resignation. My favourite reading was Shelley, my composer
among composers, Wagner. Chopin came later. This was in 1876, when the
Bayreuth apotheosis made Wagner's name familiar to us, especially in
Philadelphia, where his empty, sonorous Centennial March was first
played by Theodore Thomas at the Exposition. The reading of a magazine
article by Moncure D. Conway caused me to buy a copy, at an
extravagant price for my purse, of The Leaves of Grass, and so
uncritical was I that I wrote a parallel between Wagner and Whitman;
between the most consciously artistic of men and the wildest among
improvisators. But then it seemed to me that both had thrown off the
"shackles of convention." (What prison-like similes we are given to in
the heady, generous impulses of green adolescence.) I was a boy, and
seeing Walt on Market Street, as he came from the Camden Ferry, I
resolved to visit him. It was some time after the Fourth of July,
1877, and I soon found his little house on Mickle Street. A policeman
at the ferry-house directed me. I confess I was scared after I had
given the bell one of those pulls that we tremblingly essay at a
dentist's door. To my amazement the old man soon stood before me, and
cordially bade me enter.

"Walt," I said, for I had heard that he disliked a more ceremonious
prefix, "I've come to tell you how much the Leaves have meant to me."
"Ah!" he simply replied, and asked me to take a chair. To this hour I
can see the humble room, but when I try to recall our conversation I
fail. That it was on general literary subjects I know, but the main
theme was myself. In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in
his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not
averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a
fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness
his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the
damnedest simulacrum?" But he was a sphinx the first time I met him. I
do recall that he said Poe wrote too much in a dark cellar, and that
music was his chief recreation--of which art he knew nothing; it
served him as a sounding background for his pencilled improvisations.
I begged for an autograph. He told me of his interest in a certain
asylum or hospital, whose name has gone clean out of my mind, and I
paid my few dollars for the treasured signature. It is now one of my
literary treasures.

If I forget the tenor of our