May Byron - A Day with Walt Whitman

He was the most domesticated, least troublesome of inmates, and his "large sweet presence" imparted something to the homely breakfast-table, something of benignity and tranquillity, which it had lacked before his entrance. "The best man I ever knew," Mrs. Stafford called him. Her sons adored him; and her grandchildren were almost like his own, in the love and confidence with which they curled themselves upon his great grey knee when the meal was over. For his affection for children, his sense of fatherhood, was a predominant trait of Whitman's character. Lonely, since his mother's death, he had lived as regards the closer human relationships: lonely, in this sense, he was doomed to remain. A veil of secrecy hung over his past life, which none had ever ventured to lift. Rumours of a lost mate, as in the song of the Alabama bird upon the shore, – of children whom he never could claim, – hints of harsh fates and imperious destinies, occasionally penetrated that close-woven curtain of silence which covered his most intimate self. But only in his poems had he voiced his loneliness, and that with the tenderest poignancy of yearning for "better, loftier love's ideals, the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade"…

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