyn. 
A new edition, we believe, of the famous Whitman's poems, which made such 
a flutter among the "gray goose quills" of this city and "other quarters of the globe" 
some time ago. Of the poem which occupies the ninety-five pages of this folio, we 
have before briefly spoken. Upon examining it a second time, and pondering its aims 
and expressions, we feel constrained to say that it is certainly the strangest, most 
extraordinary production we have ever attempted to peruse. Still, like the rest of our 
contrymen, we are by no means either averse to extraordinary things or afraid of 
them. We enjoy enterprise in speech and writing as thoroughly as in steam vessels, 
revolving rifles or new-found Nicaraguas. Therefore we shall not quarrel with Mr. 
Whitman for being odd. Oddness is the normal condition of some natures-of the 
freshest and best, perhaps-at least when it means frankness and opposition to solemn 
propriety, alias humbug and red tape. 
Mr. Whitman's preface is what the hum-drum world calls "queer" as entirely perhaps 
as his poem, yet we think a great deal of it both finely and bravely uttered as well 
as true. None can, more than we do, entirely hate that cant which always ascribes 
this or that kind of writing to this or the other "school," as if the young author had 
necessarily in every instance copied some model; as if two similarly constituted minds 
210 
may not naturally seek similar expression! It is precisely this stupid, stereotyped 
classification adopted by indolent or clique-led reviewers, that has produced so many 
abortions in literature through "the straining after at least the appearance of total 
originality, but to give future readers of this book some indication of its style, ere 
they have opened it, we will say that it is Germanic and Carlylean-even Emersonian-
sometimes in the strain of Martin Farquhar Tupper, although far stronger and more 
pointed than the latter. 
The poem exhibits undoubted and striking evidence of genius and power. But the 
author reasoning that the spirit of the American people, nay, of any people is chiefly 
represented by its uncultivated though, perhaps, naturally intelligent classes, falls into 
the error of mistaking their frequent uncouthness as a fair revelation of that spirit, 
and the bathos often produced in some of his finest passages by the presence of this 
idea defaces his work and repels hundreds of candid minds who would be eager to 
acknowledge his claims, but are thus prevented from reading enough to recognize 
them. 
In glancing rapidly over the "Leaves of Grass" you are puzzled whether to set the 
author down as a madman or an opium eater; when you have studied" them you 
recognize a poet of extraordinary vigor, nay even beauty of thought, beneath the most 
fantastic possible garments of diction. If Hamlet had gone mad, in Ophelia's way, 
as well as in his own, and in addition to his own vein of madness, he might, when 
transported to our own age and country, have talked thus. 
In a crush hat and red shirt open at the neck, without waistcoat or jacket, one 
hand on his hip and the other thrust into his pocket, Walt Whitman the b'hoy poet, 
on his muscle, writes sentences like these: 
"A child said, What is grass?-fetching it to me with full hands. 
How could I answer the child .... I do not know what it is any more than he. 
* * * * * * ' * 
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. 
* * * * * * * 
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers. 
Darker than the colorless beards of old men, 
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths. 
Oh I perceive, after all, so many uttering tongues! 
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing. ["] 
Again: 
["]Press close, bare bosomed night! Press close magnetic nourishing night! 
Night of South winds! Night of the large few stars! 
Still nodding night! Mad naked Summer night! 
* * * * * * * 
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! 
Sea of the brine of life! Sea of unshovelled and always ready graves!" 
His own picture: 
"Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a Kosmos, 
Disorderly, fleshy, sensual .... eating, drinking and breeding, 
No sentimentalist . . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them 
. . . . no more modest than immodest." 
211 
Yet, he is a sentimentalist! Read the lines beginning 
"I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars, &c.-" 
He is a painter, carver and sculptor: 
"A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my caresses, 
Head high in the forehead and between the ears, 
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground, 
Eyes well apart and full of sparkling wickedness ears finely cut and flexibly 
moving." 
He is a genuine "rough"-a male muse in horse-blanket and boots. Sometimes 
he is "Mose;"2 sometimes almost a Moses. 
He enjoys "he-festivals with blackguard gibes, and ironical license, and bull dances, 
and drinking, and laughter." Then he is 
"Pleased with primitive tunes of the choir of the white-washed church," 
And then you see him 
"Walking the old hills of Judea with the beautiful gentle god by his side." 
Now, with him, we 
"Visit the orchards of God, and look at the spheric product, 
And look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green." 
