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Those years were not uniformly dreary. They were warmed by the half-filial, half-erotic friendship of many young men, notably the young Irish streetcar conductor, Peter Doyle. They were cheered by the startling letters of Mrs. Anne Gilchrist. She had read the Leaves and wrote their author: "Nothing in life or death can tear out of my heart the passionate belief that one day I shall hear that voice say to me, 'My mate. The one I so much want. Bride, wife, indissoluble, eternal.' ... O come, come, my darling, look into these eyes and see the long ardent aspiring soul in them."
Orbic. Whitman was still active. He went West, like the nation, and saw the Rockies. Their grandeur reminded him of his own poetry. But he was aging. He began to say he had never read Emerson before he wrote Leaves of Grass (he had), to be a little cadgy about money, to blossom a little senilely at his few remaining birthday parties, to welcome the less fantastic of his admirers. They were not the common workmen he had written for, but those poets and cultivated hangers-on who are the fate of poets in general. He kept adding to Leaves oj Grass. It had become "a habit." He wrote Democratic Vistas, a book of prose more perceptive of the weak spots in U.S. democracy than anything Whitman had written before. He had outlived his pre-Civil War hopefulness, but he was still capable only of vague "orbic" statements about the leadership of "the divine literatus," and preached once again "his old back-to-nature illusion." He still professed his uncritical confidence in the deep instinctive virtues of "the People." Author Fausset believes that this confidence is part of Whitman's pathetic fallacy.
Like his masses, Whitman lacked the self-mastery, the intelligence and the creative idea whereby true democracy becomes possible. He glimpsed "the necessity of bringing the moral sense into a new relation with intelligence," but he could "only link them loosely and hopefully together." He vaguely foresaw "the basic problem of democracy, that of reintegrating the individual in a social whole and converting a semiconscious mass into a community of responsible persons," but "he overlooked the cost of integration, as he had overlooked it in himself." And "his lack of insight into the nature of imagination and the spiritual cost of creating great literature was paralleled by his ignorance of the nature and cost of the 'soul-consciousness,' whose development he insisted, rightly enough, it should be the one purpose of all government in a democracy to encourage."