modern world.
"Democracy," he maintains, "infers such loving comradeship, as its most
inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in
vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself."[76]

If this be not a dream, if he is right in believing that "threads of
manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long,
carried to degrees hitherto unknown," will penetrate the organism of
society, "not only giving tone to individual character, and making it
unprecedentedly emotional, muscular, heroic, and refined, but having
deepest relations to general politics"--then are we perhaps justified in
foreseeing here the advent of an enthusiasm which shall rehabilitate
those outcast instincts, by giving them a spiritual atmosphere, an
environment of recognised and healthy emotions, wherein to expand at
liberty and purge away the grossness and the madness of their pariahdom?

This prospect, like all ideals, until they are realised in experience,
may seem fantastically visionary. Moreover, the substance of human
nature is so mixed that it would perhaps be fanatical to expect from
Whitman's chivalry of "adhesiveness" a more immaculate purity than was
attained by the mediaeval chivalry of "amativeness." Still that mediaeval
chivalry, the great emotional product of feudalism, though it fell short
of its own aspiration, bequeathed incalculable good to modern society by
refining and clarifying the crudest of male appetites. In like manner,
the democratic chivalry, announced by Whitman, may be destined to
absorb, control, and elevate those darker, more mysterious, apparently
abnormal appetites, which we have seen to be widely diffused and
ineradicable in the ground-work of human nature.

Returning from the dream, the vision of a future possibility, it will at
any rate be conceded that Whitman has founded comradeship, the
enthusiasm which binds man to man in fervent love, upon a natural basis.
Eliminating classical associations of corruption, ignoring the
perplexed questions of a guilty passion doomed by law and popular
antipathy to failure, he begins anew with sound and primitive humanity.
There he discovers "a superb friendship, exalte, previously unknown." He
perceives that "it waits, and has been always waiting, latent in all
men." His method of treatment, fearless and uncowed by any thought of
evil, his touch upon the matter, chaste and wholesome and aspiring,
reveal the possibility of restoring in a