Personal: Whitman

Personal

WHITMAN.—The venerable Walt Whitman paid a visit to the EAGLE office this morning. It is remembered now only by the patrons of the EAGLE of a generation which is rapidly passing away, that Walt Whitman was at one time editor of the EAGLE. We are glad to find the old poet in good health, and although his hair is white his heart seems to be as young as ever, and the beauties of nature of which he has sung have lost none of their old time attractions for him. Mr. Whitman's fame as a poet has grown steadily of late, and it bids fair to be permanent. A foreign critic has recently asserted that America has produced but two distinctive literary men—Poe and Whitman—and that the works of the latter are racy of the soil of the New World. Mr. Whitman has been visiting his birth place and the resting places of his Long Island ancestors, and he has been welcomed and honored wherever he has been. He speaks with enthusiasm of the beauties of Long Island, and he holds that there is no fairer land anywhere. Mr. Whitman is on his way to Boston to superintend the publication of a complete edition of his poems, which is to be published in a neat and attractive form by the Osgoods.

"My 'Leaves of Grass,'" said the old gentleman, "I will publish as I wrote it, minor revisions excepted. I wrote as I felt, and it is not for an old man to say what a man at five and thirty should have written."