Like most other philosophies and prophecies, it fell on heedless ears. Few people read it, and those who did were exasperated by its far-fetched diction or scandalized by its free treatment of delicate topics. In the next year, a second edition appeared, containing thirty-two poems; but the book had practically no sale. Then came the Civil War, and Whitman, volunteering not for the field, but for work in the hospitals, proved that the doctrine of brotherly love, so basic to his poems, was basic also to his character. "Not till the sun excludes you, neither will I exclude you," he had declared; and now he devoted himself to nursing, on battlefield, in camp and hospital, doing what he could to cheer and lighten the worst side of war, an attractive and inspiring figure. Lincoln, looking out of a window of the White House, saw him go past one day; a majestic person with snow-white beard and hair, his cotton shirt open at the throat, six feet tall and perfectly proportioned; and the President, without knowing who he was, but mistaking him probably for a common laborer, turned to a friend who stood beside him and remarked, "There goes a man!" And Whitman was a man. Up to that time, he had never been ill a day; but two years later, at the age of fifty-three, his health gave way, under the strain of nursing, and from that time until his death he was, physically, "a man in ruins." Mentally, he was as alert and virile as ever. He was given a clerical position in one of the departments at Washington after that, remaining there until, in 1873, an attack of paralysis incapacitated him even for clerical labor. Meanwhile he had issued his poems of the war, under the title "Drum-Taps," and had softened some hostile hearts by the two noble tributes to Lincoln there included, "O Captain, my Captain!" and "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." But his poetry brought him no income and, for a time, after his removal to Camden, New Jersey, where the remainder of his life was to be passed, he was in absolute want. Friends increased, however; his poems were re-issued, and his last years were spent in the midst of a circle of disciples, who hailed Whitman as a seer and prophet and were guilty of other fatuities which made the judicious grieve and did much to keep them alienated from the poet's work. Since his death, his fame has become established on a firmer basis than hysterical adulation; but it is yet too soon to attempt to judge him, to say what his ultimate rank will be. It seems probable that it will be a high one, and it is possible that, centuries hence, the historian of American letters will start with Whitman as the first exponent of an original and democratic literature, disregarding all that has gone before as merely imitative of Europe.