Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman | Page 3

SOME LAGGARDS YET
The Perfect Human Voice Shakspere for America "Unassailed Renown" Inscription for a
Little Book on Giordano Bruno Splinters Health (Old Style) Gay-heartedness As in a
Swoon L. of G. After the Argument For Us Two, Reader Dear
MEMORANDA
A World's Show New York--the Bay--the Old Name A Sick Spell To be Present Only
"Intestinal Agitation" "Walt Whitman's Last 'Public'" Ingersoll's Speech Feeling Fairly
Old Brooklyn Days Two Questions Preface to a Volume An Engineer's Obituary Old
Actors, Singers, Shows, Etc., in New York Some Personal and Old Age Jottings Out in
the Open Again America's Bulk Average Last Saved Items
WALT WHITMAN'S LAST

SPECIMEN DAYS

A HAPPY HOUR'S COMMAND
Down in the Woods, July 2d, 1882.-If I do it at all I must delay no longer. Incongruous
and full of skips and jumps as is that huddle of diary-jottings, war-memoranda of
1862-'65, Nature-notes of 1877-'81, with Western and Canadian observations afterwards,
all bundled up and tied by a big string, the resolution and indeed mandate comes to me
this day, this hour,--(and what a day! What an hour just passing! the luxury of riant grass
and blowing breeze, with all the shows of sun and sky and perfect temperature, never
before so filling me, body and soul),--to go home, untie the bundle, reel out diary-scraps
and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages,[1]
and let the melange's lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves. It will
illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life's days and hours (and they not
by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point, too,
how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and
then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and
tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work.
At any rate I obey my happy hour's command, which seems curiously imperative. May be,
if I don't do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary
book ever printed.

Note:
[1] The pages from 1 to 15 are nearly verbatim an off-hand letter of mine in January,
1882, to an insisting friend. Following, I give some gloomy experiences. The war of
attempted secession has, of course, been the distinguishing event of my time. I
commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through '63, '64 and '65, to visit
the sick and wounded of the army, both on the field and in the hospitals in and around
Washington city. From the first I kept little note-books for impromptu jottings in pencil
to refresh my memory of names and circumstances, and what was specially wanted, &c.
In these, I brief'd cases, persons, sights, occurrences in camp, by the bed-side, and not
seldom by the corpses of the dead. Some were scratch'd down from narratives I heard and
itemized while watching, or waiting, or tending somebody amid those scenes. I have
dozens of such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself
alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the
reader the associations that attach to these soil'd and creas'd livraisons, each composed of
a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten'd with a pin. I
leave them just as I threw them by after the war, blotch'd here and there with more than
one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the
excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Most
of the pages from 20 to 75 are verbatim copies of those lurid and blood-smuch'd little
notebooks.
Very different are most of the memoranda that follow. Some time after the war ended I
had a paralytic stroke, which prostrated me for several years. In 1876 I began to get over
the worst of it. From this date, portions of several seasons, especially summers, I spent at
a secluded haunt down in Camden county, New Jersey--Timber creek, quite a little river
(it enters from the great Delaware, twelve miles away)--with primitive solitudes, winding
stream, recluse and woody banks, sweet-feeding springs, and all the charms that birds,
grass, wild-flowers, rabbits and squirrels, old oaks, walnut trees, &c., can bring. Through
these times, and on these spots, the diary from page 76 onward was mostly written.
The COLLECT afterwards gathers up the odds and ends of whatever pieces I can now lay
hands on, written at various times past, and swoops all together like fish in a net.
I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering, first, from that eternal tendency to
perpetuate