1
The third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) celebrates death equally with
life and, like the second (1856) edition, it can be read as a manual of faith.
W. C. Harris proposes that the edition be viewed as a sort of bible, de-
signed to spread Whitman’s bracing word in the fashion of the active
Bible societies of his day. And, like most editions of the Bible, the poems
are divided into numbered sentences rather than stanzas.^1 The exciting
drama in which the persona imagines himself dead and happy while his
spirit still maintains an empathetic contact with the living (the premise
of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) resonates in several of the poems that ¤rst
appeared in this volume. One brief lyric, for example, announces that
“death, the future, the invisible faith, shall be conveyed” by a new breed
of spirit-mediums who will proclaim throughout the land the abiding
personal existence of the departed. And in “Apostroph” (a sixty-¤ve-line
poem that appears only in the 1860 edition) Whitman seems tempted to
take his place among the teachers of the “invisible faith”:
O mediums! O to teach! to convey the invisible faith!
To promulge real things! To journey through all The States!...
O purged lumine! you threaten me more than I can stand!^2The “invisible faith”—a recognizable synonym for spiritualism—is predi-
cated on a belief in the abiding personal existence of the “departed.”
Whitman seemed pleased to be accepted by the spiritualists as one of
their own; in fact, he reprinted a review from the Christian Spiritualist
that acknowledged his “mediatorial nature,” together with Emerson’s, and
named him among the upcoming “mediums” of the age. Although he
attended a séance several years later and dismissed the practice as “hum-