I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand.

In these lines Whitman foregrounds tactile sensation—stirring, pressing, feeling—as a primary route to joy and self-knowledge. The speaker’s happiness is immediate and bodily rather than abstract or moralized, consistent with Whitman’s broader project of affirming the physical self as integral to the soul. The second sentence introduces a limit (“about as much as I can stand”), suggesting that intimacy is both desired and overwhelming: contact with another body is intensely charged, perhaps erotically, perhaps emotionally, and the speaker acknowledges the threshold where sensation becomes too powerful. The effect is to portray human connection as fundamentally physical, yet not easily contained by social decorum or by the speaker’s own capacity.