In those days of wandering and of taking in all sights and sounds  . . . he once went over to Georgetown, where coal barges were being unloaded at the Canal, and he told us that he watched for hours a negro at work, who was naked to the waist, and the play of his muscles, as he loaded and unloaded the buckets of coal, was most fascinating: “No Greek statue could have been more superb,” he said.

-Ellen M. Calder

 

          Calder in Joel Myerson, ed., Whitman in His Own Time (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1991), p. 208.