Walt Whitman's haversack to go on display at Library of Congress "A souvenir of those days," he told his friend. He hadn't used it in years. Next month, Whitman's venerable "haversack" - a symbol of one of the war's great acts of compassion by one of its great writers - will go on display at the Library of Congress, apparently for the first time. The library has had it since 1969, when the bag was acquired from the noted Whitman collector Charles Feinberg, but library officials found no record that they have ever had it on exhibit. Whitman is known as one of America's best poets, a robust, flamboyant figure who portrayed himself, and mid-19th-century America, as alive with muscle and vitality. Less well known, perhaps, is his role in Washington during the Civil War, when he frequented the local hospitals, which were often jammed with thousands of injured, sick and dying soldiers. Moved by the horror of the war's damage to helpless young patients, Whitman made hundreds of visits, toting the haversack packed with fruit, brandy, sweets, tobacco, clothing, money, newspapers. He often sat with dying soldiers, comforting them, holding their hands. He wrote letters to their families after they died. He even dressed a few wounds and stayed for days and nights in a row. He wore his gray hair and bushy beard long, to seem more avuncular, but was always clad nicely to help cheer the men up. The library plans to exhibit the haversack, which is extremely fragile, along with some of Whitman's letters. Also on display will be one of his notebooks, in which he has penciled his terse observations: "Dec 20th Sight at the Lacy house - at the foot of tree immediately in front a heap of feet arms and human fragments . . . bloody black and blue swollen and sickening." The items will be presented some time next month, as the library removes pieces currently in its Civil War in America exhibit for preservation purposes and replaces them with new objects. Other items being added include handwritten pages of Abraham Lincoln's first and second inaugural addresses, a rare volume of Confederate sheet music, and Union and Confederate recruiting posters. In the hospitals, Whitman spent many hours doing what he called "the abstract work of consolation and sustenance." "He had a very comforting personality," said Alice Lotvin Birney, a Whitman expert and literary specialist in the library's manuscript division. His presence emanated and projected good spirits and good feelings to the soldiers. Why did he do it? Out of compassion, I would say," Birney said. Because [the war] was the biggest thing that was happening in American history, and he clearly saw himself as America's poet.