[168] This is given in full in O. L. Trigg's _Selections_; parts only, in _Comp. Prose_, 256. [169] _Comp. Prose_, 261. [170] _L. of G._, 29. [171] _L. of G._, 54. [172] _Ib._, 59. [173] _L. of G._, 55. [174] _L. of G._, 75. [175] _Ib._, 78. [176] _Ib._, 79. [177] _Ib._, 169. [178] _L. of G._, 333. [179] _Ib._, 325. [180] _Ib._, 81. [181] _Ib._ (1855). [182] _Ib._, 353. [183] _L. of G._, 134. [184] _Ib._, 211. [185] _Ib._, 209. [186] _Ib._, 282. [187] _L. of G._, 304. [188] _Ib._ (ed. 1855). [189] Camden, ix., 160; notes to mag. art. of May, 1847. [190] Letter in Appendix to _L. of G._ (1856) and Trowbridge, _op. cit._ [191] It is interesting to recall that _Prometheus Unbound_ was written in the year of Whitman's birth. [192] Bucke, 198. [193] _Ib._, 197. [194] _Ib._, 196; _In re_, 60. [195] _N. A. R._, January, 1856; _Trib._, 23rd July, 1855. [196] W. James, _Var. of Relig. Experience_, 82-83. [197] Bucke, 138; Burroughs, etc. [198] Bucke, 26. [199] _In re_, 13, 32; Bucke, 195. [200] _Atlantic Monthly_, xcii., 679. [201] Camden, ix., 119. CHAPTER VIII THE MYSTIC In September, 1855, Mr. Moncure Conway, having heard of Whitman during a visit to Concord, called upon him in Brooklyn, with an introduction from Emerson. Walt was then living with his family in one of a row of small artisans' houses, in Ryerton Street,[202] out of Myrtle Avenue. At the moment, however, he was correcting proofs in the little office where his book had been printed, and wore a workman's striped blue shirt, open at the throat. A few days later, he called upon Mr. Conway, his sister and another lady, at the Metropolitan Hotel, where his manners and conversation were enjoyed and approved. He was then garbed in "the baize coat and chequered shirt" in which he appears in the _Leaves of Grass_ portrait. Mr. Conway in his story has somewhat confused the details of these visits with those of another paid by him upon a Sunday morning some two years later, when the Whitmans seem to have moved to a more commodious house on North Portland Avenue. The matter is not important, and we may follow the main lines of the picturesque account which he contributed in October, 1866, to the _Fortnightly Review_.[203] According to this narrative, Whitman was discovered basking in the hot sunshine on some waste land outside Brooklyn. He was wearing the rough workman's clothes of his choice, was as brown as the soil and as grey as the grass bents. His visitor was at once impressed by the exceptional largeness and reality of the man, and by a subtle delicacy of feeling for which _Leaves of Grass_ does not appear to have prepared him. Whitman was slow, serene, gracious; in spite of the grey in his hair and beard, and the deep furrows across his brow, his full red face and quiet blue-grey eyes were almost those of a child.