the great and good." "Every heroic act measures
itself by its contempt of some external good,"--popularity, for instance.
"The characteristic of heroism is persistency." "When you have chosen your
part abide by it, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the
world." "Adhere to your act, and congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous
age." Heroism "is the avowal of the unschooled man that he finds a quality
in him that is negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of
hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent
than all actual and all possible antagonists." "A man is to carry himself
in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and
ephemeral but he." "Great works of art," he again says, "teach us to
abide by our spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility, the
more when the whole cry of voices is on the other side."

These brave sayings of Emerson were all illustrated and confirmed by
Whitman's course. The spectacle of this man sitting there by the window of
his little house in Camden, poor and partially paralyzed, and looking out
upon the trite and commonplace scenes and people, or looking athwart the
years and seeing only detraction and denial, yet always serene, cheerful,
charitable, his wisdom and tolerance ripening and mellowing with time, is
something to treasure and profit by. He was a man who needed no
assurances. He had the patience and the leisure of nature. He welcomed
your friendly and sympathetic word, or with equal composure he did without
it.

I remember calling upon him shortly after Swinburne's fierce onslaught
upon him had been published, some time in the latter part of the eighties.
I was curious to see how Whitman took it, but I could not discover either
in word or look that he was disturbed a particle by it. He spoke as kindly
of Swinburne as ever. If he was pained at all, it was on Swinburne's
account and not on his own. It was a sad spectacle to see a man retreat
upon himself as Swinburne had done. In fact I think hostile criticism,
fiercely hostile, gave Whitman nearly as much comfort as any other. Did it
not attest reality? Men do not brace themselves against shadows.
Swinburne's polysyllabic rage showed the force of the current he was
trying to stem. As for Swinburne's hydrocephalic muse, I do not think
Whitman took any interest in it from the first.