The Walt Whitman Archive
Complete Prose Works
It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of
that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love
hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for
the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy,
and for the spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not
follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will be seen,
running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible and visible worldly
interests of America, threads of manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet,
strong and life-long, carried to degrees hitherto unknown—not only giving
tone to individual character, and making it unprecedently emotional, muscular,
heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to general politics. I say
democracy infers such loving comradeship,
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as its most inevitable twin or
counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of
perpetuating itself.