[93] T. Wright, Life of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i, p. 158.

[94] Most of these were carelessly lost or destroyed by Posh.  A few have been published by James Blyth, Edward Fitzgerald and ‘Posh,’ 1908.

[95] It is as such that Whitman should be approached, and I would desire to protest against the tendency, now marked in many quarters, to treat him merely as an invert, and to vilify him or glorify him accordingly.  However important inversion may be as a psychological key to Whitman’s personality, it plays but a small part in Whitman’s work, and for many who care for that work a negligible part. (I may be allowed to refer to my own essay on Whitman, in The New Spirit, written nearly thirty years ago.)

[96] I may add that Symonds (in his book on Whitman) accepted this letter as a candid and final statement showing that Whitman was absolutely hostile to sexual inversion, that he had not even taken its phenomena into account, and that he had “omitted to perceive that there are inevitable points of contact between sexual inversion and his doctrine of friendship.”  He recalls, however, Whitman’s own lines at the end of “Calamus” in the Camden edition of 1876:—­

    “Here my last words, and the most baffling,
    Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting,
    Here I shade down and hide my thoughts—­I do not expose them,
    And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.”

[97] Whitman’s letters to Peter Doyle, an uncultured young tram-conductor deeply loved by the poet, have been edited by Dr. Bucke, and published at Boston:  Calamus:  A Series of Letters, 1897.

[98] Whitman acknowledged, however (as in the letter to Symonds already referred to), that he had had six children; they appear to have been born in the earlier part of his life when he lived in the South. (See a chapter on Walt Whitman’s children in Edward Carpenter’s interesting book, Days with Walt Whitman, 1906.) Yet his brother George Whitman said:  “I never knew Walt to fall in love with young girls, or even to show them marked attention.”  And Doyle, who knew him intimately during ten years of late life, said:  “Women in that sense never came into his head.”  The early heterosexual relationship seems to have been an exception in his life.  With regard to the number of children I am informed that, in the opinion of a lady who knew Whitman in the South, there can be no reasonable doubt as to the existence of one child, but that when enumerating six he possibly included grandchildren.