The fulness of human life surging through the artery of that great city exhilarated him like the west wind or the sound and presence of the sea. The sheer contact with the crowd excited him. And though he came to know New York in all its dark and sordid corners--and even an American city before the war was not without its shame--he won an inspiration from its multitudinous humanity distinct from any that the country-side could afford. Every year he grew more conscious of his membership in the living whole of human life; and the consciousness which brought despair to Carlyle, brought faith and glory to Whitman. He did not blink the ugly and sinister aspects of things, as many an optimist has done; he saw clearly the brothel, the prison, and the mortuary; his writing at this time, as we have seen, deals largely with the tragedies of life; but humanity fascinated him--not an abstract or ideal humanity, but the concrete actual humanity of New York. For its own sake he loved it, body and soul, as a man should. It was not philanthropy, it was the wholesome, native love of a man for his own flesh and blood, for the incarnation of the Other in the same substance as the Self. Very little passed in the city without his knowledge. He was in the crowd that welcomed Dickens in 1842;[82] and was doubtless among the thousands who celebrated the introduction of the first water from the Croton supply into New York, and hailed the pioneer locomotive arriving over the new track from Buffalo. Among the public figures of the day, he became familiar with the faces of great politicians like Webster and Clay; among writers, he saw Fitz-Green Halleck and Fenimore Cooper,[83] and made the acquaintance of Poe who was struggling against poverty in New York, and who became at this time--1845--suddenly famous through the publication of "The Raven";[84] and won the more lasting friendship of Bryant, who was at that time the preeminent American poet, and held besides the editorship of the _Evening Post_, to which Walt had been a contributor.[85] * * * * *