bloomed) on one of the streets of Washington,
saw a workingman in shirt-sleeves go by. Turning to a friend, the
President said, "There goes a MAN!" The exclamation sounds singularly
like that of Napoleon on meeting Goethe. But the Corsican's remark was
intended for the poet's ear, while Lincoln did not know who his man was,
although he came to know him afterward.

Lincoln in his early days was a workingman and an athlete, and he never
quite got the idea out of his head (and I am glad) that he was still a
hewer of wood. He once told George William Curtis that he more than half
expected yet to go back to the farm and earn his daily bread by the work
that his hands found to do; he dreamed of it nights, and whenever he saw
a splendid toiler, he felt like hailing the man as brother and striking
hands with him. When Lincoln saw Whitman strolling majestically past, he
took him for a stevedore or possibly the foreman of a construction gang.

Whitman was fifty-one years old then. His long, flowing beard was
snow-white, and the shock that covered his Jove-like head was iron-gray.
His form was that of an Apollo who had arrived at years of discretion. He
weighed an even two hundred pounds and was just six feet high. His plain,
check, cotton shirt was open at the throat to the breast; and he had an
independence, a self-sufficiency, and withal a cleanliness, a sweetness
and a gentleness, that told that, although he had a giant's strength, he
did not use it like a giant. Whitman used no tobacco, neither did he
apply hot and rebellious liquors to his blood and with unblushing
forehead woo the means of debility and disease. Up to his fifty-third
year he had never known a sick day, although at thirty his hair had
begun to whiten. He had the look of age in his youth and the look of
youth in his age that often marks the exceptional man.

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