Content:
As Ed Folsom notes, this manuscript "is the record of a day wandering near Timber Creek on the Stafford's farm" (see "Three Unpublished Whitman Letters to Harry Stafford and a Specimen Days Prose Fragment,"
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
25.4 [Spring 2008], 199). Whitman first published this material in "How I Get Around at Sixty and Take Notes. (No. 2),"
Critic
(9 April 1881). Most of it was later used in
Specimen Days & Collect
as "Horse-Mint" (1882–1883) and collected in
Complete Prose Works
(1892). For the complex history of how Whitman, for
Specimen Days
, mined his six-part
Critic
series on "How I Get Around," see Floyd Stovall, ed.,
Prose Works 1892
(New York: New York University Press, 1963), 1:347-351.
Content:
The fourth and fifth leaves of the printer's copy for "How I Get Around at 60, and Take Notes. (No.
2.)", which was published in the
Critic
on April 9, 1881. Though he did not
include this essay as a whole in
Specimen Days
& Collect
(1882–83), Whitman reprinted parts of it under different
titles. The first of the sections shown here appeared as "Distant Sounds."
