*Possibly on Lowell’s initiative, Leaves of Grass was removed from the open shelves of the college library and kept under lock and key with other tabooed books. Among those testifying to this was William Roscoe Thayer, a member of the class of 1881 at Harvard, who on a visit to Camden brashly recommended Lowell’s work to Whitman—“Although he isn’t a poet of the first rank, he stands well in the second place.” Whitman stood firm. “You wouldn’t persuade me to eat a second-class egg, would you? I don’t care for second-class poetry, either.” (William Roscoe Thayer, “Personal Recollections of Walt Whitman,” Scribner’s Magazine, LXV [June 1919], p. 683.)

*Similarly, J. W. Wallace, a prominent member of the Bolton group, claimed to have had “a strange and unique experience” when he visited Whitman in September 1891. “Quite suddenly there came into my mind what I can only describe as a most vivid consciousness of my mother, who had died six and a half years before. I seemed to see her mentally with perfect clearness . . . and to feel myself enwrapped in and penetrated by her living and palpitating presence. I record it here because it seemed equally indubitable that Walt was somehow the link between us, and as if his presence had made the experience possible.” According to Wallace, who could hold his own with Bucke in the obscurantism department, Whitman’s own “illumination” “had been accompanied by a liberation and vast expansion of consciousness and vision, and by a readjustment of all the diverse elements of his nature, which related them thenceforth with the universal and eternal. In this was his home, withdrawn and silent, from which he drew his inspiration and power. It was this—together with his long, resolute and uncompromising faithfulness to the promptings of his deepest nature—which invested him with the personal majesty that, with all his simplicity and spontaneity, always characterized him. And this was the main source of the silent influence of his personality and bodily presence.” (John Johnston and J. W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 [London, 1917], pp. 99, 220.)

* During the Civil War, Whitman saw one of Booth’s sons, John Wilkes, in the role of Richard III. The performance, he wrote in May 1862, “is about as much like his father’s, as the wax bust of Henry Clay, in the window down near Howard street, a few blocks below the theatre, is like the genuine orator in the Capitol, when his best electricity was flashing alive in him and out of him.” This was three years before the younger Booth’s unscheduled appearance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington at a performance of Our American Cousin. (“The Bowery,” New York Leader, May 3, 1962—reprinted in Walt Whitman and the Civil War, ed. Charles I. Glicksberg [Philadelphia, 1933], p 56.)

* In psychoanalytic terms Whitman at this stage may be described as “subject-homoerotic.” “There is, in a sense, no true external love-object—at least initially. Such men love boys as a way of loving the boy in themselves and themselves in the boy. They need have no antipathy for women and may have warm friends among them, but are likely to be too self-centered to pay much attention to them. The situation may be pictured very crudely by thinking of the subject-homoerotic man as virtually encapsulated—more or less intact—within the personality of, usually, his mother . . . he behaves as if he were caught in the predicament of earliest adolescence and tries to escape from it through his love for the young men he might have become. His intense identification with them may lead to an almost uncanny empathy.” (Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent [Boston, 1973], pp. 121–22.)

* The general situation will be familiar to readers of Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands” (in Winesburg, Ohio): “A half-witted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts. Strange hideous accusations fell from his loose-hung lips.” In one version of the Southold episode, Whitman is supposed to have been denounced from the pulpit as a “Sodomite” and then tarred and feathered. This hardly jibes with the fact that during the 1840s and 1850s Whitman regularly spent his vacations around Southold. (Horace Gregory, ed., The Portable Sherwood Anderson [New York, 1949], p. 48; Katherine Molinoff, Walt Whitman at Southold [Privately printed, 1966].)

