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."

It requires two to make a home. The first home was made when a woman,
cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. All the tender
sentimentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred
thought that we live there with some one e