"I loved Walt Whitman," Dr. McAlister said, "ever since I was a student in the medical school, and met the old gentleman regularly on the street. We talked occasionally; once he asked me to his house, later on, after my graduation, I had occasion to render him professional services, and for all the years, until Whitman's death, I called on him at least once a day. He was the most clean-minded and kind man I have ever met. I never heard him utter an obscene word. The magnificent personality of Walt Whitman and his general comradeship, inspired by his ingrained feelings and intuitive beliefs concerning the destiny of America, must certainly have impressed all who met him long before he was known as a poet. He lived a life so broad and noble that it will be more studied and emulated, and will sink deeper and deeper into the heart. The social, human world, through his aid, will reach a level hitherto unattained. The new life which he preached has not been even dreamed of yet, has not become yet an object of aspiration to us Americans. He has set the spark to the prepared fuel, the living glow has crept deeply into the dormant mass; even now tongues of flame begin to shoot forth. The longer Whitman is dead the better he will be known. He seems to me the typical American, the typical modern, the source and centre of a new, spiritual aspiration, saner and manlier than any heretofore. Whitman thought that man has within him the element of the Divine, and that this element was capable of indefinite growth and expansion. "He was the most democratic man that ever lived. Everybody was welcome to his house, everybody his equal, he was everybody's friend. He had many enemies, but also many friends. He thought Ingersoll his best friend. Dr. Longaker and Horace Traubel were almost always present, especially during the last years of his life. Once in a while they got on his nerves because they continually carried paper and pencil, writing down every word he said. Let me tell you a few incidents of his last illness. They all expected him to die. Traubel and Dr. Longaker were constantly in the hall outside of the sick room, eager to catch every one of Whitman's words. Warren Fritzinger, his nurse, was with him. "'Are those damn fools out there this afternoon?' he remarked when his condition became very weak and the rustling of papers in the hall seemed to annoy him. "The day before he died I came in the morning and asked him, 'How do you feel?' "'Well, Doctor,' he answered, 'I am tired of this dreadful monotony of waiting. I am tired of the sword of Damocles suspended over my head.'"