Title: The money value of real
Creator: Walt Whitman
Date: Between 1850 and 1855
Whitman Archive ID: rut.00024
Source: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of manuscripts, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: This prose note has no known connection to Whitman's published work. The material on the back of the leaf, which was included in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, suggests that the manuscript was likely written around 1855. The manuscript is held at Rutgers University Library along with several similar manuscripts that are numbered sequentially and probably date from around or before 1855: see "American literature must become distinct," "dithyrambic trochee," and "The only way in which."
Related item: On the back of this note is a manuscript fragment with several lines of prose that were included, with slightly-revised wording, as lines of poetry in the initial poem of the 1855 Leaves of Grass, ultimately titled "Song of Myself." See rut.00025.
Notes written on manuscript: On leaf 1 recto, in unknown hand: "7"
Contributors to digital file: Kirsten Clawson, Janel Cayer, Nicole Gray, and Kenneth M. Price
The money value of real and personal property estate in New York city is somewhere between five hundred millions and ana thousand millions of dollars.—Now what is all this in itself?—Though it seems to be the of all men and all women to,—though for its security the laws are made and the police drilled—though —yet in its positive intrinsic it is all nothing of account.—^The whole of It is not of so much account as a pitcher of water, or a dozen [a?] basket of fresh eggs,—I will The only way we attach it to aour feelings is by by attaching it identifying it with ^the human spirit,—through love, through pride, through our craving for beauty and happiness.