The portrait prefixed to his last little book, is that of some patriarch, bent under a world-weight of experience. The volume, Good-bye, my Fancy, appeared in the winter—sixty pages of fragmentary notes and rhythms of pathetic interest. He called them his “last chirps”.[753] It opens on a rather deprecatory note, but is touched here and there with wistful humour.
WHITMAN AT SEVENTY-TWO
The preface,[754] written two summers before, describes him as moved by the sunshine to the playfulness of a kid, a kitten or a frolicsome wave. He finds a grim satisfaction even in his present state, counting it as a part of his offering to the cause of the Union and America, for he has no doubt of its origin in the strain of the war-years. Of the war, and of his part in it, he now sees all his Leaves as reminiscent.
The prose memoranda are principally memorial of old friends, and familiar books and places, and are full of those generous appreciations which were a delightful feature of his later life. Among others, are tributes to Queen Victoria, to his friend Tennyson, and to the great American poets.[755]
He returns again to his gospel of health,[756] as the message most needed in the world to-day; a message which would contrast with the cry of Carlyle or of Heine, or of almost any of the dwellers in that Europe which he sees afar off, as a sort of vast hospital or asylum ward. It has been his own single purpose to arouse the soul, the essential giver of Divine health, in his readers. His aim has always been religious; he foresees the coming of a new religion which shall embrace both the feminine beauty of Christianity and the masculine splendour of Paganism.[757]
The poems are still in the vein of November Boughs. They are the utterance of certain belated elements in his life-experience, without which his book would be incomplete. Some review his past; others anticipate his future.
The most important is the poem “To the Sunset Breeze,”[758] which is perhaps the highest expression of his mystical attitude toward nature. The breeze brings to this lonely, sick man, incapable of movement, the infinite message of God and of the world; it comes to him as a loving and holy companion, the distillation and essence of all material things, the most godly of spirits:—