other, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee--I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

"Approach, encompassing Death--strong Deliveress!
When it is so--when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

"From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee--adornments and feastings for
thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky are
fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil'd Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee."

IV

Whitman despised riches, and all mere worldly success, as heartily as ever
did any of the old Christians. All outward show and finery were intensely
distasteful to him. He probably would not have accepted the finest house
in New York on condition that he live in it. During his hospital
experiences he cherished the purpose, as soon as the war was over, of
returning to Brooklyn, buying an acre or two of land in some by-place on
Long Island, and building for himself and his family a cheap house. When
his brother Jeff contemplated building, he advised him to build merely an
Irish shanty. After what he had seen the soldiers put up with, he thought
anything was good enough for him or his people. In one of his letters to
his mother, he comments upon the un-American and inappropriate
ornamentation of the rooms in the Capitol building, "without grandeur and
without simplicity," he says. In the state the country was in, and with
the hospital scenes before him, the "poppy-show goddesses" and the Italian
style of decoration, etc., sickened him, and he got away from it all as
quickly as he could.

V

During the war and after, I used to see a good deal of Whitman in
Washington. Summer and winter he was a conspicuous figure on Pennsylvania
Avenue, where he was wont to walk for exercise and to feed his hunger for
faces. One would see him afar off, in the crowd but not of it,--a large,
slow-moving figure, clad in gray, with broad-brimmed hat and gray
beard,--or, quite as frequently, on the front