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Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892

"Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy"

During his last illness, his mental faculti
were occasionally obscured, yet he was at times enabled to give
satisfactory evidence to those around him, that all was well, and
that he felt nothing in his way.
His funeral took place on fourth day, the 3rd of 3rd month. It was
attended by a large concourse of Friends and others, and a solid
meeting was held on the occasion; after which, his remains were
interr'd in Friends' burial-ground at this place (Jericho, Queens
county, New York.)
I have thought (even presented so incompletely, with such fearful
hiatuses, and in my own feebleness and waning life) one might well
memorize this life of Elias Hicks. Though not eminent in literature or
politics or inventions or business, it is a token of not a few, and is
significant. Such men do not cope with statesmen or soldiers--but I
have thought they deserve to be recorded and kept up as a sample--that
this one specially does. I have already compared it to a little
flowing liquid rill of Nature's life, maintaining freshness. As if,
indeed, under the smoke of battles, the blare of trumpets, and the
madness of contending hosts--the screams of passion, the groans of the
suffering, the parching of struggles of money and politics, and all
hell's heat and noise and competition above and around--should come
melting down from the mountains from sources of unpolluted snows, far
up there in God's hidden, untrodden recesses, and so rippling along
among us low in the ground, at men's very feet, a curious little brook
of clear and cool, and ever-healthy, ever-living water.


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