[60] _Whit. Fellowship_, '94 (C. A. Roe); Johnston, 114. [61] _Whit. Fellowship_ (Roe); _In re_, 34. [62] _Comp. Prose_, 10, 11, 521. [63] _Ib._, 10, 11, 188; Thomson, 476; Burroughs (_a_), 28. [64] _Whit. Fellowship_, '94 (Traubel). [65] MSS. Harned. [66] _Ibid._ [67] _Comp. Prose_, 336. [68] _New World_, Nov. 20, Dec. 18, 1841. [69] _Comp. Prose_, 340-370; _Democratic Review_, etc. [70] MSS. Harned; _Comp. Prose_, 188. [71] _Comp. Prose_, 12, 196. [72] _New York Mirror_ (1833), 87. _Cf._ Larned. [73] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 389. [74] _Comp. Prose_, 90. [75] _Mem. Hist._, iv., 157. [76] _Comp. Prose_, 372. [77] _Ib._, 273. [78] Bucke, 23. [79] _Ib._, 21. [80] _Comp. Prose_, 11. [81] _Comp. Prose_, 11-14, 426, 519. [82] _Comp. Prose_, 11. [83] _Ib._, 11, 12. [84] _Alibone's Dict._ [85] _Comp. Prose_, 196. [86] MSS. Harned. [87] _Atlantic Monthly_, xcii., 679. [88] _Atlantic Monthly_, xcii., 686. [89] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 397, 398. [90] _Ib._, 399. [91] _Atlantic Monthly_, xcii., 683, 684. [92] MSS. Harned. [93] _Camb. Mod. Hist._, 399; _Comp. Prose_, 188. CHAPTER IV ROMANCE (1848) Whitman was nearly twenty-nine, and had not, so far as I can discover, wandered beyond the limits of his own State,[94] nor had he experienced, to our knowledge, any serious affair of the heart. The only trace of strong personal emotion in his writing hitherto is that which we found in the _Tribune_ poems, dictated by the passion of human solidarity. "Blood Money" is probably the only thing which he had yet produced from the deeper regions of consciousness; it is the only piece of real self-revelation which he had yet confided to the world. Now we come suddenly upon a time of wandering, over which he himself has drawn a veil--a veil which covers, we cannot for a moment doubt, one of the most important incidents of his life. But it is a veil which we are unable to raise.[95] * * * * * Walking in the lobby of the old Broadway Theatre, between the acts, one February night,[96] Whitman was introduced to a Southern gentleman. A quarter of an hour later he had engaged to go South, to assist in starting the _Crescent_, a daily paper in New Orleans. On the eleventh of the month he set out.[97] The South was as unknown to him as it still remains to the majority of Northerners; and the South must have been as strange and fascinating to the son of Mannahatta as are the shores of the Mediterranean to a Londoner. An air of romance seems to breathe from his every reference to this period, and it may well be that the passionate attraction which afterwards drew his memory to the "magnet-south" had some personal incarnation.