* Robert K. Martin describes this poem as “a clear defense of the anonymity of sexual encounter. In the dream-vision of Whitman there are no persons, but rather a general feeling of the delight of sexual experience regardless of the partner. They are totally tactile, since they take place in the dreamworld of closed eyes. The experience could well be repeated in almost any steam bath of a modern large city. But the important point to see is that not asking, not knowing and not thinking are integral parts of Whitman’s democratic vision, and anonymous sexuality is an important way station on the path to the destruction of distinctions of age, class, beauty and sex. Whitman loves all being, and will love, and be loved by, all being. It is perhaps at this juncture that the implications of Whitman’s perspective become most revolutionary.” (The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry [Austin, Texas, 1979]. PP. 19–20.)

* After his first visit to New York Dickens characterized the press there as “dealing in round abuse and blackguard names . . . pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey.” (American Notes [Penguin, 1972], pp. 135–36.)

* Whitman’s “The Last of the Sacred Army” (1842) is virtually a rewriting of Hawthorne’s “The Gray Champion” (1835); symbolic of his other borrowings are the names “Reuben” (in “Reuben’s Last Wish,” 1842) and “Bourne” (in Franklin Evans, 1842), which, taken together, recall “Reuben Bourne” in Hawthorne’s “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832). Whitman’s “The Angel of Tears” (1842) shows that he had been “a good pupil” of Poe, according to Professor Roger Asselineau. “Bervance: or, Father and Son” (1841) is a Poe-like tale of “a deep revenge—a fearful redress,” just as “Revenge and Requital” (1845) joins the same major theme of Poe with the cholera epidemic rendered in symbolic terms in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). Whitman’s obsession with sepulture suggests several stories by Poe (in particular “Berenice,” 1835) and by Hawthorne as well as the opening chapter of Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816).

Two items from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when Whitman was editor dramatize his ambivalence toward Poe. On December 17, 1846, Whitman quoted the following from another publication as a laudable example of “humor and drive-away-careism”:

A NICE JOB.—We understand that Mr. E. A. Poe has been employed to furnish the railing for the new railroad over Broadway. He was seen going up street a few days ago, apparently laying out the road.

The second item, written by Whitman, followed this cruel joke by a day:

It is stated that Mr. Poe, the poet and author, now lies dangerously ill with brain fever, and that his wife is in the last stages of consumption.—They are said to be “without money and without friends, actually suffering from disease and destitution in New York.”

In the end Whitman judged him “a victim of history—like Paine. The disposition to parade, to magnify, his defects has grown into a habit: every literary, every moralistic jackanapes who comes along has to give him an additional kick.” Whitman was apparently the only writer of any standing present at Poe’s reburial in Baltimore in 1875. (Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman [Cambridge, Mass., 1960], I, 46; Cleveland Rogers and John Black, eds., The Gathering of the Forces [1920], II, 272–3; Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden [Philadelphia, 1953], 23; Floyd Stovall, ed., Prose Works, 1892 [1963], 231–32.)

* “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence . . . at bottom no one believes in his own death, or, to put the same thing in another way . . . in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” (Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [London, 1963–74], XIV, p. 289.)

* Whitman was unconsciously echoing a passage from his Franklin Evans, written six years before his trip to New Orleans. “Among the slaves on Bourne’s estate lived a young woman, named Margaret, a creole. . . . She was of that luscious and fascinating appearance often seen in the south, where a slight tinge of the deep color, large, soft, voluptuous eyes, and beautifully cut lips, set off a form of faultless proportions—and all is combined with a complexion just sufficiently removed from clear white, to make the spectator doubtful whether he is gazing on a brunette, or one who has indeed some hue of African blood in her veins. Margaret belonged to the latter class.”

This meaning of the word “creole,” a notorious semantic gumbo, was one of several current in the 1840s. “Understand, good reader,” noted the journalist, lawyer, and politician, A. Oakley Hall, who lived in New Orleans from 1846 to 1851, “that Creole is a word signifying ‘native,’ and applies to all kinds of things and men indigenous to New Orleans,” a definition also acceptable to Benjamin Moore Norman, author of a reliable guide to the city published in 1845. When applied to blacks, “creole” distinguished the native-born from those brought over from Africa. In writing about Whitman’s New Orleans “romance,” the English biographer Henry Bryan Binns, as will be seen, chose to understand “creole” to mean an upper-class white person descended from French or Spanish settlers. (A. Oakley Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of “Crescent City” Life [New York, 1851; repr. Baton Rouge, 1976], p. 17; Norman’s New Orleans and Environs [New Orleans, 1845; repr. Baton Rouge, 1976], pp. 73–74.)

