s, pink-tinged roots, timid
leaves," "scented herbage of my breast." Finally, he says:--[69]

"Here my last words, and the most baffling,
Here the frailest leaves of me, and yet my strongest-lasting,
Here I shade down and hide my thoughts--I do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."

The manliness of the emotion, which is thus so shyly, mystically
indicated, appears in the magnificent address to soldiers at the close
of the great war: "Over the Carnage rose Prophetic a Voice."[70] Its
tenderness emerges in the elegy on a slain comrade--:[71]

"Vigil for boy of responding kisses (never again on earth responding),
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain--vigil I never forget, how as day
brightened,
I rose from the chill ground, and folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell."

Its pathos and clinging intensity transpire through the first lines of
the following piece, which may have been suggested by the legends of
David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Oretes and Pylades:--[72]

"When I pursue the conquered fame of heroes, and the victories of mighty
generals,
I do not envy the generals,
Nor the president in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great house;
But when I read of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was with them,
How through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long,
Through youth, and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how
affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive--I hastily put down the book, and walk away, filled
with the bitterest envy."

But Whitman does not conceive of comradeship as a merely personal
possession, delightful to the friends it links in bonds of amity. He
regards it essentially as a social and political virtue. This human
emotion is destined to cement society and to render commonwealths
inviolable. Reading some of his poems, we are carried back to ancient
Greece--to Plato's Symposium, to Philip gazing on the Sacred Band of
Thebans after the fight at Chaeronea.[73]

"I dream'd in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole
of the rest of the earth;
I dream'd that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love--it led
the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all th