Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, Volume VII

The Correspondence

The Colleded Writings of Walt Whitman          :            1840 .01 To Abraham Paul Leech1 7.30. [1840] : Abraham P. Leech  Jamaica L.I. Woodbury Thursday July 30 My friend I feel but little in the humour for writing any thing that will have the stamp of cheerfulness. –Perhaps it would be best therefore not to write at all, and I don’t think I should, were it not for the hope of getting a reply. –I believe when the Lord created the world, he used up all the good stuff, and was forced to form Woodbury and its denizens, out of the fag ends, the scraps and refuse: for a more unsophisticated race than lives hereabouts you will seldom meet with in your travels. –They get up in the morning, and toil through the day, with no interregnum of joy or leisure, except breakfast and dinner. –They live on salt pork and cucumbers; and for a delicacy they sometimes treat company to ryecake and buttermilk. –Is not this enough to send them to perdition “uncancelled , unanointed, unannealed?”2 –If Chesterfield were forced to live here ten hours he would fret himself to death: I have heard the words “thank you,” but once since my sojourn in this earthly purgatory. –Now is the season for what they call “huckleberry frolicks.” –I had the inestimable ectasy of being invited to one of these refined amusements. –I went. –We each carried a tin pail, or a basket, or a big bowl, or a pudding bag. –It was fun no doubt, but it cost me two mortal pounds of flesh, besides numerous remnants of my apparrel, which still remain, for what I know, on the briars and bushes. –Was n’t it hot! –And then our dinner –our pic-nic dinner! –there’s the rub! –Guess now what we had. –A broken-bowl half full of cold potatoes; three or four bones thinly garnished with dirty, greasy ham; a huge pie, made out of green apples, molasses, and buckwheat crust; six radishes, and a tin pan of boiled beans!! –And all this had to be washed down with a drink they called “switchell,” a villainous compound, as near as I could discover, of water, vinegar, and brown sugar. –Our conversation, too, was a caution to white folks; it consisted principally, as you may imagine, of ethereal flashes of wit, scraps of Homeric and Italian poetry, disquisitions on science and the arts, quotations from the most learned writers, and suggestions on the speediest way of making butter. –Tim Hewlett vowed he ought to have a buss from Patty Strong; Patty modestly declined the honour. –A struggle was the result, in which Tim’s face received permanent marks of the length of Patty’s L E T T E R . 0 1 : J U L Y 3 0 , 1 8 4 0 1 finger nails; and the comb of that vigorous young damsel lost some of its fair proportions. –It was a drawn battle. –At the conclusion of this performance, we gathered together our forces and the bowls, baskets, and pudding-bags aforesaid , and returned home; for my part feeling “particularly and peculiarly kewrious” from the weight of amusement – I am much obliged for the paper you sent me. –Write soon. –Send me something funny; for I am getting to be a miserable kind of a dog; I am sick of wearing away by inches, and spending the fairest portion of my little span of life, here in this nest of bears, this forsaken of all Go[d]’s creation; among clowns and country bumpkins, flat-heads, and coarse brown-faced girls, dirty, ill-favoured young brats, with squalling throats and crude manners, and bog-trotters, with all the disgusting conceit, of ignorance and vulgarity. –It is enough to make the fountains of goodwill dry up in our hearts, to wither all gentle and loving dispositions , when we are forced to descend and be as one among the grossest, the most low-minded of the human race. –Life is a dreary road, at the best; and I am just at this time in one of the most stony, rough, desert, hilly, and heartsickening parts of the journey. –But Time is the Great Physician who cures, they say, our ills of mind and body. –I pray the fates he may rid me of my spleen ere long W. W. MS: LC. CT: AL, 58 (1986...