When I get back to West Park, I will look over the 'Notes,' and if I can throw any new light on the subject, I will write again.

On November 6, 1920, in response to a second letter signed Egmont H. Arens, (but which Mr. F. P. Hier avers was written by himself), Mr. Burroughs replied:

I have been looking over my little book, 'Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person,' and am a great deal at sea about it. I find it hard to separate the parts I wrote from those he wrote.' The fine passage I referred to, by him, begins on page 37, Chapter XXI, and includes the whole chapter [595 words]. In other places I see where he touched up my work, leaving the thought my own. [Italics mine.] The chapters on Beauty, and on 'Drum Taps,' are all my own. The Biographical Notes he enlarged and improved in the proof from notes which he had given me verbally. I have no doubt that half the book is his. He was a great critic, and he did me great service by pruning and simplifying. The title, too, is his. I had a much more ambitious title.

And yet, after these straightforward letters from Mr. Burroughs (which, by the way, the legal gentleman, who can hardly plead ignorance of the law, prints without the permission of Mr. Burroughs's literary executor), the writer of the article, F. P. Hier, Jr., with the alias, E. H. Arens, asserts that it may be fairly (!) said that the book is virtually Whitman's!

In my own copy of the 'Notes' (second edition) are many little turns of expression which I marked years ago as sounding like Whitman, and concerning which Mr. Burroughs concurred, instancing others as 'probably Walt's' — quite a different matter, however, from Mr. Hier's assertion that the book which John Burroughs said he wrote was mostly written by Whitman!

It was Whitman as person, even more than as poet, that influenced Burroughs in those Washington days; and it is as person that one welcomes the familiar glimpses one gets of

It had been fifty-three years since he wrote the book, and he was then long past eighty-three, and in failing health.

This statement should be taken in connection with the fact that of the 108 pages in the book (excluding the 'Supplementary Notes,' compiled from many sources, and arranged by Whitman), space which would at least fill twenty-two pages is taken up with quotations from Leaves of Grass.

him as a frequenter of the Burroughs household, of a Sunday morning, drawn by the delicious coffee and pancakes that Mrs. Burroughs made, with maple syrup from the old sapbush in the Catskills; but also drawn by the thought of a stroll that he and 'Jack' would take after breakfast, and their séance on the marble steps of the Capitol. Invariably he came late. Invariably the punctual housewife would 'get in a pucker' at the delay. And is it not enough to try a woman's soul when her coffee and the piping-hot griddle have to wait, while the guest comes not?

'Car after car would go jingling by,' said Mr. Burroughs, 'and still no Walt! At last one would stop, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the door-cheery, vigorous, serene and all evidence of ill-humor would vanish before his compelling charm.'

Whenever they strolled past the White House, Whitman would always stop and bring from its hiding-place in one of the fence-posts a smooth round stone which he tossed from hand to hand as they walked, on return tucking it away in its niche till they came that way again. 'What would I not give for that stone now!' Mr. Burroughs would say, sighing regretfully that he had kept no record of their talks.

He told of the oyster orgies he and Whitman had, seated on high stools at the counter in Harvey's, the genial darkies who opened the oysters marvelling at the quantities they consumed. Doubtless their talk, translated, would, in spirit, have tallied with Pistol's when Falstaff refused him a penny; only that they would have substituted the 'mightier weapon' for the 'sword':

'Why, then, the world's mine oyster,
Which I with [pen] will open.'

Women who disapproved of Whitman as poet found their disapproval vanishing in his presence. Elizabeth Akers, being a writer of correct, rhythmical verse, looked askance at Whitman's revolutionary, 'uncouth' lines, and studiously avoided meeting him.

'One day she came tripping down the stairs to meet me,' said Mr. Burroughs, 'and there was Walt!' She couldn't help liking him—no one could — and surrendered to his personality, but she wasn't big enough to accept his poetry.

I laugh whenever I think of her look of dismay when she saw Walt. He appeared not to notice it, but laughed about it afterwards.'

Although she scolded about the poet, Mrs. Burroughs made shirts for him. She was the only one who would make them loose and comfortable. Later, after his stroke of paralysis, she used to carry him delicacies, and do for him other little services. Mrs. O'Connor used to darn his socks, and, especially during and just after the Civil War, look after him with affectionate solicitude - when he was spending himself on the sick soldiers with such lavish self-forgetfulness; spending himself with a like compassion to that expressed in 'Drum Taps' those poems in which, as William O'Connor said, is voiced 'the madonna tenderness - the mother's unuttererable love and woe.' After all, poet and person were appreciated in the Burroughs and O'Connor households.

Unforgettable were those scenes in the Washington hospitals when John Burroughs, so unused to the sight of suffering, would occasionally accompany Whitman on his errands of mercy; for Whitman's services continued long after the War. On Thanksgiving, and other holidays, he would wheedle Mrs. Burroughs into making pies and cookies, which he and 'Jack' would distribute to the soldiers. Sometimes the distressing sights would almost floor the younger man; but with Whitman pity as an emotion had long given place to practical sympathy. As his friend watched him move from cot to cot, dispensing fruit, tobacco, writing-paper, clover-blooms, some little thing for each, and, with each gift, dispensing cheer and tenderness, he, too, would try to help, but made poor work of it.

During that Washington decade, but few letters passed between the comrades, since they were seeing each other almost daily; those few when one or the other was absent from the city. Whitman's letters are lacking in literary quality homely, commonplace letters, with a strong human heartbeat in each. His remembrances to friends never seem perfunctory; his affection breathes in the very mention of their names. It is as though the one so remembered had received a blessing.

Although a little out of sequence, chronologically, excerpts from a letter of July, 1866, written by Whitman in Washington, to Burroughs in the Catskills, are given here: