[COYNE] RICHARD MAURICE BUCKE— A SKETCH 179 



î^Tature " (1879) as to the relation of the great sympathetic nerve to 

 the moral nature. In it, he says, ''he sought to embody the teaching 

 of the illumination."' 



The subject appears to have been first broached by him in a 

 paper on " The Functious of the Great Sympathetic Xervous System/' 

 read by him at St. Louis in May, 1877, and again in a paper on 

 '" The Moral Xature and the Great Sympathetic," read at Washington 

 in ]\[ay, 1878, before the Association of Medical Superintendents of 

 American Institutions for the Insane. 



In July, 1877, for the first time, he met and conversed with Walt 

 AVhitman. He called upon the poet at Camden. Of this meeting 

 he gives a graphic account in the Introduction to " Calamus," a collec- 

 tion of Whitman letters to Peter Doyle, edited by Dr. Bucke, and 

 published in 1897. 



It is too long to transcribe here. But the effect is given in these 

 words : 



'^ Briefly, it would be nothing more than the simple truth to 

 state that I was, by it, lifted to and set upon a higher plane of exist- 

 ence, upon which I have more or less continuously lived ever since — 

 that is. for a period of eighteen years. And my feeling toward the 

 man, Walt AYhitman, from that day to the present has been, and is, 

 that of the deepest affection and reverence. All this, no doubt, was 

 supplemented and reinforced by other meetings, by correspondence 

 and by readings, but equally certainly it derived its initial and essential 

 vitality from that first, almost casual contact."' 



In a paper published in 1894, referring to the interview, he had 

 written as follows : " A sort of spiritual intoxication set in which did 

 not reach its culmination for some weeks, and which, after continuing 

 some months, very gradually, in the course of the next few years faded 

 out .... it is certain that the hours spent that day with the 

 poet was the turning point of my life. The upshot of it was the 

 placing of my spiritual existence on a higher plane." 



Headers of Lucian will remember his description of a somewhat 

 similar effect produced upon him by the philosopher Nigrinus. Other 

 instances in sacred and profane literature are by no means infrequent 

 in cases of men and women of exceptional moral and spiritual elevation. 



23. 



"Man's Moral î^'ature " (1879) is dedicated "To the man who 

 inspired it — to the man who of all men, past and present, that I have 

 known has the most exalted moral nature — to Walt Whitman." 



