372 LITERARY PAPERS 
is not merely having “a genteel young woman at a table in a 
ward.” 
He tells of “Girls, mothers, housekeepers in all their per¬ 
formances. The group of laborers seated at noon-time with 
their open dinner kettles, and their wives waiting;” of the 
prison visitor leading her children by each hand, who brings, 
with the rustling folds of her silken gown, balm to heal the 
convict’s woe. Whether as the woman containing all, nothing 
lacking, in the one who “waits for me,” or in those lines 
relating to a city where all is forgotten but the woman who 
detained him for love of him; or women old and young; or 
the sleeping mother, —Whitman studies them “each and all, 
long and long.” 
Thus in labors and charity, abroad or in the home, Whitman 
sees “male and female everywhere.” But Whitman de¬ 
scribes woman, too, standing alone; she it is, the dusky wo¬ 
man from Ethiopia who salutes the flag, who recognizes the 
banner, the colors assuring freedom. The one-time slave, 
who, knowing the lament of servitude, welcomes liberty “and 
courtesies to the regiments,” though through men’s strife 
freedom comes. Whitman also does not forget the “young 
American woman,” one of a large family of daughters, who 
has gone out from her own home to gain her own support; 
who, unstained, preserved her own independence, and by her 
own efforts sustains herself and helps her parents and sisters. 
Nor is he silent as to the woman who “from taste and neces¬ 
sity conjoined, has gone into practical affairs, carries on a 
mechanical business, partly works at it herself, dashes out 
more and more into real hardy life, is not abash’d by the coarse¬ 
ness of the contact — and will compare any day, with supe¬ 
rior carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers. For 
all that, she has not lost the charm of the womanly nature.” 
Then there is the woman “physiologically sweet and sound, 
loving work, practical. She yet knows that there are intervals, 
however few, devoted to recreation, music, leisure, hospital¬ 
ity — and affords such intervals. Whatever she does, and 
wherever she is, that charm, that indescribable perfume of 
genuine womanhood, attends her, goes with her, exhales from 