Or 
"Go hunting polar furs and the seal .... leaping chasms with a pi~e-pointed staff 
.... clinging to topples of brittle and blue. [") 
Read this noble passage: 
"How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and 
death chasing it up and down the storm, 
How he knuckled tight and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days 
and faithful of nights, 
And chalked in large letters on a board; Be of good cheer, We will not desert 
you; 
How he saved the drifting company at last, 
How the lank loose-gowned women looked when boated from the side of their 
prepared graves. 
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipped 
unshaven men; [.] " 
We are tempted to quotr many strophes from this remarkable collection of genius 
inebriated with its own overflowing fountains of fancy, but must conclude with the 
following fine lines, referring to past struggles for freedom, and predicting a future: 
212 
["]Meanwhile corpses lie in new-made graves . . .. bloody corpses of young 
men: 
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily . . . . the bullets of princes are flying .... 
the creatures of power laugh aloud, 
And all these things bear fruits . . . . and they are good. 
Those corpses of young men, 
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets . . . . those hearts pierced by the gray 
lead, 
Cold and motionless as they seem . . . . live elsewhere with unslaughter'd 
vitality. 
They live in other young men, 0 kings, 
They live in brothers, again ready to defy you: 
They were purified by death . . . . They were taught and exalted. 
Not a grave of the murdered for freedom but grows seed for freedom in 
its tum to bear seed, 
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish. 
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose, 
But it stalks invisibly over the earth . . . . whispering counseling cautioning. 
Liberty let others despair of you . . . . I never despair of you. 
Is the house shut? Is the master away? 
Nevertheless be ready .... be not weary of watching, 
He will soon return . . . . his messengers come anon. ["] 
For the sum of 75 cents any reader may accompany Whitman through a poetic 
chaos-bright, dark, splendid, common, ridiculous and sublime--in which are floating 
the nebulre and germs of matter for a starry universe of organized and harmonious 
systems that may yet revolve, in all the magnificence of artistic order, through the 
highest heaven of fame! 
As proof that whatever may be the merits or demerits of this singular production, 
we may state that very many thousand copies have been sold and the demand is 
still increasing. 
I have examined in vain the fragmentary Daily News files at the New 
York Public Library and the N ew York Historical Society in search 
of the prior notice of Leaves alluded to in the opening paragraph of 
the review. Recovery of the prior notice seems especially desirable 
considering the intelligence and ebullience of the author's appraisal. 
Here in full is the December 20, 1856, Frank Leslie's Illustrated 
Newspaper review, equally intelligent although ferociously hostile: 
LEAVES OF GRASS. By WALT WHITMAN. 
We find upon our table (and shall put into the fire) a thin octavo volume, handsomely 
printed and bound, with the above curious title. We shall not aid in extending the 
sale of this intensely vulgar, nay, absolutely beastly book, by telling our readers where 
it may be purchased. The only review we shall attempt of it, will be to thus publicly 
call the attention of the grand jury to a matter that needs presentment by them, and 
to mildly suggest that the author should be sent to a lunatic asylum, and the mercenary 
publishers to the penitentiary for pandering to the prurient tastes of morbid sensualists. 
Ralph W. Emerson's name appears as an indorser of these (so-called) poems (?)-
God save the mark! We can only account for this strange fatuity upon the supposition 
213 
that the letter is a forgery, that Mr. E. has not read some passages in the book, or 
that he lends his name to this vile production of a vitiated nature or diseased 
imagination, because the author is an imitator of his style, and apes him occasionally 
in his transcendentalisms. Affectation is as pitiful an ambition in literature as 
alliteration, and never has it been more fully exhibited during the present century 
than in the case of Thomas Carlyle, a man with an order of intellect approaching 
genius, but who for a distinguishing mark to point like a finger-board to himself, 
left a very terse and effeGtive style of writing to adopt a jargon filled with new-fangled 
phrases and ungrammatical super-superlative adjectives-Mr. Carlyle buried himself 
for a long time in German universities and German philosophy, and came forth clothed 
in a full "old clothes" suit of transcendentalism worthy of the Chatham street 
embodiments of that pseudo-philosophy, Kant and Spinosa [sic]-Carlyle by this 
operation became a full-fledged Psyche from the chrysalis, and sported in the sunshine 
of popularity, whereupon a young gentleman ambitious of making New England an 
umbra of Scottish-Germanic glory, one Ralph Waldo Emerson, suddenly transforms 
himself into a metaphysical transcendentalist and begins talking about "Objective and 
Subjective," the "Inner and Outer," the "Real and Ideal," the "God-heads and God-
tails," "Planes," "Spheres," "Finite, Infinite," "Unities," and "Dualities," "Squills, 
Ipecac," "Cascading and Cavorting," &c., &c. And lo! another appeared after this 
Mr. Emerson, one Walt Whitman, who kicked over the whole bucket of the Milky 
Way, and deluged the world with the whey~ curds and bonny-clabber of Brooklyn-
which has resulted from the turning of the milk of human kindness in a "b'hoy's" 
brains to the cream of Tartar-and a delicious dish of the same is now furnished 
under cover of Leaves of Grass, and indorsed by the said Emerson, who swallows 
down Whitman's vulgarity and beastliness as if they were curds and whey. No wonder 
the Boston female schools are demor:alized when Emerson, the head of the moral 
and solid people of Boston, indorses Whitman, and thus drags his slimy work into 
the sanctum of New England firesides. 
