Grass had been addressed, crowded Mickle Street, waiting to view the
corpse; thousands more reportedly lined the funeral route to view the
passing cof¤n, and the crowd at the cemetery, it is said, stretched as far as
the eye could see.^78
Some Whitman devotees accepted the poet’s death as a momentous
event. Thus John Addington Symonds wrote from England that Whit-
man’s “sick-bed, his death-bed, is the seal of the magnetic inspiration he
has sent to quicken spiritual life in others,” adding that Whitman’s “‘sub-
lime doctrine’ teaches us to live and die.”^79 Horace Traubel implied that
Whitman had died like a saint. Borrowing Whitman’s imagery of twi-
light and sunsets, Traubel wrote: “He passed away as peaceably as the sun,
and it was hard to catch the moment of transition. That solemn watch,
the gathering shadows, the painless surrender are not to be forgotten. His
soul went out with the day. The face was calm, the body lay without
rigidity[!], the majesty of his tranquil spirit remained. What more could
be said? It was a moment not for the doctor, but for the poet, the seer.”^80
Three days later, in another burst of hagiography, Dr. Bucke, who has
been called “the Saint Paul, who spread the word about the departed
Messiah,”^81 described the deceased poet in godlike terms in a letter to an
English Whitmanite, proclaiming, “Christ ist erstanden! More correctly,
he is arising.” And a few days later John Burroughs noted in his journal
that “W. W. is the Christ of the modern world—he alone redeems it,
justi¤es it, shows it divine, ®oods and saturates it with human-divine
love.”^82 Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness (1901), a collection of case histo-
ries of mystic illumination, places Whitman’s inspirational faculty second
only to that of Christ, asserting that “in no man who ever lived was the
sense of eternal life so absolute.” At the poet’s funeral service Bucke de-
clared (as Whitman’s poems sometimes hint) that Death had whispered
to Whitman the secret of the hereafter. “With [Whitman] immortality
was not a hope but a beautiful dream,” said Bucke. “He believed that we
all live in an eternal universe, and that man is as indestructible as his
Creator. His views of religion have been misunderstood. He was tolerant
of the opinions of others, and recognized the good of all religious sys-
tems. His philosophy was without limitation of creed, and included the
best of every age and clime.”^83 And Harned, citing a line from one of
Whitman’s late poems, declared that the poet gladly welcomed death as
the “Usher, Guide, at last, to all,” and he, too, testi¤ed that the poet had
peacefully surrendered to death. “Never did he fear that fatal and certain
end,” Harned asserted. “Idle, indeed, it was for Death to try to alarm
240 / “Sweet, Peaceful, Welcome Death”