“I wear army boots, with magnificent black morocco tops, the trousers put in, wherein shod and legged confront I Virginia’s deepest mud with supercilious eyes.”

-Walt Whitman

          Harry Stafford, quoted in Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols., (New York: New York University Press, 1961-77) 1: 83.