A great personality of recent times, widely regarded with reverence as the prophet-poet of Democracy[95]--Walt Whitman--has aroused discussion by his sympathetic attitude toward passionate friendship, or "manly love" as he calls it, in _Leaves of Grass_. In this book--in "Calamus," "Drumtaps," and elsewhere--Whitman celebrates a friendship in which physical contact and a kind of silent voluptuous emotion are essential elements. In order to settle the question as to the precise significance of "Calamus," J.A. Symonds wrote to Whitman, frankly posing the question. The answer (written from Camden, N.J., on August 19, 1890) is the only statement of Whitman's attitude toward homosexuality, and it is therefore desirable that it should be set on record:-- "About the questions on 'Calamus,' etc., they quite daze me. _Leaves of Grass_ is only to be rightly construed by and within its own atmosphere and essential character--all its pages and pieces so coming strictly under. That the 'Calamus' part has ever allowed the possibility of such construction as mentioned is terrible. I am fain to hope that the pages themselves are not to be even mentioned for such gratuitous and quite at the time undreamed and unwished possibility of morbid inferences--which are disavowed by me and seem damnable." It would seem from this letter[96] that Whitman had never realized that there is any relationship whatever between the passionate emotion of physical contact from man to man, as he had experienced it and sung it, and the act which with other people he would regard as a crime against nature. This may be singular, for there are many inverted persons who have found satisfaction in friendships less physical and passionate than those described in _Leaves of Grass_, but Whitman was a man of concrete, emotional, instinctive temperament, lacking in analytical power, receptive to all influences, and careless of harmonizing them. He would most certainly have refused to admit that he was the subject of inverted sexuality. It remains true, however, that "manly love" occupies in his work a predominance which it would scarcely hold in the feelings of the "average man," whom Whitman wishes to honor. A normally constituted person, having assumed the very frank attitude taken up by Whitman, would be impelled to devote far more space and far more ardor to the subject of sexual relationships with women and all that is involved in maternity than is accorded to them in _Leaves of Grass_. Some of Whitman's extant letters to young men, though they do not throw definite light on this question, are of a very affectionate character,[97] and, although a man of remarkable physical vigor, he never felt inclined to marry.[98] It remains somewhat difficult to classify him from the sexual point of view, but we can scarcely fail to recognize the presence of a homosexual tendency.