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    Walt Whitman An Address
    Walt Whitman An Address
    Walt Whitman An Address
    Ebook77 pages55 minutes

    Walt Whitman An Address

    By Robert Green Ingersoll

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    Walt Whitman An Address

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      Book preview

      Walt Whitman An Address - Robert Green Ingersoll

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Walt Whitman, by Robert G. Ingersoll

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: Walt Whitman

      An Address

      Author: Robert G. Ingersoll

      Release Date: September 24, 2011 [EBook #34417]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALT WHITMAN ***

      Produced by Al Haines

      WALT WHITMAN

      WALT WHITMAN.

      AN ADDRESS

      BY

      ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

      LIBERTY IN LITERATURE.

      Delivered in Philadelphia, Oct. 21, 1890. Also Funeral

      Address Delivered at Harleigh, Camden, N. J.,

          March 30, 1892.

      WITH PORTRAIT OF WHITMAN.

      AUTHORIZED EDITION.

      New York;

      THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY,

      28 Lafayette Place.

      Copyrighted, 1890,

      BY

      THE TRUTH SEEKER COMPANY.

      TESTIMONIAL

      TO

      WALT WHITMAN.

      Of all the placid hours in his peaceful life, those that Walt Whitman spent on the stage of Horticultural Hall last night must have been among the most gratifying, says the Philadelphia Press of October 22, 1890. To a testimonial, intended to cheer his declining years, not only in a complimentary sense, came some eighteen hundred or more people to listen to a tribute to the aged poet by Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, such as seldom falls to the lot of living man to hear about himself.

      On the stage sat many admirers of the venerable torch-bearer of modern poetic thought, as Colonel Ingersoll described him, young and old, men and women. There were white beards, but none were so white as that of the author of Leaves of Grass. He sat calm and sedate in his easy wheeled chair, with his usual garb of gray, with his cloudy white hair falling over his white, turned-down collar that must have been three inches wide. No burst of eloquence from the orator's lips disturbed that equanimity; no tribute of applause moved him from his habitual calm.

      And when the lecturer, having concluded, said, We have met to-night to honor ourselves by honoring the author of 'Leaves of Grass,' and the audience started to leave the hall, the man they had honored reached forward with his cane and attracted Colonel Ingersoll's attention.

      Do not leave yet, said Colonel Ingersoll, Mr. Whitman has a word to say.

      This is what he said, and no more characteristic thing ever fell from the poet's lips or flowed from his pen:

      After all, my friends, the main factors being the curious testimony called personal presence and face to face meeting, I have come here to be among you and show myself, and thank you with my living voice for coming, and Robert Ingersoll for speaking. And so with such brief testimony of showing myself, and such good will and gratitude, I bid you hail and farewell.

      THE ADDRESS.

      Let us Put Wreaths on the Brows of the Living.

      I.

      In the year 1855 the American people knew but little of books. Their ideals, their models, were English. Young and Pollok, Addison and Watts were regarded as great poets. Some of the more reckless read Thomson's Seasons and the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott. A few, not quite orthodox, delighted in the mechanical monotony of Pope, and the really wicked—those lost to all religious shame—were worshipers of Shakespeare. The really orthodox Protestant, untroubled by doubts, considered Milton the greatest poet of them all. Byron and Shelley were hardly respectable—not to be read by young persons. It was admitted on all hands that Burns was a child of nature of whom his mother was ashamed and proud.

      In the blessed year aforesaid, candor, free and sincere speech, were under the ban. Creeds at that time were entrenched behind statutes, prejudice, custom, ignorance, stupidity, Puritanism and slavery; that is to say, slavery of mind and body.

      Of course it always has been, and forever will be, impossible for slavery, or any kind or form of injustice, to produce a great poet. There are hundreds of verse makers and writers on the side of wrong—enemies of progress—but they are not poets, they are not men of genius.

      At this time a young man—he to whom this testimonial is given—he upon whose head have fallen the snows of more than seventy winters—this man, born within the sound of the sea, gave to the world a book, Leaves of Grass. This book was, and is, the true transcript of a soul. The man is unmasked. No drapery of hypocrisy, no pretense, no

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