What place is besieged, and vainly tries to raise the siege?
Lo, I send to that place a commander, swift, brave, immortal,
And with him horse and foot, and parks of artillery,
And artillerymen, the deadliest that ever fired gun.
He sends you your own soul.
As we rode back to Camden on the trolley one of my companions spied the Washington statue in front of the courthouse (which I had been hoping he would miss). He smiled at the General grotesquely kneeling in stone. "Only giving one knee to his Maker," was his droll comment.
It was so with Walt. He wanted to be quite sure what he was kneeling to before he gave both knees.
Perhaps the most curious (and gruesome) story in connection with Whitman comes to me from James Shields. He has showed me a monograph by the late Dr. E. A. Spitzka, professor of anatomy at the Jefferson Medical College, which gives a brief review of scientific post-mortem measurements made of the brains of 130 notable men and four women. In this monograph, reprinted by the American Philosophical Society in 1907, occurs the following paragraph:
87. WHITMAN, WALT, American poet. The weight of Walt Whitman's brain is variously given as 45.2 ounces (1282 grams) and 43.3 ounces (1228 grams). His stature was six feet and in health he weighed about 200 pounds. The brain had been preserved, but some careless attendant in the laboratory let the jar fall to the ground; it is not stated whether the brain was totally destroyed by the fall, but it is a great pity that not even the fragments of the brain were rescued.
