During bad days he sat solitary at home, trying to maintain a good heart, his whole vitality too depressed to do more. "If I only felt just a little better," he would say, "I should get acquainted with many of the [railroad] men,"[542] a class who affected this particular locality. But feeble as he was, it was long before he made any friends to replace the lost circle at Washington. Now and again some kindly soul, hearing that he was ill, would call upon him:[543] or Jeff would look in on his way to New York, or Eldridge or Burroughs, coming and going between Washington and New England. Walt could not readily adjust himself to his new circumstances. His was not an elastic, pliable temper; but on the contrary, very stubborn, and apt to become set in ways; the qualities of adhesion and inertia increasing in prominence as his strong will and initiative ebbed. He kept telling himself between the blurs that disabled his brain, that he might be in a much more deplorable fix; that his folks were good to him; that his post was kept open for his return, and that his friends were only waiting to welcome him back to Washington. But he could not pass by or elude the ever-present consciousness and problem of his mother's death. At the end of August he wrote to Pete: "I have the feeling of getting more strength and easier in the head--something like what I was before mother's death. (I cannot be reconciled to that yet: it is the great cloud of my life--nothing that ever happened before has had such an effect on me.)"[544] When we remember his separation from the woman and the children of his love, and all the experiences of the war, we may a little understand the meaning of these soberly written words, and the strength of the tie which bound together mother and son. Who knows or can estimate the full meaning of that relationship which begins before birth, and which all the changes and separations of life and death only deepen? * * * * * It is difficult to look calmly at this period of Whitman's life. One resents, perhaps childishly, the fate which overtook this sane and noble soul. Surely he, of all men, had been faithful to the inner vision, and generous to all. He had fulfilled the Divine precept; he had loved the Lord his God with all the might of soul and body, and his neighbour as himself. From childhood up he had been clean and affectionate, independent and loyal, whole-heartedly obedient to the law as it was written in his heart, undaunted by any fear or convention. He had prized health, and held it sacred, as the essential basis of freedom and sanity of spirit. And he had hazarded it without reserve and without fear, in the infectious and malarial wards of the hospitals.