Whatever Whitman's duty in this matter, it behoves his biographer to present as full a picture as possible of his life, and to let no fact go by without notice; while the knowledge that Whitman himself could not disclose the whole truth, should only make us the more careful in our reading of the scanty facts which are known. It seems that about this time Walt formed an intimate relationship with some woman of higher social rank than his own--a lady of the South where social rank is of the first consideration--that she became the mother of his child, perhaps, in after years, of his children; and that he was prevented by some obstacle, presumably of family prejudice, from marriage or the acknowledgment of his paternity. The main facts can now hardly be disputed. Whitman put some of them on record in a letter to Addington Symonds during the last year of his life, designing to leave a fuller statement in the care of his executors. But this, through access of weakness, was never accomplished. Remarks which he let fall from time to time in private conversation seem to admit of no other interpretation than that I have put upon them. In one of his poems[107] he vividly describes how once in a populous city he chanced to meet with a woman who cast her love upon him, and how they remained together till at last he tore himself away, to remember nothing of that city save her and her love. In spite of Whitman's express desire that the poem should be regarded merely in its universal application--a desire which in itself seems to betoken a consciousness of self-betrayal--we cannot but recognise its autobiographical suggestion. And in the stress laid upon the part of the woman, we may see a cause for Whitman's reticence. If it was she who had pressed the relationship, it behoved him the more, for her sake, to keep silence, and to leave the determination of the relationship to her. But perhaps the most important evidence upon this obscure passage of his story is to be found in the psychological development which we can, as I believe, trace in his character. It was but a short time after his Southern visit,[108] perhaps in the same year, that he began to sketch out some of the poems which afterwards took the form familiar to us in _Leaves of Grass_. Now these differ from his earlier writings in many ways, but fundamentally in their subjectivity. In them he sets out to put himself on record in a way he heretofore had not attempted, and this enterprise must, I take it, have had its cause in some quickening of emotional self-consciousness. That process may well have culminated a few years later in what has been described as "cosmic consciousness"; but before that culmination, Whitman's experience must have contained elements which do not seem to have been present in the Whitman of _Franklin Evans_, or of the verses written upon the Mississippi. These elements, I believe, he acquired or began to acquire in the South.