[93] T. Wright, _Life of Edward Fitzgerald_, vol. i, p. 158.
[94] Most of these were carelessly lost or destroyed by Posh. A few have
been published by James Blyth, _Edward Fitzgerald and_ '_Posh_,' 1908.
[95] It is as such that Whitman should be approached, and I would desire
to protest against the tendency, now marked in many quarters, to treat him
merely as an invert, and to vilify him or glorify him accordingly. However
important inversion may be as a psychological key to Whitman's
personality, it plays but a small part in Whitman's work, and for many who
care for that work a negligible part. (I may be allowed to refer to my own
essay on Whitman, in _The New Spirit_, written nearly thirty years ago.)
[96] I may add that Symonds (in his book on Whitman) accepted this letter
as a candid and final statement showing that Whitman was absolutely
hostile to sexual inversion, that he had not even taken its phenomena into
account, and that he had "omitted to perceive that there are inevitable
points of contact between sexual inversion and his doctrine of
friendship." He recalls, however, Whitman's own lines at the end of
"Calamus" in the Camden edition of 1876:--
"Here my last words, and the most baffling,
Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting,
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts--I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.
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