minutes in a speech which Whitman thought the most consummate piece of oratory he had ever enjoyed. The next year was our last with Whitman. He was at that time home-tied. So we arranged to have the dinner in his house. Until the very moment we were doubtful whether he would even be able to get downstairs to join us. But he came, and we had a halcyon evening together. An account of this may be read in Round Table with Walt Whitman, which, Symonds wrote us from Switzerland, affected him "with a great solemnity and to tears." Whitman was never more royally simple, more proudly the democrat, than when detected thus in the bosom of his family - that family of comrades whose lives were so inextricably one with his own. The evening of the last meeting between Ingersoll and Whitman (1892) was a sad one. Walt never bettered from that attack. While Ingersoll was outwardly cheerful he realized that Whitman's stream of life ran low. But the two big men had their talk out and parted like lovers who were resigned to events. Ingersoll's practical generosity to Whitman had been unprecedented. Whitman

spoke of Symonds and Ingersoll as his best victories- "Symonds one of the most scholarly, Ingersoll one of the most magnetically spontaneous men on the planet." But he never dwelt upon this as being final. To him only the general effect was

final. He looked for native men and women with native moments to correlate the substance of the

Leaves. Some of his friends came to him, urging that Ingersoll and Bucke were extreme. How could the Leaves be made responsible for any extravagance? "They are men of first rank," he replied-"men of the first remove or no remove: and I love men of that sort." And he argued again: "What have I to do with men's ideas, good or bad?" And he would intimate that he was neither for nor against ideas but chiefly concerned about love. A woman at Harned's asked him: "What kind of love, Mr. Whitman?" and he replied: "Just love." We never discovered him in a mood to argue men good or bad. He finally deposited every man in forgiveness. Yet he was full of fire for the great ideas. He was capable of intensest emotion and of emotional expression rigorously prophetic. No man loved America better. And yet his America was not an affair of political hurrahs but of spiritual amens. His America was not built on geographical but on human lines. He lamented certain then recent tendencies: "They are momentary. They leave the real work undone. The real America is not to establish empires but to destroy them. Any America that stopt with America would be a story half told." In Harned's parlor he warmly declared to a group of arguers: America is not railroads but men. No matter how good your railroads your men must be better. The chief thing is men. America is the influence that will make men possible.

And

this America can be as active in soil not technically America's as in America itself." When Whitman said religion he meant all religions. When he said America he meant all races. And when he saw America expanding he did not see it going armed with gun and club. He was not a controversialist in these later years, yet he entertained convictions whose solemn utterance was pentecostal. He opposed all policies in state or social life which threatened to set the courts and customs against the people which victimized the people to privilege and caste. He was in favor of intercontinental emigrations. Speaking of America he said: "Let them all come. We can digest them all.' He was sometimes quoted as an enemy of churches. But one of the last things he said was this: "I am only opposed to churches because I am in favor of the church." Such reminiscent evidence, which could be indefinitely extended, shows how well sustained was his interest in contemporary life. He did not share in any scholarly antipathy to the newspaper. He looked to it for the "abstract and chronicle" of his time. Whit

man was only physically a sick man. He did no sick thinking. He had no sick passions. One hour before he died he counted his own pulse and announced that he was about done for. He labored under no delusions. He practised no self-deception. He had none of the old-man querilities. The youth of this man's old age kept his thinking perennially in

seedtime. He died from the bottom up. His head was the last to go. Said the autopsist after his death: "He must have lived weeks by mere force of will." Knowing from nearby all the trying conditions of his last sickness, we marvelled that no extension of physical feebleness dimmed the lustre of his brain. In the three months from December 17, 1891, to March 26, 1892, he died a thousand deaths. It is a thing, however, that need not be dwelt upon. For most other men die plucky deaths, fighting to the last ditch. Whitman would say himself, referring to the boys in the hospitals: "They all died handsomely." He died handsomely.

Whitman died March 26, 1892. The last entry in his diary was this: "Dec. 2 x 4th x 2d, 3d day & night g't suffering."

Whitman's funeral was wholly without parallel in America. It is not difficult to create a furore over the remains of the generals and the statesmen, whose grandiose stature excites an immediate reward. It is far more difficult to gain the public eye or ear for an abstraction. And literary, philosophic, and religious effects are abstract. So that Whitman's appeal was to an element in the human psychus hard to reach and puzzling to hold. Yet the appeal was made and its success was eminent. While the outpouring was vast it seemed concerted. It resembled the flow and overflow of some irrevocable and inexplicable but archaically uncorrupted emotion. For hours,

while the body lay exposed in his home, a stream many thousands in number passed by, and was only finally cut off by a necessary time limit. From the Delaware ferries to Harleigh, a distance of perhaps three miles, the roads were busy with people coming and going, and with fakirs who sold fruits and a strange miscellany of wares. It was not so much the funeral as the merrymaking. It possessed the kaleidoscopic features of the country fair. The faces of the people were even glad faces. For while the people were not glad that Whitman was dead they were glad that he had lived. It may be that few of the strolling mourners knew more than vaguely why they had undertaken their errand. Some fundamental urge had swept them from their moorings into a current. Whitman had always been familiarly one of the people's own. He had gone among the people with their own manners and with their own sympathies and with their own entire unaffectedness. He had dedicated his full faith to the average service. These crowds showed some apprehension of that unequivocal award. For it was award. He had awarded his being to them. had given all. Not an atom was left alien. If Whitman could have wished for any tribute it would have been the gift of the popular gladness. He had come among them strange and distrusted and had departed as one of conceded kin. Whitman did not like lachrymose funerals. The funeral was not a

He