I have often heard Whitman say that he inherited most excellent blood from
his mother,--the old Dutch Van Velser strain,--Long Island blood filtered
and vitalized through generations by the breath of the sea. He was his
mother's child unmistakably. With all his rank masculinity, there was a
curious feminine undertone in him which revealed itself in the quality of
his voice, the delicate texture of his skin, the gentleness of his touch
and ways, the attraction he had for children and the common people. A lady
in the West, writing to me about him, spoke of his "great mother-nature."
He was receptive, sympathetic, tender, and met you, not in a positive,
aggressive manner, but more or less in a passive or neutral mood. He did
not give his friends merely his mind, he gave them himself. It is not
merely his mind or intellect that he has put into his poems, it is
himself. Indeed, this feminine mood or attitude might be dwelt upon at
much length in considering his poems,--their solvent, absorbing power, and
the way they yield themselves to diverse interpretations.
The sea, too, had laid its hand upon him, as I have already suggested. He
never appeared so striking and impressive as when seen upon the beach. His
large and tall gray figure looked at home, and was at home, upon the
shore. The simple, strong, flowing lines of his face, his always clean
fresh air, his blue absorbing eye, his commanding presence, and something
pristine and elemental in his whole expression, seemed at once to put him
_en rapport_ with the sea. No phase of nature seems to have impressed him
so deeply as the sea, or recurs so often in his poems.