Now at last, the plan of the book had been, as far as health and strength permitted, brought to completion[626]--a plan amended since the previous Boston visit, and qualified to admit those poems which had since been written, and at first designed for a supplementary book. The cargo was filled, and the good ship ready to sail. * * * * * After a visit to the Globe Theatre to see Rossi in "Romeo and Juliet,"[627] and a supper with his co-operators, the printers and proof-readers, whose aid he was always eager to acknowledge, Whitman set out again for New York, returning home about the beginning of November. Late in the same month, the book, his vessel as he loved to think of it, set out upon its voyage; but in spite of favourable presages and a happy commencement, it was soon shrouded about in fog, which only yielded to a storm. Some 2,000 copies were sold during the winter, but early in the New Year (1882)[628] the trouble, which seemed to have passed over when the Postmaster-General decided that the book was not so obscene as to be "unmailable," began to threaten anew. The Boston District Attorney,[629] urged by certain agents of the Society for the Suppression of Vice--as though, forsooth, vice could be "suppressed"!--objected to the publication, and demanded the withdrawal of certain passages. Whitman was hardly surprised. He had discussed these passages, or a certain number of them, with his own judgment; and it is possible that Mrs. Gilchrist's view of them had also appealed to him. In his own judgment they were right, but he seems to have been willing to omit five brief items, amounting in all to nearly a page, from the incriminated "Children of Adam" section, if it would save the edition from further molestation.[630] These he suggested might be cut out of the plates, and replaced by other cancelling lines which he would substitute. This was early in March. But the Attorney was not to be so easily satisfied. He demanded the omission of lines in all parts of the volume, amounting to a total of eight or ten pages.[631] This, Whitman emphatically refused; and as neither party would give way, Messrs. Osgood, without testing the case further, threw up their publication on the 9th of April. Their action was scathingly contrasted with that of Woodfall, the publisher of the letters of Junius, and of Mr. Murray, Lord Byron's publisher, by W. D. O'Connor, in a letter to the _New York Tribune_. His indignant sense of literary justice had brought him once more to the side of his old friend, and although the former cordial relations seem hardly to have been re-established, the phantasmal but rigid barrier between them was crumbling away. * * * * * That Whitman was sorely disappointed by the issue of the affair, goes without saying, for he had counted much upon this edition. But District Attorneys and Societies for the Suppression of Vice were not likely to daunt him.