He sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown backward, as if resting it one vertebra lower down the spinal column than other people do, and thus tilting his face a little upwards. With his head so poised and the whole man fixed in contemplation of the interlocutor he seemed to pass into a state of absolute passivity ... the glassy eyes half closed, the large knotted hands spread out before him. He resembled, in fact, nothing so much as "a great old grey Angora Tom," alert in repose, serenely blinking under his combed waves of hair, with eyes inscrutably dreaming.... As I stood in dull, deserted Mickle Street once more, my heart was full of affection for this beautiful old man ... this old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience and philosophy. Whitman was then sixty-five. In a portrait of thirty years before there is just a wraith of that feline dream, perhaps, but it is a face of a rare grace and beauty that looks out at us, of a profound kindness and compassion. And, in the eyes, not so much penetration as visionary absorption. Such was the man to whom nothing was unclean, nothing too trivial (except "pale poetlings lisping cadenzas _piano_," who then apparently thronged New York) to take to himself. Intensest, indomitablest of individualists, he exulted in all that appertains to that forked radish, Man. This contentious soul of mine, he exclaims ecstatically; Viva: the attack! I have been born the same as the war was born; I lull nobody, and you will never understand me: maybe I am non-literary and un-decorous.... I have written impromptu, and shall let it all go at that. Let me at least be human! Human, indeed, he was, a tender, all-welcoming host of Everyman, of his idolized (if somewhat overpowering) American democracy. Man in the street, in his swarms, poor crazed faces in the State asylum, prisoners in Sing Sing, prostitute, whose dead body reminded him not of a lost soul, but only of a sad, forlorn, and empty house--it mattered not; he opened his heart to them, one and all. "I see beyond each mark that wonder, a kindred soul. O the bullet could never kill what you really are, dear friend." The moon gives you light, And the bugles and drums give you music, And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, My heart gives you love. "Yours for you," he exclaims, welding in a phrase his unparalleled egotism, his beautiful charity, "yours for you, who ever you are, as mine for me." It is the essence of philosophy and of religion, for all the wonders of heaven and earth are significant "only because of the Me in the centre."