Walt Whitman
[Writer and poet, b. 1819, South Huntington, Long Island, New York, d. 1892, Camden, New Jersey.]

 [Mathew Brady and I] had many a talk together: the point was, how much better it would often be, rather than having a lot of contradictory records by witnesses or historians—say of Caesar, Socrates, Epictetus, others—if we could have three or four or half a dozen portraits—very accurate—of the men: that would be history—the best history—a history from which there could be no appeal. (1889) 
 An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner’s cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality. 
 You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.