Camden: Sunday December 30, 1888

No day passes now but W. hands over to me some document which he says is for my “archives.” I said to-night to him: you are giving me some great stuff nowadays. I will find real use for it; I’ll make a big story out of it all some day.” He nodded. “That’s what I want you to do, if the world will stand it. In the final sense they are not records of my life,—of my personal life, of Walt Whitman,—but scripture material applying to a movement in which I am only an episode.”

-Horace Traubel

 

          Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 9 vols (1906-1996) 3: 424-25.