efended him
from the aspersions cast upon his references to womanhood. A
sympathetic and friendly tone began to displace the collection of
distasteful adjectives which had been his meed heretofore.

Then, in the latter part of 1865, occurred an episode which drew
around Whitman a circle of friends keen to resent, and active to
condemn, an act of injustice from one high in authority. Among the
influential friends who rushed to his defense were John Burroughs and
William Douglas O'Connor, and the events which drew their fire were
these:

Whitman, whose health was shattered by his untiring devotion and
ministrations to ill and wounded soldiers, had been given a minor
clerkship in the Department of the Interior. James Harlan was
Secretary of the Department. He had been a Methodist clergyman and
president of a western college. When his attention was called to
Whitman's authorship of Leaves of Grass, the Secretary characterized
the book as "full of indecent passages," the author was termed "a very
bad man," and was abruptly dismissed from the position he had held for
six months.

Whitman meekly accepted the curt dismissal, but William Douglas
O'Connor in a white heat of indignation issued a pamphlet which flayed
the astonished Secretary of the Interior as a narrow-minded
calumniator. The pamphlet, now a very rare document, was headed:

THE GOOD GRAY POET
A VINDICATION

With Celtic fervor and eloquence, William Douglas O'Connor made his
plea an intercession in the cause of free letters. He examined the
entire range of literature, ancient and modern, in quest of parallels
that would prove Whitman's book by comparison to be a masterpiece of
literature, and would demonstrate Mr. Secretary Harlan to be merely a
literary headsman. Out of many pages of allusion to the literary
productions of the great writers of all time and for all time, some
characteristic passages may be chosen:

"Here is Dante. Open the tremendous pages of the Inferno. What
is this line at the end of the twenty-first canto, which even
John Carlyle flinches from translating, but which Dante did
not flinch from writing? Out with Dante!

"Here is the book of Job: the vast Arabian landscape, the
picturesque pastoral details of Arabian life, the last tragic
immensity of Oriental sorrow, the whole over-arching sky of
Oriental piety, are here. But here also the inevitable
'indecency.' Out with Job!

"Here is Plutarch