The atmosphere of Whitman personally was that of a large, tolerant,
tender, sympathetic, restful man, easy of approach, indifferent to any
special social or other distinctions and accomplishments that might be
yours, and regarding you from the start for yourself alone.
Children were very fond of him; and women, unless they had been prejudiced
against him, were strongly drawn toward him. His personal magnetism was
very great, and was warming and cheering. He was rich in temperament,
probably beyond any other man of his generation,--rich in all the purely
human and emotional endowments and basic qualities. Then there was a look
about him hard to describe, and which I have seen in no other face,--a
gray, brooding, elemental look, like the granite rock, something primitive
and Adamic that might have belonged to the first man; or was it a
suggestion of the gray, eternal sea that he so loved, near which he was
born, and that had surely set its seal upon him? I know not, but I feel
the man with that look is not of the day merely, but of the centuries. His
eye was not piercing, but absorbing,--"draining" is the word happily used
by William O'Connor; the soul back of it drew things to himself, and
entered and possessed them through sympathy and personal force and
magnetism, rather than through mere intellectual force.