[650] See _supra_, ch. i., ii. [651] Horace Traubel, of Camden, New Jersey, editor of _The Conservator_, is the secretary of the Walt Whitman Fellowship (International), which meets annually in New York and issues papers. A file of these may now be consulted in the British Museum Library. CHAPTER XIX HE BECOMES A HOUSEHOLDER Emerson and Longfellow died within six months of Whitman's Boston visit; the former being buried in that graveyard at Sleepy Hollow where Walt had so recently stood by the green mounds that mark the resting-places of Hawthorne and of Thoreau.[652] Carlyle had died a year earlier; Carlyle who so deeply impressed his impetuous pathetic personality upon all that he handled, and who was one of the principal literary influences upon Whitman during his later years, as Emerson had doubtless been an inspiration in the earlier. And while Walt had been working on the Osgood proof-sheets, James Garfield, the friend who used to hail him as he passed on Pennsylvania Avenue riding with Pete Doyle, shouting out some tag from the _Leaves_, and who had now become President of the United States, died amid the mourning of the nation. Whitman's daily life had been poorer these last two or three years, since Mrs. Gilchrist's return to England, but new friends were continually added to his circle. Among these was Mr. W. S. Kennedy, who was working for awhile on one of the Philadelphia papers, and has since published a notable collection of reminiscences and memoranda of his relations with the Camden poet. The Christmas of 1882[653] brought him a delightful gift in the friendship of a Quaker family. Mr. Pearsall Smith was a wealthy Philadelphia glass merchant, who with his wife had, till recently, been a member of the Society of Friends. He had had a remarkable career as an evangelist, both in his own country and in Europe; his eloquence and magnetic personality having been instrumental in changing the course of many lives. His wife also was an active worker in the fields of religion and philanthropy; and their home in Germantown--one of the suburbs of Philadelphia most remote in every sense from plebeian Camden--became a meeting-place for men and women interested and engaged in the work of reform. By this time, however, Mr. Pearsall Smith himself, finding in human nature more forces than were accounted for in the evangelical philosophy, had withdrawn from active participation in its labours.