He loves thus to enlarge upon the poet's office as the Answerer[183] or sympathiser with all men, and how he should be welcome and familiar to each. In the poet's company, the soul of each one quickens. And yet the poet is no greater than the least; his verses are not nobler than the kindly deed of any poor old woman. He writes of 1848, the year of Revolutions,[184] somewhat in the style of "Blood Money," and probably this page is one of the earliest of the fragments, and may date back to the year which it celebrates. In spite of the successes of tyranny, and the failures of the young men of Europe, he sees that Liberty herself is never foiled. By way of sharp contrast[185] he directs a mocking and colloquial page of satire against the 'cute Bostonians of 1854. Whitman's dislike of Boston is never for a moment concealed; Jonathan the Yankee he detests. And now he brings home to him the profits of his bargaining; he has dethroned King George only to set up in his place this Republican President, Pierce of New Hampshire, who in these loud-echoing streets employs the strength of America upon the capture of a fugitive slave. Sometimes he is autobiographical.[186] "There was a child went forth,"--he recites--a country boy who, at West Hills and in Brooklyn, absorbed all the sights and sounds of his world into himself; till the early lilacs, the morning-glories, and the orchard blossom, the quarrelsome and the friendly boys and the bare-footed negro-children all became a part of him. His parents, too, in the daily life of the home as well as by heredity, entered into his make-up; the mother, wholesome, quiet and gentle, the father, virile and hot-tempered, with a streak of craft and astuteness running through him. And as they became a part of me, he says, so now they shall become a part of you that read this page. Or at his naïvest, we see him standing open-mouthed and amazed, like a very child, before the sheer naked facts of his own story from the date of his birth to the present hour;[187] and endeavouring to evoke a similar naïve attitude in the reader, not indeed towards the date of Whitman's birth, but towards that of his own. Upon a kindred note we turn the last page also[188]--for it is a proclamation of reverence, reverence for all the old myths; reverence for the high ideals; reverence too for Youth and for Age, for Speech and Silence, for true Wealth and true Poverty, always with stress upon the last member of each pair; for America, too, and for the Earth with its ineffable future; for Truth, for Justice, for Goodness--ay, and, he adds with conscious paradox, for Wickedness as well; above all for Life, but not less for Death. Great is Life, he concludes:-- Great is Life, real and mystical wherever and whoever: Great is Death:--sure as Life holds all parts together, Death holds all parts together: Sure as the stars return again after they merge in the light, Death is great as Life.