Whitman-Stafford House - Laurel Springs, NJ
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bpom
N 39° 49.270 W 075° 00.160
18S E 499771 N 4407908
This was a summer home of Walt Whitman. Much of “Specimen Days” and parts of “Leaves of Grass” were written here.
Waymark Code: WMAE2H
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 01/02/2011
Views: 12
Between 1876 and 1884, poet Walt Whitman spent summers in his later life at a friend’s farm house a few blocks from Laurel Lake in Laurel Springs, Camden County, New Jersey. Whitman converted one of the barn buildings into his summer home. Whitman said that Laurel Lake was the “prettiest lake in either America or Europe”. He would walk to Crystal Spring near the lake. Much of Whitman’s work for “Specimen Days” and part of “Leaves of Grass” were written here. He would sit by the spring, drink the water, and take mud baths near the spring to help his recovery after a partial stroke.
Location: 315 E Maple Ave
The marker reads: Whitman-Stafford House; 1785; Whitman’s Summer Home; 1876-1881; A pleasant house parts of it, quite old with maple and lilac bushes growing in the yard.
From A Sun-Bath—Nakedness
Sunday, Aug. 27.—ANOTHER day quite free from mark’d prostration and pain. It seems indeed as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly filter into me as I slowly hobble down these country lanes and across fields, in the good air—as I sit here in solitude with Nature—open, voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable, eloquent Nature. I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day. Hovering over the clear brook-water, I am sooth’d by its soft gurgle in one place, and the hoarser murmurs of its three-foot fall in another. Come, ye disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left—come get the sure virtues of creek-shore, and wood and field. Two months (July and August, ’77,) have I absorb’d them, and they begin to make a new man of me. Every day, seclusion—every day at least two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no manners.
Whitman, Walt. “Specimen Days.” Whitman Poetry & Prose. Library of America, 1996.
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