But at fifty-three his splendid health was crowded to the breaking strain.  How?  Through caring for wounded, sick and dying men, hour after hour, day after day, through the long, silent watches of the night.  From Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four to the day of his death in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-two, he was, physically, a man in ruins.  But he did not wither at the top.  Through it all he held the healthy optimism of boyhood, carrying with him the perfume of the morning and the lavish heart of youth.

Doctor Bucke, who was superintendent of a hospital for the insane for fifteen years, and the intimate friend of Whitman all the time, has said:  “His build, his stature, his exceptional health of mind and body, the size and form of his features, his cleanliness of mind and body, the grace of his movements and gestures, the grandeur, and especially the magnetism, of his presence; the charm of his voice, his genial, kindly humor; the simplicity of his habits and tastes, his freedom from convention, the largeness and the beauty of his manner; his calmness and majesty; his charity and forbearance—­his entire unresentfulness under whatever provocation; his liberality, his universal sympathy with humanity in all ages and lands, his broad tolerance, his catholic friendliness, and his unexampled faculty of attracting affection, all prove his perfectly proportioned manliness.”

But Whitman differed from the disciple of Lombroso in two notable particulars:  He had no quarrel with the world, and he did not wax rich.  “One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!” we might have said to the poet; “you are not a financier.”  He died poor.  But this is no proof of degeneracy, save on ’Change.  When the children of Count Tolstoy endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia:  A man who gives away his money is not necessarily more foolish than he who saves it.

And with Horace L. Traubel I assert that Whitman was the sanest man I ever saw.

* * * * *

Some men make themselves homes; and others there be who rent rooms.  Walt Whitman was essentially a citizen of the world:  the world was his home and mankind were his friends.  There was a quality in the man peculiarly universal:  a strong, virile poise that asked for nothing, but took what it needed.

He loved men as brothers, yet his brothers after the flesh understood him not; he loved children—­they turned to him instinctively—­but he had no children of his own; he loved women, and yet this strongly sexed and manly man never loved a woman.  And I might here say as Philip Gilbert Hamerton said of Turner, “He was lamentably unfortunate in this:  throughout his whole life he never came under the ennobling and refining influence of a good woman.”