And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea,
And at night under the full of the moon in calmer weather....
Yes, when the stars glisten'd,
All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop'd stake,
Down, almost amid the slapping waves,
Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears
I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair,
Listen'd long and long....
(Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.)
But now the Stafford family were assembled at breakfast and Walt limped in to join them. Courteously and simply he greeted the various members of the household,—the dark, silent, diligent Methodist father,— the spiritually-minded yet busy-handed mother,—the two young fellows, the married daughter and her little ones. He was the most domesticated, least troublesome of inmates, and his "large sweet presence" imparted something to the homely breakfast-table, something of benignity and tranquillity, which it had lacked before his entrance. "The best man I ever knew," Mrs. Stafford called him. Her sons adored him; and her grandchildren were almost like his own, in the love and confidence with which they curled themselves upon his great grey knee when the meal was over. For his affection for children, his sense of fatherhood, was a predominant trait of Whitman's character. Lonely, since his mother's death, he had lived as regards the closer human relationships: lonely, in this sense, he was doomed to remain. A veil of secrecy hung over his past life, which none had ever ventured to lift. Rumours of a lost mate, as in the song of the Alabama bird upon the shore,—of children whom he never could claim,—hints of harsh fates and imperious destinies, occasionally penetrated that close-woven curtain of silence which covered his most intimate self. But only in his poems had he voiced his loneliness, and that with the tenderest poignancy of yearning for "better, loftier love's ideals, the divine wife, the sweet, eternal, perfect comrade"....
That woman who passionately clung to me.
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.
(Be not impatient—a little space—Know you, I salute the air, the ocean and the land,
Every day, at sundown, for your dear sake, my love.)
And this was the man who had been blamed for his utter lack of "the romantic attitude towards women!" But Whitman was no light singer of casual empty love-lyrics; he was of sterner stuff than that.