The most important is the poem "To the Sunset Breeze,"[758] which is perhaps the highest expression of his mystical attitude toward nature. The breeze brings to this lonely, sick man, incapable of movement, the infinite message of God and of the world; it comes to him as a loving and holy companion, the distillation and essence of all material things, the most godly of spirits:-- Thou, messenger-magical strange bringer to body and spirit of me, (Distances balk'd--occult medicines penetrating me from head to foot), I feel the sky, the prairies vast--I feel the mighty northern lakes, I feel the ocean and the forest--somehow I feel the globe itself swift-swimming in space; Thou blown from lips so loved, now gone--haply from endless store, God-sent, (For thou art spiritual, Godly, most of all known to my sense), Minister to speak to me, here and now, what word has never told, and cannot tell, Art thou not universal concrete's distillation? Law's, all Astronomy's last refinement? Hast thou no soul? Can I not know, identify thee? One cannot doubt the feeling behind these passionate lines, or question the soul-contact which the old poet felt with the things we are complacently and ignorantly contented to regard as mere automata, moved by mechanical force. For Whitman, Nature was a soul; a soul, though strange and often seeming-hostile, yet beloved and really loving; a soul, whose infinite life is, without exception, seeking and groping after its divine source. He deliberately enumerates a catalogue of things evil to make the significance of his meaning clear. The title of the book is related, on the last page, to a curious thought which occupied his mind at this period. While the imagination which has prompted all his poems has not been exactly himself, it has become so intimately related to him that he cannot now conceive of himself existing after death unaccompanied by it; hence his _Good-bye, my Fancy_ is but a new welcome, a _vale atque ave_.[759] There are two more poems, not included in this volume, which seem to close his work. One, the last thing that he composed, was a final greeting to Columbus, who had become in his mind a type of the poet of the future.[760] The other, the last that I can note of these "concluding chirps,"[761] as he would call them, is a beautiful correction of the popular picture of death's valley. Before Whitman--and he of all men had a right to speak upon the subject, because he knew Death, as it were, personally--there spread out a very different landscape:--