“I am sooth’d by its soft gurgle in one place…”
Posted by: 
bpom
N 39° 49.020 W 075° 00.230
18S E 499671 N 4407446
A natural spring at the eastern end of Laurel Lake in Laurel Springs, Camden County, New Jersey. A favorite location of poet Walt Whitman.
Waymark Code: WMAG26
Location: New Jersey, United States
Date Posted: 01/11/2011
Views: 21
Crystal Spring is a low magnitude natural spring at the eastern end of Laurel Lake in Laurel Springs, Camden County, New Jersey. Between 1876 and 1884, poet Walt Whitman spent summers at a friend’s farm house a few blocks from Laurel 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.
Crystal Spring is at the bottom of a hill in a beautiful wooded area at the edge of Laurel Lake. The entrance is at the corner of Lakeview and West Elma Avenues. Parking is available on the street at the location. Walk down a hill on a path which winds around at the bottom to the right to the spring. The spring is in a stone alcove, pooling at the base, and then flowing in a very small stream to the lake.
From A Sun-Bath—Nakedness, from "Specimen Days"
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.
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