WALT WHITMAN
IN MICKLE STREET
BY ELIZABETH LEAVITT KELLER
"There's this little street and this little house"
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
328 MICKLE STREET
FROM A PAINTING [1908] BY MARSDEN HARTLEY
WALT WHITMAN
IN MICKLE STREET
ELIZABETH LEAVITT KELLER
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXXI
COPYRIGHT 1921 BY
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
EDITOR'S NOTE
ELIZABETH LEAVITT KELLER was born at Buffalo, N. Y., on November 3,1839. Both her parents were descended from the first settlers of thiscountry, and each in turn came to Buffalo in its early days, her mother,Sarah Ellis, by private conveyance in 1825, and her father, James S.Leavitt, by way of the newly opened Erie Canal in 1834.
Elizabeth was the second daughter. In the spring of 1841 she was takento Niagara Falls, and all her childhood recollections are clusteredaround that place. Returning to Buffalo in 1846, her father opened abook-bindery, and later added a printing office and stationery store.
At nineteen years of age Elizabeth Leavitt was married to WilliamWallace Keller, of Little Falls, N. Y. Seven years later she became awidow.
Her natural instinct for nursing was developed during the Civil War andthe years that followed, but the time and opportunity[Pg vi] for professionaltraining did not come until 1876, when, her two children being providedfor, she was free to apply for admission to the school for nursesconnected with the Women's Hospital in Philadelphia—one of the threesmall training schools then existing in the United States.
Before her course was finished her younger sister died. Mrs. Keller leftthe hospital to take care of the five motherless children, and it wasnot until ten years later that she was free to resume her training. Whenshe graduated she was a grandmother—the only one, it need scarcely besaid, in the class.
While nursing her patient, Walt Whitman, during his last illness, shelearnt much about his personality and home life, and much also about hisunselfish friend and housekeeper, Mrs. Davis. The desire to tell thetruth about the whole case—so often misunderstood or distorted—grewstronger with the passing years, and finally Mrs. Keller entered an oldladies' home in her own city, where she would have leisure to carry outher design. Here the book was commenced and completed. "After numerousstruggles and disappointments," she writes, "my second great desire—toset Mrs.[Pg vii] Davis in her true light—has been fulfilled—this time by agreat-grandmother!"
It is not often that a great-grandmother, after a long life of serviceto others, sees her first book published on her eighty-second birthday.
Mrs. Keller uses her pen as if she were twenty or thirty years younger.Her letters are simple but cheery, her outlook on life contented but inno way obscured. Not deliberately, but through a natural gift, sheconveys vivid impressions of the world as it now appears to her, just asshe conveys so unpretenti