Other circumstances aided in the same direction. His manner of daily life had altered. He lived no longer among his own folk at home, but instead among professional men and clerks, at a middle-class Washington boarding-house. He worked now with a pen, not a hammer; and his book, written for the young American artisan, was being read and appreciated, not at all by him, but instead by students in Old and New England. He lost nothing of himself by becoming one of this other class in which for the time he lived with his book. A smaller man might have been seriously affected by such a change in environment; but while it could not be without effect upon Whitman, it never made him less true to his essential self. In considering this period, I think we may say that the Whitman of the later sixties was still the large masculine man who wrote the first _Leaves of Grass_; but having in 1860 completed the first plan of the book, his task of self-assertion now became as it were a secondary matter. The suffering and sympathy of the war had developed the saviour in him; so that some of his portraits, taken at the time, have almost the air of a "gentle shepherd". His message became increasingly one of helpful love, newly adjusted to the individuals among whom he was thrown. And with the rise of a group of able young champions and admirers, it became more necessary that he should guard his message and himself from anything that could encourage that habit of personal imitation which would have created a group of little Whitmanites, whose very ability must have limited the original inspiration which had bound them to him. Thus it was in a sense true that, after the publication of the volume of 1860, the first Whitman was, as he prophesied he would be, "disembodied, triumphant, dead". * * * * * So much on the matter of Whitman's increased respectability: as to his prolonged stay in Washington, something further must be said. It is evident that he was no longer the Titan of old days. In the spring of 1867 he writes home that he is well, but "getting old";[454] and every year he seemed to feel the extremes of the Washington climate more and more. This is further evidence of decreasing vitality. Had he returned to New York, it must probably have been to write for the press; and however physically robust he might suppose himself to be, something at least of the old force of initiative had left him. There was no longer any immediate need for his presence at home; for when Jeff went West to St. Louis, as engineer to the city waterworks, his brother George was there to take his place as the mother's main support.