He added: "You know I care nothing for this—no more than for the calendar." Then again: "I depend on you to talk with Dave if he wants more." He added: "These gems, extracts, specimens, tid-bits, brilliants, sparkles, chippings—oh, they are all wearisome: they might go with

     W. had pinned the original proof with his blue-pencilled corrections to my sheet. He tied the papers together. He said he was "careful not to ostentate with the sheets"—"only to send them to the few" he "knew would approve its appearance if not its sentiments." Even with Morse he hesitated. "Would Sidney be interested?" "I remember Doctor's emphasis on that phrase—'one of us'? We talked once about Stedman—more than once: but this was a particular time. Maurice declared—was emphatic: 'I can't think—no, I can't think, he is one of us!' He thought probably that I was too warm: something I said, probably, aroused him." I said: "Dave was nearly struck dumb when I told him to-day that Stedman gives you thirteen pages in his book whereas the average is three." W. asked me to repeat. Then: "Yes, it is significant: you are right: there is no doubt but Stedman has changed a good deal—in fact as towards his older point of view has changed utterly: has turned his back on all that." I said: "I meet men who say—Whitman is great, perhaps, but no poet. They refer to Stedman. But Stedman is nowadays among the readiest to call you a poet and love you as such whatever he may have said in the past." W. nodded his head: "It is true: whatever else is true, that is true, too." Then asked about S.'s book: how many volumes, &c. Had seen none. "I suppose I come up at the last with the W.'s?" But I found the order was different, coming in periods: colonial, &c. W. said in conclusion that if S.

     W. gave me back The Publishers' Weekly. I'll send it to Bucke. "I have looked it over carefully—was interested in the pictures, the printing: but it struck me to ask, if Dave paid fifty dollars (did n't you say fifty?) to get that portrait in, was it a paying investment?" Gave me check for Ferguson—eighty-four dollars seventy-five cents: paying in full. Advised also that I get F. to "certify" to the deposit of the plates with him. One box from Oldach still unopened down stairs. W. wished to pay bill. I advised: Wait till we are sure: I will open the box and make my count in a day or two. He said: "Well—do as you think best, but I am in the humor now—have no doubt at all but that things are all right: besides, I have softened to old Oldach: he has so gratified me with the book I want to testify to it." The W. paragraph was not in all editions of yesterday's Record. W. said: "It happened so once with The Herald: some one said he had a copy reporting that I was dying, but when he went and secured a second copy—the same date—the paragraph was not to be found. Probably later information showed the report to be false." W. leaned over towards the fire: picked up the old-fashioned tongs. "What do you think of this? this is the latest"—opened and shut: looked at it asquint: then seemed to study it: handle graceful—a good looking tool. "Warren Fritzinger, one of Mrs. Davis's boys, knows an old Irish lady living not far from here—right in the neighborhood. She had this—was not using it: she would not sell it but would let me have it till I got another. Don't it have the true look? It is made for work not for appearance. You go into the parlors: there are the tongs, brassed, shining—a long handle—graceful, pretty, dainty—but never intended to touch the dirty fire with. I need such a thing as to stir up the fire here." He thought "forty or fifty years ago I might have handled this weapon with

     I had read McCosh's paper on Arnold. W. said: "Yes, I see he has been doing it, and he is very severe too—thinks, evidently, there was no place for Arnold." I asked W.: "Don't you think that 's from the theological bias?" W.: "That is true: McCosh is the priest: he has the priestly twist. I imagine, if Arnold, Arnold's spirit, is hovering about these days—could be cognizant of McCosh, of others—he would care little about what they think—what Mr. McCosh thinks, anyhow. My own criticism of Arnold—the worst I could say of him—the severest: I who probably have no right to any opinion at all—who, having read so little, should keep his mouth shut on the subject: my worst criticism would be, that Arnold brings coal to Newcastle—that he brings to the world what the world already has a surfeit of: is rich, hefted, lousy, reeking, with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis: all of them things which threaten to overwhelm us." Yet he "understood that." He was aware that "we must be in no haste to dismiss Arnold." "John Burroughs, who has read him, knows him, is certain Arnold has a place and a significance—a great place, too." I suggested: "You don't credit the critics much: John Burroughs thinks you are pretty considerable of a critic in your way." W. said: "Does he? How could John? If I am it must be in an intuitive fashion: but I guess I am not. That reminds me of a story told of Socrates: you have probably heard it: perhaps I have repeated it before myself. It lugs in the oracle—is told of Athens: some one coming to Socrates and telling him the oracle had named him the wisest man in Athens: he resisting, explaining, questioning: how was it? how could it be? could the friend, servant, courier, messenger—or whoever—give reasons? unravel the mystery? Well—Socrates would find them for himself. Why was Socrates the wisest man in all Athens? Simply because of this—simply because of this: because while the whole pack

     W. recited this with great spirit—slowly, as usual, threading his strange but strikingly coherent sentences through with an infalliable circumspection. Then he said with vim: "That is the story in substance. It has no doubt often been better told—I myself have told it better, perhaps. Did I never before allude to it? It is the oldest of the Socratian stories to me: I met it very young, when I was sixteen or seventeen—met with it in a book somewhere—I don't know in what. It has clung to me all these years: it is a touchstone: it seems to me, O very deep—very deep!" The story was familar to me but his way of retelling it was inimitable—his enjoyment of it immense. "There is of course a not literally true element in these stories: yet all of them are essentially true—must be: they bear the stamp." We quoted a number of Socrates stories. W. said they contained for him "a perpetual and perpetuating interest." The story he had told was "in a sense" an answer to John who thought him a critic, "with the difference that John set nothing up egotistically." "But W. W. knows W. W. is a damned fool if no on else does." I asked him: "You speak of well told stories: don't you think most of the stories in books are too well told?" He said without hesitation: "Yes I do—I do." I said the best criticisms, the best stories, are heard in parlors, in crowds, informally. W.: "That, too, is true: see the theaters: the best criticisms are heard in the lobbies, at the time, impromptu, unstudied: yet lost, swallowed up, unheard of." Took him the Carlyle-Goethe correspondence. "Is it Tolstoy?" he asked. I handed it to him. When he had seen what it was: "Well—this, too, is something: we 'll see." In another reference to John's saying W. was a good critic W. quoted something Emerson said to him in one of their talks: "'You surprise me in one way, Mr. Whitman: sur-

Concord, Mass., Dec. 25, 1888.

Dear Friend:

     I received you noble volume of Works just in time to make it a Christmas present from you,—and none could have been more highly valued. I hope it may not be the final edition but that you may live to add more prose and verse to the monument which will preserve your name in the Future, for which you write, and to which you truly belong. But in the Present and the Past also you have done your work, and thus have gained a claim on the Future, which will not be denied you.

     I cherish two copies of the first edition of your Leaves of Grass—one given to me by Emerson in the year it was published, and one left to me by Sophia Thoreau—her brother Henry's copy. I shall place these and your fullgrown volume together, and hand them down to my children.

     I enclose the report of an essay I lately read in New York. The omitted passage is one about Emerson, which did not properly belong there, and was not read by me—

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but the reporter found it among the sheets which I handed him to use, not to print entire.

Yours with friendly regard

F. B. Sanborn.