In 1862 he went South to nurse his brother, who was wounded in the Civil War. For nearly three years, the poet served as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals in Washington and its vicinity. Few good Samaritans have performed better service. He estimated that he attended on the field and in the hospital eighty thousand of the sick and wounded. In after days many a soldier testified that his recovery was aided by Whitman's kindly ministrations. Finally, however, his own iron constitution gave way under this strain. When the war closed, he was given a government clerkship in Washington, but was dismissed in 1865, because of hostility aroused by his _Leaves of Grass_. He soon received another appointment, however, which he held until 1873, when a stroke of paralysis forced him to relinquish his position. He went to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived the life of a semi-invalid during the rest of his existence, writing as his health would permit. He died in 1892, and was buried in Harleigh Cemetery, near Camden. POETRY.--Whitman gave to the world in 1855 the first edition of the poems, which he called _Leaves of Grass_. His favorite expression, "words simple as grass," and his line:-- "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars," give a clue to the idea which prompted the choice of such an unusual title. He continued to add to these poems during the rest of his life, and he published in 1892 the tenth edition of _Leaves of Grass_, in a volume containing four hundred and twenty-two closely printed octavo pages. Whitman intended _Leaves of Grass_ to be a realistic epic of American democracy. He tried to sing this song as he heard it echoed in the life of man and man's companion, Nature. While many of Whitman's poems have the most dissimilar titles, and record experiences as unlike as his early life on Long Island, his dressing of wounds during the Civil War, his comradeship with the democratic mass, his almost Homeric communion with the sea, and his memories of Lincoln, yet according to his scheme, all of this verse was necessary to constitute a complete song of democracy. His poem, _I Hear America Singing_, shows the variety that he wished to give to his democratic songs:--