"
He said emphatically, "Without yielding an inch, the working man and
working woman were to be in my pages from first to last." He is the only
American poet of his rank who remained through life the close companion of
day laborers. Yet, although he is the poet of democracy, his poetry is too
difficult to be read by the masses, who are for the most part ignorant of
the fact that he is their greatest representative poet.
He not only preached democracy, but he also showed in practical ways his
intense feeling of comradeship and his sympathy with all. One of his
favorite verses was
"And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud."
His Civil War experiences still further intensified this feeling. He looked
on the lifeless face of a son of the South, and wrote:--
"... my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead."
Like Thoreau, Whitman welcomed the return to nature. He says:--
"I am enamour'd of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods."
He is the poet of nature as well as of man. He tells us how nature educated
him:--
"The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the
mare's foal and the cow's calf.
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