Whitman bares his mind and soul to us as he bares his body. There are no masks or disguises. His inmost heart is as nude as his anatomy. Nothing is dressed up. No fashionable tailoring at all. There is nowhere the air of the studied, the elaborated. When other poets stand before the mirror, Whitman looks off at the landscape, or goes and bathes and admires himself. Or, to vary the image, when other poets distill perfumes, Whitman aims to give us the fresh breath of the unhoused air. In this respect he stands alone among modern English-speaking poets. He is the air of the hills and the shore, and not of a flower garden, or of a June meadow, or of parlors. That is what disappoints people. He aims at beauty no more than a wood or a river or a lake or a jungle does. His aim is to tally Nature. It was my rare good fortune to know this quiet, sympathetic, tolerant man for more than thirty years, and to walk or saunter with him at all seasons and hours. Often at night he would stop and gaze long and silently at the stars, and then resume his walk. He was an easy-going, lethargic man--nothing strenuous about him, never in a hurry, never disturbed or excited, always in good humor, cleanly, clad in gray, with a fresh, florid complexion, large, broad, soft hands, blue-gray eyes, gray-haired and gray-bearded. He was fond of children and old people. What a contrast were his placid and easy-going ways to the astronomic sweep and power of his poems, his spirit darting its solar rays to the utmost bounds of the universe. When I was with him I did not feel his mighty intellect, I felt most his humanity, his primitive sympathy, the depth and intensity of his new democratic character, perhaps also that in him which led Thoreau to say that he suggested something a little more than human.