Armstrong (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museum of Stony Brook, 1980) 107–124. In 1881,
Whitman made a return visit to the family burial grounds on Long Island. A Time to
Mourn includes a photograph of the Huntington Burial Hill Cemetery.
- Madeleine B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman:
U Oklahoma P, 1971), 109–141. See also WWBB, 99–123. Many interesting paral-
lels between Whitman’s thinking and that of contemporary reformers (especially
women) are illustrated in Ceniza, Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Women Re-
formers. - When all of humanity is unmuzzled, it was argued, it will have outgrown its
bestial traits. Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Essay on Physiognomy, 1778, a crudely evolu-
tionary and racialist work that diagnosed character in terms of facial features argued
that some peoples (non-Nordics) and some individuals exhibited bestial features that
mark their arrested state of development. The attribution of bestial features to non-
European and non-Christian persons antedated Lavater by centuries. On earlier hos-
tile analyses of peoples in terms of their physical characteristics, see David E. Stan-
nard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York:
Oxford UP, 1992). - The concept that American democracy is best served by a cadre of excep-
tional heroes is clearly expressed in “Song of the Broad-Axe,” “Pioneers! O Pio-
neers!” and Democratic Vistas. - Paul Tillich, “The Eternal Now,” in The Meaning of Death, ed. Herman Feifel
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 53. - Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. Cyril Bailey, cited in Lamont, Illu-
sion of Immortality, 26. - John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, ed. Frederick M. Link (Lincoln: U Nebraska P,
1975), 75. Another passage (p. 79) reads: “Grim though it be, death pleases when it
frees.” - Quoted in Mariasusai Dhavamony, “Death and Immortality in Hinduism,”
in Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World, ed. Paul Badham and Linda
Badham (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 99–100. - Samuel Clemens, “[Three Statements of the Eighties],” in What Is Man?
ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley: U California P, 1973), 57. - James E. Miller Jr., Walt Whitman (New York: Twayne, 1962), 107.
- Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, 770.
- For an insight into this subject, see Hick, Death and Eternal Life, 143. In an
“uncertain” conclusion, Hick suggests that “the spirits, particularly the controls, who
seem to be communicating directly during the mediumistic trance, are some kind of
secondary personality of the medium.” He speculates that they may be “tapping some
kind of telepathic impressions” from the living or the dead. - Kübler-Ross, Wheel of Life, 189–191. Gates, roads, bridges, she reports, com-
monly occur in such visions as they do in Whitman’s imagery of the passage to, and
beyond, death. - Barrus, Whitman and Burroughs Comrades, 225.
- The episode of the foundered ship resembles Henry Thoreau’s reportage of a
similar tragedy in the ¤rst chapter of Cape Cod, 1865. The essay was ¤rst published in
Notes to Pages 83–92 / 255