by it; so that they can find nothing significant in this prophet of the new world but his shamelessness. "Hold off from sensuality," enjoined Cicero (who, by the way, was not a Victorian) "for, if you have given yourself up to it, you will find yourself unable to think of anything else." This precept rests upon physiological and psychological facts which Whitman's experiments in heliotherapy have not altered. To put a serpent in a show-window does not blunt its fangs. But to represent Whitman as exclusively or finally preoccupied with the life of the senses is not to represent him whole. It is to ignore a fact which flames from the completed Leaves of Grass, namely, that he is one of the "twice-born"—that he had a new birth in the spirit of the Civil War and a rebaptism in its blood. His book as it now stands is built around that event, and the martyred President is the palpitating heart of it. That Whitman emerged from the warm shallows of his individual sensibility, that he immersed himself in the spiritual undercurrents of the national life,—this significant alteration of his position is established by his conduct and temper in the war.
Through the long agony of the struggle, Whitman went about the military hospitals, nursing the sick and wounded from every state without exception; with malice toward none, with charity for all, tenderly compassionate toward Northerner and Southerner alike. In his "Notes of a Hospital Nurse" he records his affectionate ministrations to
