in the dark concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult.  No doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them.  He was often at Pfaff’s with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact of my experience.  I did not know he was there till I was on my way out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head of one farther into the room.  There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and all.  He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand.  I doubt if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press.  I did not meet him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston.  Some years later I saw him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking friends who gathered about him.  Then and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a passage from a private letter of Emerson’s, though I believe he would not have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in another.  The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand.  I will make sure only of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man.  The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.

As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in effect as in intention.  He was a liberating force, a very “imperial anarch” in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called his verse.  I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better; there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very