lude you," he had declared; and
now he devoted himself to nursing, on battlefield, in camp and hospital,
doing what he could to cheer and lighten the worst side of war, an
attractive and inspiring figure.

Lincoln, looking out of a window of the White House, saw him go past one
day; a majestic person with snow-white beard and hair, his cotton shirt
open at the throat, six feet tall and perfectly proportioned; and the
President, without knowing who he was, but mistaking him probably for a
common laborer, turned to a friend who stood beside him and remarked,
"There goes a man!" And Whitman was a man. Up to that time, he had never
been ill a day; but two years later, at the age of fifty-three, his
health gave way, under the strain of nursing, and from that time until
his death he was, physically, "a man in ruins." Mentally, he was as
alert and virile as ever.

He was given a clerical position in one of the departments at Washington
after that, remaining there until, in 1873, an attack of paralysis
incapacitated him even for clerical labor. Meanwhile he had issued his
poems of the war, under the title "Drum-Taps," and had softened some
hostile hearts by the two noble tributes to Lincoln there included, "O
Captain, my Captain!" and "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
But his poetry brought him no income and, for a time, after his removal
to Camden, New Jersey, where the remainder of his life was to be passed,
he was in absolute want. Friends increased, however; his poems were
re-issued, and his last years were spent in the midst of a circle of
disciples, who hailed Whitman as a seer and prophet and were guilty of
other fatuities which made the judicious grieve and did much to keep
them alienated from the poet's work.

Since his death, his fame has become established on a firmer basis than
hysterical adulation; but it is yet too soon to attempt to judge him, to
say what his ultimate rank will be. It seems probable that it will be a
high one, and it is possible that, centuries hence, the historian of
American letters will start with Whitman as the first exponent of an
original and democratic literature, disregarding all that has gone
before as merely imitative of Europe.

Of our lesser poets, only a few need be mentioned here. Bayard Taylor,
born in Pennsylvania in 1825, of Quaker stock and reared in the tenets
of that sect, at one time loomed large in American letters, but it is
doubtful whether anything of his ha