fierce in you,
eligible to burst forth;
For an athletic is enamoured of me--and I of him,
But toward him there is something fierce and terrible in me,
eligible to burst forth,
I dare not tell it in words--not even in these songs."

The reality of Whitman's feeling, the intense delight which he derives
from the personal presence and physical contact of a beloved man, find
expression in "A Glimpse," "Recorders ages hence," "When I heard at the
Close of Day," "I saw in Louisiana a Live Oak growing," "Long I thought
that Knowledge alone would content me,"[67] "O Tan-faced Prairie Boy,"
and "Vigil Strange I kept on the Field one Night."[68]

It is clear, then, that in his treatment of comradeship, or the
impassioned love of man for man, Whitman has struck a keynote, to the
emotional intensity of which the modern world is unaccustomed. It
therefore becomes of much importance to discover the poet-prophet's
_Stimmung_--his radical instinct with regard to the moral quality of the
feeling he encourages. Studying his works by their own light, and by the
light of their author's character, interpreting each part by reference
to the whole and in the spirit of the whole, an impartial critic will, I
think, be drawn to the conclusion that what he calls the "adhesiveness"
of comradeship is meant to have no interblending with the "amativeness"
of sexual love. Personally, it is undeniable that Whitman possesses a
specially keen sense of the fine restraint and continence, the
cleanliness and chastity, that are inseparable from the perfectly virile
and physically complete nature of healthy manhood. Still, we may
predicate the same ground-qualities in the early Dorians, those martial
founders of the institution of Greek Love; and it is notorious to
students of Greek civilisation that the lofty sentiment of their
chivalry was intertwined with singular anomalies in its historical
development.

To remove all doubt about Whitman's own intentions when he composed
"Calamus," and promulgated his doctrine of impassioned comradeship, I
wrote to him, frankly posing the questions which perplexed my mind. The
answer I received, dated Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., August 19, 1890,
and which he permits me to make use of, puts the matter beyond all
debate, and confirms the conclusions to which I had been led by
criticism. He writes as follows: "About the questions on 'Calamus,'
&c., they quite daze me. 'Leaves of Grass' is on