s nature.
It was a mouth that required the check and curb of that classic brow.

And the influence of his poems is always on the side of physiological
cleanliness and strength, and severance from all that corrupts and makes
morbid and mean. He says the "expression of a well-made man appears not
only in his face: it is in his limbs and joints also; it is curiously in
the joints of his hips and wrists; it is in his walk, the carriage of his
neck, the flex of his waist and knees; dress does not hide him; the
strong, sweet, supple quality he has strikes through the cotton and
flannel; to see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more.
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side."
He says he has perceived that to be with those he likes is enough: "To be
surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,--I
do not ask any more delight; I swim in it, as in a sea. There is something
in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact
and odor of them, that pleases the soul well. All things please the soul,
but these please the soul well." Emerson once asked Whitman what it was he
found in the society of the common people that satisfied him so; for his
part, he could not find anything. The subordination by Whitman of the
purely intellectual to the human and physical, which runs all through his
poems and is one source of their power, Emerson, who was deficient in the
sensuous, probably could not appreciate.

XI

The atmosphere of Whitman personally was that of a large, tolerant,
tender, sympathetic, restful man, easy of approach, indifferent to any
special social or other distinctions and accomplishments that might be
yours, and regarding you from the start for yourself alone.

Children were very fond of him; and women, unless they had been prejudiced
against him, were strongly drawn toward him. His personal magnetism was
very great, and was warming and cheering. He was rich in temperament,
probably beyond any other man of his generation,--rich in all the purely
human and emotional endowments and basic qualities. Then there was a look
about him hard to describe, and which I have seen in no other face,--a
gray, brooding, elemental look, like the granite rock, something primitive
and Adamic that might have belonged to the first man; or was it a
suggestion of the gray, eternal sea that he so loved, near which he was
born, and that had surely set i