* Whitman was thinking of a passage from his early and enduring idol Frances Wright’s A Few Days in Athens: “Zeno advanced into the midst; he stood by the head and shoulders above the crowd . . . his gait, erect, calm, and dignified; his features . . . seemed sculptured by the chisel for a colossal divinity; the forehead . . . was marked with the even lines of wisdom and age; but no harsh wrinkles . . . Wisdom undisturbable, fortitude unshakeable, self-respect . . . were in his face, his carriage, and his tread.” (David Goodale. “Some of Walt Whitman’s Borrowings.” American Literature X, No. 2 [May 1938], pp. 205–6.)

*This applies to Whitman’s plein-air “Farm Picture”—

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn,

A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,

And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.

This in turn recalls the luminous realism of the Long Island genre painter William Sidney Mount, whose work Whitman knew. Genre painting—an “art for the people,” in Oliver Larkin’s definition, that interprets “man to himself by showing how he behaves on simple and present occasions”—was integral to the democratic vision of Leaves of Grass. Section 9 of “Song of Myself” also recalls Mount:

The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready,

The dried grass of the harvest-time loads the slow-drawn wagon.

The clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged,

The armfuls are pack’d to the sagging mow.

Whitman and painting are sensitively discussed in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance [New York, 1941], pp. 595–613. For genre painting, Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America [New York, 1960], pp. 214–23.

* “I hear the trained soprano . . . she convulses me like the climax of my love-grip,” Whitman wrote in the 1855 Leaves of Grass (he softened the line in later editions). But his response to Anna Bishop in 1847 already has sexual overtones of artful prolongation and ecstatic release. “Dallied,” suggesting amorous play, and “the gyrations of a bird in the air” together anticipate his 1880 poem about the mating of eagles:

Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,

The rushing amorous contact high in space together,

The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel . . .

* This promise died with the Crystal Palace. Although cheap, strong, and technically fireproof, iron had no integrity in high temperatures, a flaw that was demonstrated on October 5, 1858, when, within fifteen minutes after its combustible contents caught fire, the dome, roof and walls of the Crystal Palace collapsed. (Waring Latting’s observatory tower had burned to the ground two years earlier.)

* Vincent Van Gogh was reading Whitman in 1888, around the time he was painting the apocalyptic Starry Night, and he wrote to his sister, “He sees in the future, and even in the present, a world of health, carnal love, strong and frank—of friendship—of work—under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which after all one can only call God—and eternity in its place above the world. At first it makes you smile, it is all so candid and pure.” The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke describes this counterpart to the ecstasy that Whitman invoked in Section 5 of “Song of Myself.” “He had never been filled with more gentle motions, his body was somehow treated like a soul, and put in a state to receive a degree of influence which, given the normal apparentness of one’s physical conditions, really could not have been felt at all. . . . he insistently asked himself what was happening to him then, and almost at once found an expression that satisfied him, saying to himself, that he had got to the other side of Nature.” In part a response to this experience, Rilke’s Duino Elegies are written in a dithyrambic free verse similar to Whitman’s. (The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh [London, 1958], Vol. III, p. 445; Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender [New York, 1939], pp. 124–25.)

* “Standing apart” is one of the literal meanings of the word ecstasy. Tennyson said he experienced the same sort of autohypnosis through the repetition of his name.

I have never had any revelation through anaesthetics, but a kind of waking trance (this for want of a better term) I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently till, all at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of the individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being; and this is not a composed state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were), seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state was utterly beyond words? (Quoted in Walter Franklin Prince, Noted Witnesses for Psychic Occurrences [Boston, 1928], p. 144.)

