house on Mickle Street where Walt
Whitman lived his last years. It is now occupied by Mrs. Thomas Skymer,
a friendly Italian woman, and her family. Mrs. Skymer graciously
allowed me to go through the downstairs rooms.

I don't suppose any literary shrine on earth is of more humble and
disregarded aspect than Mickle Street. It is a little cobbled byway,
grimed with drifting smoke from the railway yards, littered with
wind-blown papers and lined with small wooden and brick houses sooted
almost to blackness. It is curious to think, as one walks along that
bumpy brick pavement, that many pilgrims from afar have looked forward
to visiting Mickle Street as one of the world's most significant altars.
As Chesterton wrote once, "We have not yet begun to get to the beginning
of Whitman." But the wayfarer of to-day will find Mickle Street far from
impressive.

The little house, a two-story frame cottage, painted dark brown, is
numbered 330. (In Whitman's day it was 328.) On the pavement in front
stands a white marble stepping-block with the carved initials
W.W.--given to the poet, I dare say, by the same friends who bought him
a horse and carriage. A small sign, in English and Italian, says:
_Thomas A. Skymer, Automobiles to Hire on Occasions_. It was with
something of a thrill that I entered the little front parlor where Walt
used to sit, surrounded by his litter of papers and holding forth to
faithful listeners. One may safely say that his was a happy old age,
for there were those who never jibbed at protracted audience.

A description of that room as it was in the last days of Whitman's life
may not be uninteresting. I quote from the article published by the
Philadelphia _Press_ of March 27, 1892, the day after the poet's death:

Below the windowsill a four-inch pine shelf is swung, on which rests
a bottle of ink, two or three pens and a much-rubbed spectacle case.

(The shelf, I am sorry to say, is no longer there.)

The table--between which and the wall is the poet's rocker covered
with a worsted afghan, presented to him one Christmas by a bevy of
college girls who admired his work--is so thickly piled with books
and magazines, letters and the raffle of a literary desk that there
is scarcely an inch of room upon which he may rest his paper as he
writes. A volume of Shakespeare lies on top of a heaping full waste
basket that was once used to bring peaches to market, and an ancient