Only once was I fated to see him carried out of his usual quiet mood. One day, sitting there at his side, I picked up a New York paper and there read a paragraph about a new book by the poet, Swinburne. Without thinking, I casually mentioned it, forgetting that Swinburne had lost his earlier enthusiasm for “Leaves of Grass,” and had even, to put it proverbially, gone back on his tracks and “ratted” in a disgraceful article entitled “Whitmania.” The effect of his name now on Walt Whitman was astonishing. He turned round, raised his big hand from the broad arm of the chair on which it rested, and in a tremendous voice that shook me to the mid-rib, cried: “Of all the damned simulacra I have known, that man was the worst. He brought me to a table spread with fair dishes and when I lifted up the covers, behold, there was nothing there!”

-Ernest Rys

 

          Ernest Rhys, from Everyman Remembers (New York: Cosmopolitan, 1931, pp. 121-126) in Myerson 329.