* The official version of the episode, laid out by Bucke in 1883 with Whitman’s approval, even denied there had been any evidence “that the letter was meant to be private.” Whitman became more circumspect about such matters. In 1871, after he received a flattering letter from Tennyson, he cautioned a newspaper friend, “I rely on your promise not to publish the letter, nor any thing equivalent to it.” But he had no objection to printing the news that he had received such a letter. (Richard Maurice Bucke, M. D., Walt Whitman [Philadelphia, 1883], p. 139.)

* The contrary is suggested by a manuscript note about Emerson that Whitman made (according to Bucke’s dating) in the “early fifties,” before Leaves of Grass.

He has what none else has; he does what none else does. He pierces the crusts that envelope the secrets of life. He joins on equal terms the few great sages and original seers. He represents the freeman, America, the individual. He represents the gentleman. No teacher or poet of old times or modern times has made a better report of manly and womanly qualities, heroism, chastity, temperance, friendship, fortitude. None has given more beautiful accounts of truth and justice. His words shed light to the best souls; they do not admit of argument. As a sprig from the pine tree or a glimpse anywhere into the daylight belittles all artificial flower work and all the painted scenery of theatres, so are live words in a book compared to cunningly composed words. A few among men (soon perhaps to become many) will enter easily into Emerson’s meanings; by those he will be well-beloved. The flippant writer, the orthodox critic, the numbers of good or indifferent imitators, will not comprehend him; to them he will indeed be a transcendentalist, a writer of sunbeams and moonbeams, a strange and unapproachable person. (Richard Maurice Bucke, ed., Notes and Fragments [London, Ont., 1899], pp. 128–29.)

* William James quotes this “fine and moving poem,” titled “To You,” in the concluding chapter of Pragmatism (1907). Of two ways of interpreting it, “both useful,” he favors the second:

One is the monistic way, the mystical way of pure cosmic emotion. The glories and grandeurs, they are yours absolutely, even in the midst of your defacements. Whatever may happen to you, whatever you may appear to be, inwardly you are safe. Look back, lie back, on your true principle of being! This is the famous way of quietism, of indifferentism. Its enemies compare it to a spiritual opium. Yet pragmatism must respect this way, for it has massive historic vindication.

But pragmatism sees another way to be respected also, the pluralistic way of interpreting the poem. The you so glorified, to which the hymn is sung, may mean your better possibilities phenomenally taken, or the specific redemptive effects even of your failures, upon yourself or others. It may mean your loyalty to the possibilities of others whom you admire and love so, that you are willing to accept your own poor life, for it is that glory’s partner. You can at least appreciate, applaud, furnish the audience, of so brave a total world. Forget the low in yourself, then, think only of the high. Identify your life therewith; then, through angers, losses, ignorance, ennui, whatever you thus make yourself, whatever you thus most deeply are, picks its way.

In either way of taking the poem, it encourages fidelity to ourselves. Both ways satisfy; both sanctify the human flux. [Cambridge, Mass., 1975, p. 133.]

* The same symbolic butterfly appears on the backstrip of Leaves of Grass in 1884, a year after Whitman sat for a studio photograph (used as frontispiece in 1889) that showed him with a butterfly apparently perched on his right forefinger. “I’ve always had the knack of attracting birds and butterflies and other wild critters,” Whitman said about this picture to William Roscoe Thayer. “They know that I like ‘em and won’t hurt ‘em and so they come.” Thayer had wondered what a summer butterfly was doing inside a photographer’s studio so cold that Whitman was wearing a heavy sweater. In all probability, as Esther Shephard showed in 1938, Whitman was holding an object that turned up in Harned’s collection of Whitman memorabilia at the Library of Congress, “a small cardboard butterfly with a loop of fine wire attached, by means of which it could be fastened to a finger.” Printed on the blue, red, green and yellow wings of Whitman’s cardboard butterfly are lines by the hymnologist John Mason Neale, author of “Jerusalem the Golden” and “Good King Wenceslas.” (William Roscoe Thayer, “Personal Recollections of Walt Whitman,” Scribner’s Magazine, June 1919, p. 685; Esther Shephard, Walt Whitman’s Pose [New York, 1938], pp. 250–52.)

