Of his own later years, he said to Mr. J. W. Wallace, who called frequently during the late autumn of 1891, "I used to feel ... that I was to irradiate or emanate buoyancy and health. But it came to me in time, that I was not to attempt to live to the reputation I had, or to my own idea of what my programme should be; but to give out and express what I really was; and, if I felt like the devil, to say so; and I have become more and more confirmed in this."[751] Whitman has so often been accused of a self-conscious pose, that this partial acknowledgment that such a pose had existed is full of interest; an interest accentuated by the statement that he deliberately abandoned it in his later years. Talking was at this time often an effort; the heavy feeling in his head, which had become more and more frequent since his first illness, increased till he compared his brain to "sad dough," or "an apple dumpling". At times, when he was really prostrated, his head was "like ten devils".[752] The portrait prefixed to his last little book, is that of some patriarch, bent under a world-weight of experience. The volume, _Good-bye, my Fancy_, appeared in the winter--sixty pages of fragmentary notes and rhythms of pathetic interest. He called them his "last chirps".[753] It opens on a rather deprecatory note, but is touched here and there with wistful humour. [Illustration: WHITMAN AT SEVENTY-TWO] The preface,[754] written two summers before, describes him as moved by the sunshine to the playfulness of a kid, a kitten or a frolicsome wave. He finds a grim satisfaction even in his present state, counting it as a part of his offering to the cause of the Union and America, for he has no doubt of its origin in the strain of the war-years. Of the war, and of his part in it, he now sees all his _Leaves_ as reminiscent. The prose memoranda are principally memorial of old friends, and familiar books and places, and are full of those generous appreciations which were a delightful feature of his later life. Among others, are tributes to Queen Victoria, to his friend Tennyson, and to the great American poets.[755] He returns again to his gospel of health,[756] as the message most needed in the world to-day; a message which would contrast with the cry of Carlyle or of Heine, or of almost any of the dwellers in that Europe which he sees afar off, as a sort of vast hospital or asylum ward. It has been his own single purpose to arouse the soul, the essential giver of Divine health, in his readers. His aim has always been religious; he foresees the coming of a new religion which shall embrace both the feminine beauty of Christianity and the masculine splendour of Paganism.[757] The poems are still in the vein of _November Boughs_. They are the utterance of certain belated elements in his life-experience, without which his book would be incomplete. Some review his past; others anticipate his future.