The worst stumbling block was the portion of the book called “Children of Adam,” dealing with sex. The Anglo-Saxon race was used to horrified silence about sex, and also to sly leering about sex; the one thing it had never encountered was simple frankness. What Whitman did was to take sex exactly as it is, a part of life, and write about it as he wrote about everything else. When I, as a student, first looked up “Leaves of Grass” in the Columbia University library, I found this portion of the book so thumbed and worn as to make plain that the young readers had not been taught to understand Whitman. For he gave to this part of his message its due proportion and no more. He was a clean man, living an abstemious and even ascetic life, developing his mind as well as his body. The Civil War came, and the moral greatness of Whitman was made apparent. He went to Washington as a sort of amateur nurse; living on almost nothing, he devoted his entire time to visiting in the hospitals, bringing comfort and affection to tens of thousands of suffering and neglected soldiers. His genius was for friendship, and everyone loved him; there are many stories of men whose lives were saved by his presence and his love. He was a big man, with ruddy cheeks and a full beard, turned gray under the strain of these years. It is interesting to note that Lincoln, meeting him, said the same words that Napoleon said to Goethe: “This is a man!” “The good grey poet,” as one of his friends called him, wrecked his health amid these frightful scenes, and was never the same again. He published more poems, “Drum-Taps,” dealing with the war. All that which was called egotism is now burned away, and we have a revelation of a people uplifted by struggle. In 1871 came a prose work, “Democratic Vistas,” in which his message is proclaimed even more clearly than in his verse. It is a call for a new art, based upon brotherhood and equality. Our New World democracy, declared Whitman, is “so far an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results.” Whitman suffered a stroke of paralysis, recovered partially, and then suffered another stroke. He was more or less crippled through his last twenty years, and lived in extreme poverty; but gradually his fame spread and friends gathered about him. The labor movement was now emerging--and its leaders were discovering that this old poet had indeed forseen how they would feel. “My call is the call of battle--I nourish active rebellion.” And each new generation of the young nourishers of rebellion feeds its soul upon Whitman’s inspiration.