impression of my perceptive faculties a fraud.  I have studied him as I have studied the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw.  Nothing about a first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be studied in every feature,—­in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear is as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice.  In Whitman all these things are remarkably striking and suggestive.  His face exhibits a rare combination of harmony and sweetness with strength,—­strength like the vaults and piers of the Roman architecture.  Sculptor never carved a finer ear or a more imaginative brow.  Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that, if he achieve the height at all, it will be from where every man stands, and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious point.  He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or litterateur, but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to make,—­that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical.  It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, after an hour’s interview, that he suggested “something a little more than human.”  In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman’s life and personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be found in about the largest emotional element that has appeared anywhere.  This, if not controlled by a potent rational balance, would either have tossed him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin.  These volcanic emotional fires appear everywhere in his books; and it is really these, aroused to intense activity and unnatural strain during the four years of the war and his persistent labors in the hospitals, that have resulted in his illness and paralysis since.

It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions and magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the poems, in doing which I found that his “Leaves of Grass” was really the drama of himself, played upon various and successive stages of nature, history, passion, experience, patriotism, and that he had not made, nor had he intended to make, mere excellent “poems,” tunes, statues, or statuettes, in the ordinary sense.