Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,) To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails, Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating, At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America, That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud, In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul, What joys! what joys were thine! (_To the Man-of-War Bird._)] Anne Gilchrist's opinion of Whitman was even more enthusiastic than his appreciation of her. She admired and revered the courage with which he expounded his theories of life, no less than the expression of them in words which, as she put it, ceased to be words and became electric streams. "What more can you ask of the words of a man's mouth," she exclaimed, "than that they should absorb into you as food and air, to reappear again in your strength, gait, face--that they should be fibre and filter to your blood, joy and gladness to your whole nature?" She alone, of all women, and almost alone among men, had stood forth to defend him for the "fearless and comprehensive dealing with reality" which had alienated the conventional and offended the prudish--and she alone was the recipient, now, of his most intimate thoughts and aspirations. They sat together on the shady piazza, and he unfolded to her, while her children played around, the hopes and wishes of his heart not only for America but for all humanity. He said, "My original idea was that if I could bring men together by putting before them the heart of man with all its joys and sorrows and experiences and surroundings, it would be a great thing.... I have endeavoured from the first to get free as much as possible from all literary attitudinism--to strip off integuments, coverings, bridges--and to speak straight from and to the heart; ... to discard all conventional poetic phrases, and every touch of or reference to ancient or mediæval images, metaphors, subjects, styles, etc., and to write _de novo_ with words and phrases appropriate to our own days." He took her hand as he spoke, as was his wont with a sympathetic listener, and gazed with eagerness into her serious yet easily-lighted face. His "terrible blaze of personality" was subdued for the nonce into that child-like simplicity, that woman-like tenderness, which constituted some of his chief charms.