I have left both reviews un attributed for lack of evidence. A 
possible but unlikely candidate for either review, oddly enough, is the 
English literary man, Thomas Powell. Hershel Parker identified Powell 
as the author of a review of Melville's Piazza Tales in the May 26, 
1856 New York Daily News,3 but Powell's· tenure with the Daily News 
appears not to have begun until mid-March of that year, shortly after 
the February review of Leaves appeared. The Dictionary of American 
Biography reports that Powell was "the first editor of Frank Leslie's 
Illustrated Newspaper, established in 1855," and that he stayed on with 
the Frank Leslie publishing house all his life. 4 Powell's known 
comments on Carlyle and Emerson,s however, do not sufficiently I 
resemble those of the Frank Leslie's reviewer to justify an attribution. 
It would be particularly worthwhile to learn the identity of the Daily 
News reviewe~, who may in some capacity have been familiar with 
Whitman since he realized that in the black and white frontispiece por-
trait Whitman wore a "red shirt." Presumably he meant the exposed 
portion of undershirt, although his wording suggests Whitman's obvi-
ously light-colored overshirt, "open at the neck." We know from Bronson 
214 
Alcott that Whitman indeed sometimes wore a "Red flannel undershirt" 
in 1856,6 but whether the Daily News reviewer actually knew Whitman's 
person or just made an informed guess about the generic color of the 
shirt remains to be known. 
As I found after discovering the two reviews, Whitman included 
the Daily News and Leslie's Illustrated News among twenty-two other 
N ew York newspaper and periodical titles entered by him along with 
their street locations into a notebook that Harold Blodgett dates be-
tween July 1855 and September 1856,7 now most widely available as 
the "George Walker" manuscript entry in volume 1 of Whitman's Note-
books and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts. 8 Also among the entries 
("checked off by ticks" according to Edward F. Grier, editor of Note-
books [239n]) are the Crayon (signified by Whitman's listing of its edi-
tors, "Stillman & Durand"), the Sunday Leader and the Ledger, three 
serials that noticed Leaves in January, June and May of 1856, respec-
tively. Probably using the compilation as a checklist of projected recipi-
ents, Whitman appears to have marked each title once he had submit-
ted a review copy of Leaves to that particular establishment. If, as Grier's 
wording suggests, Whitman checked off every one of the twenty-four 
serial titles he listed, one can speculate that a good many more New 
York reviews of the 1855 and 1856 Leaves of Grass appeared than we 
have yet been able to acknowledge, some of which may still survive in 
library files. 
University of Delaware 
NOTES 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Professor Price generously shared 
with me the 1855-56 reviews in his then unpublished collection. 
2 The smoking and spitting Bowery fireman and b'hoy portrayed in a number of 
stage productions, beginning in 1848 with Benjamin A. Baker's "A Glance at New 
York in 1848," and named in association with Whitman also by the reviewer of Leaves 
in the February 18 Daily National Intelligencer [Washington, D.C.] (see Price, 37). 
3 Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews 
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), 470. 
4 Edwin Francis Edgett, "Powell, Thomas," Dictionary of American Biography vol. 
7, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), 151. 
5 Such as those on Carlyle in the August 25, 1856 issue of the New York Daily 
News and in Living Authors of England (New York: D. Appleton, 1849), 232-245, 
and on Emerson in Living Authors of America (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 
1850), 49-77. 
215 
6 The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown and 
Company, 1938), 286. 
7 Walt Whitman: An 1855-56 Notebook Toward the Second Edition of Leaves of Grass 
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959). 
8 Family Notes and Autobiography, Brooklyn and ·New York, ed. Edward F. Grier 
(New York: New York University Press, 1984), 239-249. 
216 


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