one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of
the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.
It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and
still waits its second palingenesis.

The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic
power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he
was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that
he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a
vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call
generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday
Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side
of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that
his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen
some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark
concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and
the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No
doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he
would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact
that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was
often at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief
fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way
out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head
of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow
stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his
chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give
it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair