Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart, Joys of the solitary work, the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering and the struggle; The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings day or night; Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space!

What would not I give to know the completeness of manhood implied in all that?  Such an ideal of course is not a new-created thing for me, but I never felt it as in Whitman’s work.  It is so foreign to my own habits of thought.  I have always been so narrow, in a sense so provincial.  And indeed I doubt whether Whitman would have appealed to me as he now does had I read him for the first time in England and under the old conditions.  These fifteen months of practical business life in America has swept my brain of much that was mere prejudice, even when I thought it worship.  I was a pedantic starveling; now, at all events, I see the world about me, and all the goodliness of it.  Then I am far healthier in body than I was, which goes for much.  It would be no hardship to me to take an axe and go off to labour on the Pacific coast; nay, a year so spent would do me a vast amount of good.

’I wonder whether you have read any of the twaddle that is written about Whitman’s grossness, his materialism, and so forth?  If so, read his poems now, and tell me how they impress you.  Is he not all spirit, rightly understood?  For to him the body with its energies is but manifestation of that something invisible which we call human soul.  And so pure is the soul in him, so mighty, so tender, so infinitely sympathetic, that it may stand for Humanity itself.  I am often moved profoundly by his words.  He makes me feel that I am a very part of the universe, and that in health I can deny kinship with nothing that exists.  I believe that he for the first time has spoken with the very voice of nature; forests and seas sing to us through him, and through him the healthy, unconscious man, ‘the average man,’ utters what before he had no voice to tell of, his secret aspirations, his mute love and praise.

’Look you!  I write a sort of essay, and in doing so prove that I am myself still.  Were it not that I have mercy on you, I could preach on even as I used to do to my class in Lambeth.  Ha, if I had known Whitman then!  I believe that by persuading those men to read him, and helping them to understand him, I should really have done an honest day’s work.  There were some who could have relished his meaning, and whose lives he would have helped.  For there it is; Whitman helps one; he is a tonic beyond all to be found in the druggist’s shop.  I imagine that to live with the man himself for a few days would be the best thing that could befall an invalid; surely vital force would come out of him.