“I understand the large hearts of heroes,” wrote an ecstatic Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself”:

The courage of present times and all times,

How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm. . . .

I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

The disdain or calmness of martyrs,

The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on

The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,

The twinges that…