"Fear grace, fear delicatesse; Fear the mellow-sweet, the sucking of honey-juice: Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature! Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of states and men." He was himself the savage old man he invoked. It was no part of his plan to preach, in refined and euphonious terms, hygiene and the value of the natural man, but to project into literature the thing itself, to exploit a character coarse as well as fine, and to imbue his poems with a physiological quality as well as a psychological and intellectual. "I will scatter the new roughness and gladness among them." He says to the pale, impotent victim of over-refinement, with intentional rudeness, "Open your scarf'd chops till I blow grit within you." X One of the key-words to Whitman both as a man and a poet is the word "composite." He was probably the most composite man this century has produced, and in this respect at least is representative of the American of the future, who must be the result of the blending of more diverse racial elements than any man of history. He seems to have had an intuition of his composite character when he said in his first poem:-- "I am large,--I contain multitudes." The London correspondent of the "New York Tribune," in reluctantly conceding at the time of the poet's death something to the British admiration of him, said he was "rich in temperament." The phrase is well chosen. An English expert on the subject of temperament, who visited Whitman some years ago, said he had all four temperaments, the sanguine, the nervous, the melancholic, and the lymphatic, while most persons have but two temperaments, and rarely three. It was probably the composite character of Whitman that caused him to attract such diverse and opposite types of men,--scholars and workingmen, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and men of the world,--and that made him personally such a puzzle to most people,--so impossible to classify. On the street the promenaders would turn and look after him, and I have often heard them ask each other, "What man was that?" He has often been taken for a doctor, and during his services in the army hospitals various myths were floating about concerning him. Now he was a benevolent Catholic priest,--then some unknown army general, or retired sea captain; at one time he was reputed to be one of the owners of the Cunard line of steamers. To be taken for a Californian was common. One recalls the composite character of the poet whom he outlines in his poems (see quotation, page 159).