He too would give his life to the lowly and the oppressed; he too would eat with publicans and sinners; he too would raise the sick and the dying: To any one dying--thither I speed, and twist the knob of the door, Turn the bed-clothes toward the foot of the bed, Let the physician and the priest go home. I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will. O despairer, here is my neck, By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me. I dilate you with tremendous breath--I buoy you up, Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force, Lovers of me, bafflers of graves. Sleep! I and they keep guard all night, Not doubt--not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you, I have embraced you. The poetic message of Whitman, the new message that was, as he believed, "to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion," he summed up himself in the phrase "The greatness of Love and Democracy"--Love meaning comradeship, hearty "hail, fellow, well met" to all men alike; Democracy meaning the equality of all things and all men--_en masse_. He is to be the poet of the East and the West, the North and the South alike; he is to be the poet of all occupations, and of all sorts and conditions of men. He salutes the whole world _in toto_ and in detail. A great part of _Leaves of Grass_ is taken up with enumerations of the universality and the detail of his poetic sympathy. He covers the nation with the accuracy of a gazetteer, and he enumerates its industries and its population, simply that he may announce, "I am the poet of these also." The appearance of Whitman marks the first positive resurgence of masculinity in mid-century America. He came as the first loud protest against sentimentalism, against Longfellowism, against a prudish drawing-room literature from which all life and masculine coarseness had been refined. Whitman broke into the American drawing-room as a hairy barbarian, uncouth and unsqueamish, a Goth let loose among ladies, a Vandal smashing the bric-à-brac of an over-refined generation. He came in with a sudden leap, unlooked-for, unannounced, in all his nakedness and vulgarity like a primitive man, and proceeded to sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. He mixed high and low, blab and divinity, because he knew no better. Like the savage that he was he adorned himself with scraps of feathers from his reading--fine words: _libertad_, _camerado_, _ma femme_, _ambulanza_, _enfans d'Adam_; half understood fragments of modern science; wild figures of speech from the Transcendental dreamers which he took literally and pushed to their logical limit. And he poured it all out in a mélange without coherence or logical sequence: poetry and slang, bravado and egotism, trash and divinity and dirt. At one moment he sings: