These considerations do not, however, affect the spiritual nature of that ideal. After acknowledging, what Whitman has omitted to perceive, that there are inevitable points of contact between sexual inversion and his doctrine of comradeship, the question now remains whether he has not suggested the way whereby abnormal instincts may be moralised and raised to higher value. In other words, are those instincts provided in "Calamus" with the means of their salvation from the filth and mire of brutal appetite? It is difficult to answer this question; for the issue involved is nothing less momentous than the possibility of evoking a new chivalrous enthusiasm, analogous to that of primitive Hellenic society, from emotions which are at present classified among the turpitudes of human nature. Let us look a little closer at the expression which Whitman has given to his own feelings about friendship. The first thing that strikes us is the mystic emblem he has chosen for masculine love. That is the water-plant, or scented rush, called Calamus, which springs in wild places, "in paths untrodden, in the growth by margins of pond-waters" He has chosen these "emblematic and capricious blades" because of their shyness, their aromatic perfume, their aloofness from the patent life of the world. He calls them "sweet leaves, pink-tinged roots, timid leaves," "scented herbage of my breast." Finally, he says:--[69] "Here my last words, and the most baffling, Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting, Here I shade down and hide my thoughts--I do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems." The manliness of the emotion, which is thus so shyly, mystically indicated, appears in the magnificent address to soldiers at the close of the great war: "Over the Carnage rose Prophetic a Voice."[70] Its tenderness emerges in the elegy on a slain comrade--:[71] "Vigil for boy of responding kisses (never again on earth responding), Vigil for comrade swiftly slain--vigil I never forget, how as day brightened, I rose from the chill ground, and folded my soldier well in his blanket, And buried him where he fell." Its pathos and clinging intensity transpire through the first lines of the following piece, which may have been suggested by the legends of David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Oretes and Pylades:--[72] "When I pursue the conquered fame of heroes, and the victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the generals, Nor the president in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house; But when I read of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them, How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, Through youth, and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were, Then I am pensive--I hastily put down the book, and walk away, filled with the bitterest envy."