He not only preached democracy, but he also showed in practical ways his intense feeling of comradeship and his sympathy with all. One of his favorite verses was "And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud." His Civil War experiences still further intensified this feeling. He looked on the lifeless face of a son of the South, and wrote:-- "... my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead." Like Thoreau, Whitman welcomed the return to nature. He says:-- "I am enamour'd of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods." He is the poet of nature as well as of man. He tells us how nature educated him:-- "The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf." He delights us "... with meadows, rippling tides and trees and flowers and grass, And the low hum of living breeze--and in the midst God's beautiful eternal right hand." No American poet was more fond of the ocean. Its aspect and music, more than any other object of nature, influenced his verse. He addresses the sea in lines like these:-- "With husky-haughty lips, O sea! Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore, Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions, (I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,) Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal, Thy ample, smiling face, dash'd with the sparkling dimples of the sun." He especially loves motion in nature. His poetry abounds in the so-called motor images. [Footnote: For a discussion of the various types of images of the different poets, see the author's _Education of the Central Nervous System_, Chaps. VII., VIII., IX., X.] He takes pleasure in picturing a scene "Where the heifers browse, where geese nip their food with short jerks," or in watching "The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing." While his verse is fortunately not without idealistic touches, his poetic theory is uncompromisingly realistic, as may be seen in his critical prose essays, some of which deserve to rank only a little below those of Lowell and Poe. Whitman says:-- "For grounds for _Leaves of Grass_, as a poem, I abandoned the conventional themes, which do not appear in it: none of the stock ornamentation, or choice plots of love or war, or high exceptional personages of Old-World song; nothing, as I may say, for beauty's sake--no legend or myth or romance, nor euphemism, nor rhyme."