While traveling in California, recently, I could not resist the temptation offered to visit the recluse poet in his home at Oakland Heights, where he dwells as Walt Whitman and all true children of nature love to dwell, surrounded by rural scenes, in close communion with nature. The drive from East Oakland to the Heights, a distance of two miles, is beautiful in the extreme. Broad and smooth, the road skirts a ravine and winds about the hill: it is cool and refreshing, being shaded on either side by Monterey Cyprus, eucalyptus, and acacia trees. On arriving at the poet's home, the first sight one gets of the man is furnished by the home he has built for his mother. His father being long since dead, with loving hand the poet has drawn his mother away from the more active struggles of life to spend her remaining days with him on the mountain near the clouds. Then the conservatory filled with choice flowers speaks of him as a lover of nature, but the man—the lover of nature—the poet himself—was found in bed, in a little cell whose dimensions and primitive simplicity forcibly suggested the early settlement of the coast. Although only 3 o'clock in the afternoon, he had retired to rest, but received us most graciously without rising. I was invited to a seat on the bed at his feet, while my wife occupied the only chair in the room. Here was a man who had received the hospitality of the most polished men and women of Europe, a man who had been a
