No More Learning

The first immediate occasion of his going down to camp was on behalf of his
brother, Lieutenant-Colonel George W. Whitman, of the 51st New York
Veterans, who had been struck in the face by a piece of shell at
Fredericksburg. From the spring of 1863 this nursing, both in the field and
more especially in hospital at Washington, became his "one daily and
nightly occupation;" and the strongest testimony is borne to his
measureless self-devotion and kindliness in the work, and to the unbounded
fascination, a kind of magnetic attraction and ascendency, which he
exercised over the patients, often with the happiest sanitary results.
Northerner or Southerner, the belligerents received the same tending from
him. It is said that by the end of the war he had personally ministered to
upwards of 100,000 sick and wounded. In a Washington hospital he caught, in
the summer of 1864, the first illness he had ever known, caused by poison
absorbed into the system in attending some of the worst cases of gangrene.
It disabled him for six months. He returned to the hospitals towards the
beginning of 1865, and obtained also a clerkship in the Department of the
Interior. It should be added that, though he never actually joined the army
as a combatant, he made a point of putting down his name on the enrolment-
lists for the draft, to take his chance as it might happen for serving the
country in arms. The reward of his devotedness came at the end of June
1865, in the form of dismissal from his clerkship by the minister, Mr.
Harlan, who learned that Whitman was the author of the _Leaves of Grass_; a
book whose outspokenness, or (as the official chief considered it)
immorality, raised a holy horror in the ministerial breast. The poet,
however, soon obtained another modest but creditable post in the office of
the Attorney-General. He still visits the hospitals on Sundays, and often
on other days as well.

The portrait of Mr. Whitman reproduced in the present volume is taken from
an engraving after a daguerreotype given in the original _Leaves of Grass_.
He is much above the average size, and noticeably well-proportioned--a
model of physique and of health, and, by natural consequence, as fully and
finely related to all physical facts by his bodily constitution as to all
mental and spiritual facts by his mind and his consciousness. He is now,
however, old-looking for his years, and might even (according to the
statement of one of his enthusiasts, Mr. O'Connor) have passed for being
beyond the age for the draft when the war was going on. The same gentleman,
in confutation of any inferences which might be drawn from the _Leaves of
Grass_ by a Harlan or other Holy Willie, affirms that "one more
irreproachable in his relations to the other sex lives not upon this
earth"--an assertion which one must take as one finds it, having neither
confirmatory nor traversing evidence at hand. Whitman has light blue eyes,
a florid complexion, a fleecy beard now grey, and a quite peculiar sort of
magnetism about him in relation to those with whom he comes in contact. His
ordinary appearance is masculine and cheerful: he never shows depression of
spirits, and is sufficiently undemonstrative, and even somewhat silent in
company. He has always been carried by predilection towards the society of
the common people; but is not the less for that open to refined and
artistic impressions--fond of operatic and other good music, and discerning
in works of art. As to either praise or blame of what he writes, he is
totally indifferent, not to say scornful--having in fact a very decisive
opinion of his own concerning its calibre and destinies. Thoreau, a very
congenial spirit, said of Whitman, "He is Democracy;" and again, "After
all, he suggests something a little more than human. " Lincoln broke out
into the exclamation, "Well, _he_ looks like a man! " Whitman responded to
the instinctive appreciation of the President, considering him (it is said
by Mr. Burroughs) "by far the noblest and purest of the political
characters of the time;" and, if anything can cast, in the eyes of
posterity, an added halo of brightness round the unsullied personal
qualities and the great doings of Lincoln, it will assuredly be the written
monument reared to him by Whitman.

The best sketch that I know of Whitman as an accessible human individual is
that given by Mr. Conway. [4] I borrow from it the following few details.
"Having occasion to visit New York soon after the appearance of Walt
Whitman's book, I was urged by some friends to search him out.