* In the words of Stephen B. Oates, Lincoln’s most acute and evenhanded modern biographer,

The truth was that Lincoln felt embarrassed about his log-cabin origins and never liked to talk about them. . . . he had worked all his adult life to overcome the limitations of his frontier background, to make himself into a literate and professional man who commanded the respect of his colleagues. So if he ever discussed his childhood or his parents, said William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, “it was with great reluctance and significant reserve. There was something about his origin he never cared to dwell on.” (Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln [New York: New American Library, 1978], p. 4.)

* Whitman reported to Emerson from Washington in January 1863 that “the Army (I noticed it first in camp, and the same here among the wounded) is very young—and far more American than we supposed—ages range mainly from 20 to 30—a light sprinkling of men older—and a bigger sprinkling of young lads of 17 and 18.”

* Amputation was to become “the trade-mark of Civil War surgery. . . . More arms and legs were chopped off in this war than in any other conflict in which the country has ever been engaged. According to Federal records, three out of four operations were’ amputations, and there is good reason to believe the same figures obtained in the Confederacy. At Gettysburg, for an entire week, from dawn to twilight, some surgeons did nothing but cut off arms and legs. . . . For what it is worth, legend has it that younger soldiers often saved their limbs by hiding a pistol under a pillow and drawing it out at the opportune time.” As a hospital visitor Whitman intervened on a number of occasions; a paragraph in the New York Tribune in 1880 quotes a grateful veteran of the Union Army—“This is the leg that man saved for me.” (Stewart Brooks, Civil War Medicine [Springfield, III., 1966], p. 97; the Tribune item is from Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., Walt Whitman [Philadelphia, 1883], p. 37.)

*Whitman returned to this subject in Democratic Vistas.

The whole present system of the officering and personnel of the army and navy of these States, and the spirit and letter of their trebly-aristocratic rules and regulations, is a monstrous exotic, a nuisance and revolt, and belong here just as much as orders of nobility, or the Pope’s council of cardinals. I say if the present theory of our army and navy is sensible and true, then the rest of America is an unmitigated fraud. [Prose Works, 1892, II, pp. 389–90.!

*The idioms and familiar practices of the period have to be understood accordingly and not bent to the present, as these two passages suggest.

John Burroughs, who was unquestionably “straight,” writes as follows in 1863–64. “I have been much with Walt. Have even slept with him. I love him very much. . . . He loves everything and everybody. I saw a soldier the other day stop on the street and kiss him. He kisses me as if I were a girl. . . . He bathed today while I was there—such a handsome body, and such delicate, rosy flesh I never saw before. I told him he looked good enough to eat.”

From an interview with people in Huntington who remembered Whitman from his Long Islander days there: “We inquired whether Walt was a gay lad among the lassies of the village—a beau in the rustic society of his day—and both received the same reply: ‘Not in the least.’ ‘He seemed to hate women,’ said one of them—a hard, and, I am sure, quite too strong expression, but one which forcibly shows how alien even to his hot blood of twenty summers were all effeminate longings.” (Clara Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs, Comrades [Boston, 1931], pp. 13, 17; Daniel G. Brinton and Horace L. Traubel, “A Visit to West Hills,” Wait Whitman Fellowship Papers, Philadelphia, December 1894.)

*“He had had that very dream before every great national success,” George Templeton Strong noted a week after the assassination, “and he was certain he should hear of some great piece of news within forty-eight hours. A poet could make something of that.” The poet may have found some clues in Moby-Dick, where Starbuck pleads with the doomed Ahab, “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart! . . . How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again.” (Strong, Diary, II, 691; Moby-Dick, [repr. N. Y., 1943], pp. 581, 605–6.)

