God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS. "A woman waits for me----" He might as well have said: "The femaleness waits for my maleness." Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function. "Athletic mothers of these States----" Muscles and wombs. They needn't have had faces at all. "As I see myself reflected in Nature, As I see through a mist. One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty. See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see." Everything was female to him: even himself. Nature just one great function. "This is the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman. This is the bath of birth, the merge of small and large, and the outlet again----" "The Female I see----" If I'd been one of his women, I'd have given him Female. With a flea in his ear. Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other. "The Female I see----" Anything, so long as he could merge himself. Just a horror. A sort of white flux. Post mortem effects. He found, like all men find, that you can't really merge in a woman, though you may go a long way. You can't manage the last bit. So you have to give it up, and try elsewhere. If you _insist_ on merging. In _Calamus_ he changes his tune. He doesn't shout and thump and exult any more. He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful. The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the intervention of woman, the female. So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades. Over and over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love. Out of this manly love will come the inspiration for the future. Will it though? Will it? Comradeship! Comrades! This is to be the new Democracy: of Comrades. This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship. Is it? Are you sure? It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in _Drum Taps._ It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative activity. And it is extreme and alone, touching the confines of death. Something terrible to bear, terrible to be responsible for. Even Walt Whitman felt it. The soul's last and most poignant responsibility, the responsibility of comradeship, of manly love.