eir looks and words."

And again:[74]

"I believe the main purport of these States is to found a superb
friendship, exalte, previously unknown,
Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in
all men."

And once again:--[75]

"Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees all along the shores of America,
and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other's necks;
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am thrilling these songs."

In the company of Walt Whitman we are very far away from Gibbon and
Carlier, from Tardieux and Casper-Liman, from Krafft-Ebing and Ulrichs.
What indeed has this "superb friendship, exalte, previously unknown,"
which "waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all men," that
"something fierce in me, eligible to burst forth," "ethereal
comradeship," "the last athletic reality"--what has all this in common
with the painful topic of the preceding sections of my Essay?

It has this in common with it. Whitman recognises among the sacred
emotions and social virtues, destined to regenerate political life and
to cement nations, an intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant
love of man for man: a love which yearns in absence, droops under the
sense of neglect, revives at the return of the beloved; a love that
finds honest delight in hand-touch, meeting lips, hours of privacy,
close personal contact. He proclaims this love to be not only a daily
fact in the present, but also a saving and ennobling aspiration. While
he expressly repudiates, disowns, and brands as "damnable" all "morbid
inferences" which may be drawn by malevolence or vicious cunning from
his doctrine, he is prepared to extend the gospel of comradeship to the
whole human race. He expects Democracy, the new social and political
medium, the new religious ideal of mankind, to develop and extend "that
fervid comradeship," and by its means to counterbalance and to
spiritualise what is vulgar and materialistic in the