*O’Connor’s source for this appealing but apocryphal tale was Whitman, who in turn had taken it in good faith from a letter sent him by an admirer in New York. The writer appears to have adapted the story from Goethe, who claimed that Napoleon said to him, “Indeed, you are a Man.” (John J. McAleer, “Whitman and Goethe: More on the ‘Van Rensellaer’ Letter.” Walt Whitman Review, VI, No. 4 [Dec. 1960], pp. 83–85.)

*A manuscript note written at the time shows Whitman trying to make the best of this situation.

Of William Blake & Walt Whitman Both are mystics, extatics but the difference between them is this—and a vast difference it is: Blake’s visions grow to be the rule, displace the normal condition, fill the field, spurn this visible, objective life, & seat the subjective spirit on an absolute throne, wilful & uncontrolled. But Whitman, though he occasionaly prances off, takes flight with an abandon & capriciousness of step or wing, and a rapidity & whirling power, which quite dizzy the reader in his first attempts to follow, always holds the mastery over himself, &, even in his most intoxicated lunges or pirouettes, never once loses control, or even equilibrium. To the pe[rfect] sense, it is evident that he goes off because he permits himself to do so, while ever the director, or direct’g principle sits coolly at hand, able to stop the wild teetotum & reduce it to order, at any a moment. In Walt Whitman, escapades of this sort are the exceptions. The main character of his poetry is the normal, the universal, the simple, the eternal platform of the best manly & womanly qualities.

Despite Swinton’s conjectures, Whitman apparently had no special knowledge of Blake prior to 1868; ten years later he made a fleeting reference to the Englishman’s “half-mad vision”; and the sole example of any direct “influence” is the design of Whitman’s tomb which, according to Anne Gilchrist’s daughter Grace, he adapted from a Blake engraving. (Faint Clews & Indirections, p. 53; Prose Works, 1892, II, p. 670; Grace Gilchrist, “Chats with Walt Whitman,” Temple Bar Magazine [London], CXIII, February 1898, pp. 211–1 2.)

* Drinkard, a Southern sympathizer who studied in Paris and London during the war, wrote up the case for the Philadelphia doctor who treated Whitman that summer.

On the 23rd of January last, Mr. Whitman previously in good health—was attacked with left hemiplegia, presenting all the symptoms of such conditions, though none of them very marked at the time. Speech was hardly appreciably impaired: facial distortion was slight, and deviation of tongue just perceptible: left upper extremity never wholly useless: left lower showing the paretic condition—more than any other part or organ. Constipation, slight at onset of attack, has required little attention subsequent. Under the influence of rest, and such incidental treatment as was demanded from time to time, his general condition has slowly improved: locomotive power having, however, been only imperfectly regained. His principal annoyance has been a recurrent headache, with tendency to nausea—never actually reaching the point. After subsidence of everything like active manifestations, I commenced cautiously, the use of induced current—with Gaiffe’s battery, and continued it for a number of weeks, without apparent result, beyond a decided improvement in nutrition of the lower limb. (Drinkard to Dr. Matthew Grier, July 24, 1873, Trent Coll., Duke University Library; Charles E. Feinberg, “Walt Whitman and His Doctors,” Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 114 [December 1964], p. 836.)

* Herbert was studying to be a painter. Walt wrote an unsigned notice, for a Camden paper, of the portrait the boy was doing at Timber Creek. “The painting, which is now well advanced and promises to be an excellent likeness, represents Mr. Whitman sitting in an easy chair under a favorite tree. It is hoped that the painting will be retained in the country.” Herbert later settled at Centerport, Long Island, where he barely managed to support himself as a painter. The Gilchrists’ visit to America left a trail of defeat for them. Beatrice pursued a career in medicine in the same way her mother pursued Walt and with somewhat comparable results. In 1877, when Beatrice was studying medicine in Philadelphia, Walt cautioned her against “sheer overwork, & too intense concentration . . . resulting in terrible brain troubles & general caving in.” She committed suicide in 1881.