Whitman Will Not Answer

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WHITMAN WILL NOT ANSWER.

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 10.

—Walt Whitman sat in the dining room of his modest two-story frame cottage in Camden to-day and looked over a newspaper clipping giving a synopsis of Swinburne's savage attack on him in the current number of the Fortnightly. Swinburne says Whitman is no poet, and his "Eve" is a drunken applewoman, indecently sprawling in the slush and garbage of the gutter, amid the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit stall, and his "Venus" a Hottentot wench under the influence of cantharides and adultered rum. The gay poet said he was surprised at this outburst of the gifted Englishman, and he couldn't understand it. Before passing final judgment on it he was waiting to read the article in the Fortnightly. He did not intend to reply to Swinburne. The editors of the North American Review had sent him three dispatches, urgently requesting an article in reply for their next number, but he had positively declined to furnish it, and he had nothing to say for publication.

The venerable bard lives very quietly, and is bright and cheerful despite his infirmities, which prevent him from walking much. He has many visitors, and his door is always open. The children all salute him as they pass his house to and from school, and he likes to chat with the little ones.