Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/136

 and Emerson, who expressed his philosophy fully, or as fully as one man can express anything for another, and it was not long before Jones discovered an unusual facility for expressing himself, both with his voice and with his pen. The letters he wrote to the men in his shops—putting them in their pay-envelopes—are models of simplicity and sincerity, which show a genuine culture and have that beauty which is the despair of conscious art. He had just learned of Oscar Wilde's "Ballad of Reading Gaol," and he committed it to memory, or got it into his memory somehow, so that he would recite stanzas of it to anyone. He read Burns, too, with avidity, and I can see him now standing on the platform in one of his meetings, snapping his fingers as he recited:

A fig for those by law protected! Liberty's a glorious feast!

But it was Walt Whitman whom he loved most, and his copy of "Leaves of Grass" was underscored in heavy lines with a red pencil until nearly every striking passage in the whole work had become a rubric. When anything struck him, he would have to come and tell me of it; sometimes he would not wait, but would call me up on the telephone and read it to me. I remember that occasion when his voice, over the wire, said:

"Listen to this [and he read]: