Physical Description: number of leaves unknown, handwritten
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Content:
A manuscript known only from a transcription published by Clifton Joseph Furness in
Walt Whitman's Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts
(Harvard University Press, 1928), 45. Because the manuscript has not been located it is difficult to speculate on the circumstances or date of its composition, but Edward Grier speculates that it was written in period leading up to the publication of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass
in 1855 because "the idea expressed is one that occupied [Whitman's] mind while he was preparing" that edition. See Grier, ed.
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts
(New York University, 1984), 1:120.