WALT WHITMAN IN MICKLE STREET "_There's this little street and this little house_" EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY [Illustration: 328 MICKLE STREET FROM A PAINTING [1908] BY MARSDEN HARTLEY] WALT WHITMAN IN MICKLE STREET ELIZABETH LEAVITT KELLER NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMXXI COPYRIGHT 1921 BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK EDITOR'S NOTE Elizabeth Leavitt Keller was born at Buffalo, N. Y., on November 3, 1839. Both her parents were descended from the first settlers of this country, and each in turn came to Buffalo in its early days, her mother, Sarah Ellis, by private conveyance in 1825, and her father, James S. Leavitt, by way of the newly opened Erie Canal in 1834. Elizabeth was the second daughter. In the spring of 1841 she was taken to Niagara Falls, and all her childhood recollections are clustered around that place. Returning to Buffalo in 1846, her father opened a book-bindery, and later added a printing office and stationery store. At nineteen years of age Elizabeth Leavitt was married to William Wallace Keller, of Little Falls, N. Y. Seven years later she became a widow. Her natural instinct for nursing was developed during the Civil War and the years that followed, but the time and opportunity for professional training did not come until 1876, when, her two children being provided for, she was free to apply for admission to the school for nurses connected with the Women's Hospital in Philadelphia--one of the three small training schools then existing in the United States. Before her course was finished her younger sister died. Mrs. Keller left the hospital to take care of the five motherless children, and it was not until ten years later that she was free to resume her training. When she graduated she was a grandmother--the only one, it need scarcely be said, in the class. While nursing her patient, Walt Whitman, during his last illness, she learnt much about his personality and home life, and much also about his unselfish friend and housekeeper, Mrs. Davis. The desire to tell the truth about the whole case--so often misunderstood or distorted--grew stronger with the passing years, and finally Mrs. Keller entered an old ladies' home in her own city, where she would have leisure to carry out her design. Here the book was commenced and completed. "After numerous struggles and disappointments," she writes, "my second great desire--to set Mrs. Davis in her true light--has been fulfilled--this time by a great-grandmother!" It is not often that a great-grandmother, after a long life of service to others, sees her first book published on her eighty-second birthday.