cipation from temporal life in a union with eternity, and according to
Whitman, the word oblivion best re®ects “the idea I had in mind.”^52 An-
other poem shows how much he cherished these ¤nal years by picturing
him as a tree whose “lingering sparse leaves on winter-nearing boughs”
(like the verses of his old age) are still precious to him. And he enshrined
these twilight days of blissful surrender in one of the most charming an-
ticipations of easeful death in all of English verse—the sensuous and rhe-
torically dazzling “Halcyon Days”:
Not from successful love alone,
Nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics
or war;
But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm,
As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky,
As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air,
As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs
really ¤nish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree,
Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all!
The brooding and blissful halcyon days.^53To further illustrate his readiness for death as he entered his eighth
decade Whitman revisited the saintlike deaths of two mythic heroes of
his youth—James Fenimore Cooper’s path¤nder Natty Bumppo and
Osceola, the legendary chief of the Seminoles. In The Prairie (1827) Coo-
per had pictured the frail and ancient Natty Bumppo standing erect and
with an “air of grandeur and humility” against the backdrop of a remote
Western prairie. Having apparently heard the voice of God summoning
him home, Bumppo stands at strict attention before his “Commanding
Of¤cer,” and “with a ¤ne military elevation of the head, and, with a voice
that might be heard in any part of that numerous assembly, he pro-
nounces the word—Here!” Whitman, who had recently replaced the oil
lamp in his parlor with an electric light bulb, was rereading Cooper’s nov-
els. He had long admired Cooper’s hero: “I never forget Natty Bumppo—
he is from everlasting to everlasting,” he said.^54 So, having himself com-
pleted the allotted three-score and ten and, being attentive to his Maker’s
call (and having formerly pictured himself in the role of an old soldier in
Drum-Taps), the ailing Whitman likens his own readiness for death to
Natty Bumppo’s:
232 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”