Whitman had already made his acquaintance in Boston, and their friendship now became most cordial and intimate. Generous and romantic in his view of life, O'Connor's whole personality was very attractive to Whitman from the day of their first encounter. He had the warm Irish temperament which Walt loved; he was a natural actor, and Walt was always at home with actors.[361] Moreover, he was an eager and intelligent admirer of _Leaves of Grass_; and his keen insight, wide reading and remarkable powers of elocution sometimes revealed to their author meanings and suggestions in his own familiar words of which he himself had been unconscious. O'Connor's personal attachment to and reverence for the older man is evident upon every page of _The Carpenter_, a tale which he afterwards contributed to _Putnam's Magazine_;[362] while in the impassioned eulogium of _The Good Gray Poet_ he has expressed his admiration for the _Leaves_. Upon politics however the two friends never agreed, and, unfortunately, O'Connor was always eager for political argument. He was a friend of Wendell Phillips, that anti-slavery orator who once described Lincoln as "the slave-hound of Illinois," because the latter approved the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law while it remained on the statute-book: and to O'Connor, compulsory emancipation always came before the preservation of the Union. This of course was not Whitman's view, and it was upon the negro question that their friendship finally suffered shipwreck.[363] O'Connor's rooms soon became the centre of an interesting group of literary friends. Mr. Eldridge, the publisher,[364] came to Washington after the wreck of his Boston business, and a little later Mr. John Burroughs,[365] a student of Wordsworth, Emerson and the _Leaves_, being attracted to the capital, whither all eyes were turning, gave up teaching in New England, and obtained a Government clerkship. Mr. E. C. Steadman,[366] a poet and journalist in those days, and a clerk in the Attorney-General's department, was of the O'Connor group; and Mr. Hubley Ashton[367] also, then a rising young lawyer, who afterwards intervened successfully on Whitman's behalf at a critical moment. The last-named of these gentlemen tells me that he first saw Whitman late one evening at the rooms of their mutual friend. It was indeed past midnight when Walt appeared asking for supper. He was wearing army boots, his sleeves were rolled up, and his coat was slung across his arm. He had just come in with a train-load of wounded from the front, and had been disposing of his charges in the Washington hospitals. Very picturesque he looked, as he stood there, stalwart, unconventional, majestic, an heroic American figure. * * * * *