he saw him in 1884, in his bare, littered sun-drenched room in Camden,
shared by kitten and canary:

He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as
if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than
other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards. With
his head so poised and the whole man fixed in contemplation of
the interlocutor he seemed to pass into a state of absolute
passivity ... the glassy eyes half closed, the large knotted
hands spread out before him. He resembled, in fact, nothing so
much as "a great old grey Angora Tom," alert in repose, serenely
blinking under his combed waves of hair, with eyes inscrutably
dreaming.... As I stood in dull, deserted Mickle Street once
more, my heart was full of affection for this beautiful old man
... this old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience
and philosophy.

Whitman was then sixty-five. In a portrait of thirty years before there
is just a wraith of that feline dream, perhaps, but it is a face of a
rare grace and beauty that looks out at us, of a profound kindness and
compassion. And, in the eyes, not so much penetration as visionary
absorption. Such was the man to whom nothing was unclean, nothing too
trivial (except "pale poetlings lisping cadenzas _piano_," who then
apparently thronged New York) to take to himself. Intensest,
indomitablest of individualists, he exulted in all that appertains to
that forked radish, Man. This contentious soul of mine, he exclaims
ecstatically; Viva: the attack! I have been born the same as the war was
born; I lull nobody, and you will never understand me: maybe I am
non-literary and un-decorous.... I have written impromptu, and shall let
it all go at that. Let me at least be human! Human, indeed, he was, a