A great fellow for delving into persons and into the concrete, and even into the physiological and the gastric, and wonderfully cute." But on this occasion he delved in vain.
The foregoing remarks (substantially contained in the previous editions of this book) were based mainly on the information received from J.A.

Symonds's side.

But of more recent years interesting light has been thrown on this remarkable letter from Walt Whitman's side.

The Boswellian patience, enthusiasm, and skill which Horace Traubel has brought to his full and elaborate work, now in course of publication, _With Walt Whitman in Camden_, clearly reveal, in the course of various conversations, Whitman's attitude to Symonds's question and the state of mind which led up to this letter.
Whitman talked to Traubel much about Symonds from the twenty-seventh of April, 1888 (very soon after the date when Traubel's work begins), onward.

Symonds had written to him repeatedly, it seems, concerning the "passional relations of men with men," as Whitman expressed it.