The old sad and solitary inertia was broken. Ill though he often was, the lonely little upper room held him no longer; nor was he any more shut up within the sense of bereavement. Jeff had come over from St. Louis, and his two daughters spent the autumn with their aunt and uncles in Stevens Street. All through the winter Walt was moving back and forward between George's house, the Staffords farm, and Mrs. Gilchrist's. He was cheerfully busy with the orders for his pair of handsome books, which were selling briskly at a guinea a volume. _Leaves of Grass_ had been reprinted from the plates of the fifth edition. Its companion, _Two Rivulets_, was a "mélange" compounded of additional poems, including "Passage to India," and the prose writings of which we have already spoken, printed at various times during the last five years. "Specimen Days" was not among them, and did not appear till 1882. The title _Two Rivulets_ suggests the double thread of its theme, the destiny of the nation and of the individual, American politics and that mystery of immortal life which we call death. They were not far asunder in Whitman's thought.[579] At the end of February, Mr. Burroughs met Walt at Mrs. Gilchrist's, and thence they set out together for New York. Here, Whitman stayed with his new and dear friends, Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Johnston;[580] and presented himself in his own becoming garb at the grand full-dress receptions which were held in his honour; the applause which greeted him, and the atmosphere of real affection by which he was surrounded, compensating him for the always distasteful attentions of a lionising public, eager for any sensation. He renewed also, and with perhaps more unmitigated satisfaction, his acquaintance with the men on the East River ferries, and the Broadway stages; and, finally, he ascended the Hudson to stay awhile with John Burroughs. This pleasant holiday jaunt was not without its tragic element; his friend, Mrs. Johnston, dying suddenly on his last evening in New York. * * * * * It was in May that Mr. Edward Carpenter visited him in Camden. After a brilliant Cambridge career, he was now a pioneer University Extension lecturer in natural sciences. But besides, or rather beyond this, a poet, in whom the sense of fellowship and unity was already becoming dominant. [Illustration: EDWARD CARPENTER AT FORTY-THREE] In a note to his just-published preface, Whitman had spoken of the "terrible, irrepressible yearning"[581] for sympathy which underlay his work, and by which he claimed the personal affection of such readers as he could truly call his own. This also was the aim which underlay Mr. Carpenter's first book of verses, _Narcissus and Other Poems_, published in 1873.[582]