sat helpless, yet cheerful, in the grip of death all the fruit of that strange awakening to the consciousness of his surroundings. "I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels." Such pure contemplative wonder the same that we see and cannot fathom in the eyes of a child-constitutes Whitman's most habitual mood. All manifestation amazes and delights him: the knuckle-joint of his finger-even the forms of his own instinctive word-melodies. He must fancifully call his gathered sheaf of songs "Leaves of Grass"owning them no more than he owns all things—all things, for, as he matures, he does feel the pride and pain of possession in all that he beholds, desiring nowhere destruction, but always growth and successful advancement, admonishing his ideal of government even, as he might his own son: "Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy! Of value is thy freight; 'tis not the Present only The Past is also stored in thee. Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western continent alone: Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship; is steadied by thy spars. Steer then with good strong hand and wary eye, O helmsman, thou carriest great companions: Venerable priestly Asia sails this day with thee But years eventually bring the conviction that the world's pageants are of little use in themselves. When appearances begin to deceive, he turns inward for light on the perplexing mysteries of life, and finds the means of reconciliation between man's mind and the phenomena of the Universal laws in self-expression: "Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither, Your schemes, politics fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me. Only the theme I sing the great and strong possessed soul-eludes not; One's self can never give way—that is the final substance; When show break up, what's but one's self is sure?" 30 His appreciation of the miraculous in nature, especially in familiar things; his conception of the spirit of American institutions battling triumphantly toward the ideal commonwealth and carrying the world along; his declaration of faith in personality, the soul, as the one final truth-these together give a fairly accurate idea of Whitman's attitude toward life as it developed from childhood through maturity and fixed itself in old age. That our first proclaimed attitude toward our surroundings reveals our inherent type, while succeeding attitudes bear testimony to the increasing influence of these surroundings upon them—the final attitude expressing a resultant of all inheritance and all experience is well exemplified in such a development of thought as Whitman's. His life-history is simple; his thought-history impossible to compass. This, because of his unique sensitiveness, blind, apparently, to no side of life. Only one great historic event occurred during his life, the Civil War. Yet the impressions made on him during that seeming eternity of violence mark him as deeply and permanently as actual battle-scars marked those for whom he labored. Springing from an intensely patriotic race—the silent and courageous fisher people along the Atlantic seaboard-he was fitted by tradition as well as temperament to feel terribly the course of events which all at once absorbed his boundless love of Nature's playground, and centered it upon a newly awakened conception of America: a living, beautiful thing, painfully writhing out of the fatal coils of its own ignorance. Here, where he feels deepest, he writes best. The parts of "Leaves of Grass" dominated by the war spirit are touched with not only a pathos but a brilliance which, naturally enough, has drawn first popular attention to the book. Particularly in the opening war poems we hear the "rattle and thrums of drums," the "shriek of the great shells and whirr and hum of the grape through the trees;" we see the "dust-covered men in columns" that "rise and fall to the undulations of the ground," as we advance through the verses—now ragged and uneven, or are borne on by them now swinging and galloping along like a charge of troopers across a plain. Then, when, as the great drama closes, Whitman can begin to look back upon and summarize his experience, he gradually evolves his theory-his religion indeed-of complete selfassertion. And if in his teaching he shows little regard for literary form, the continuous breeze of outdoor life still sweeping through the verse breathes into us an exhileration which overlooks his crudities of style and accepts his fiat when, "forth from the war emerging," he says, "the words of my book are nothing; the drift everything." To some lovers of Whitman it seems a pity that much of what his book contains is taboo, to this generation at least, because of his utter lack of circumspection of phrasing. Perhaps it was inevitable that a man of the Whitman type-essentially religious, as the sincerest men seem to be, and consequently devoid of a very active sense of humor and of its cousin, literary tact-should so imperturbably mingle slang, foreign words, philosophical jargon and dialects as to lead a critic to call the result a "most surprising combination of plain grandeur, sentimental affectation and downright nonsense. But such an imperfection never long conceals such breadth and depth of sincerity as pervades this book, wherein may be found a rebuke for the most respectable conscience, and for the most fallen a kindly and supporting welcome. But, indeed, as he shouts out his admiration of nature, or his exhortation to you and to himself to confront with your own every other personality, and even to stand "cool and collected before a million universes," you are impressed, even after granting his lack of style, with the elemental grandeur of tone springing from Whitman's urgent sincerity and directness, much as Carlyle was impressed by the virility and aggressiveness of his hero-prophet Mahomet as revealed in the Koran. "A confused jumble," Carlyle calls it, "crude, incondite but in it a merit quite other than a literary one: sincerity, which alone, at bottom, can give rise to merit of any kind." And truly, Walt Whitman, by a bedside at night in a hospital tent, or in the excitement of action, scribbling those "soiled and creased little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin," is not unlike the Prophet of the Sword pausing in the midst of his mystic vigils, waking from troubled sleep, or hastening after a whirlwind attack upon an unbeliever's camp, to scratch on "shoulder-blades of mutton; to be flung pell-mell in a chest," words that for all their impossibility as literature sway millions by their inherent honesty of appeal. There is, however, this noticeable difference between them: the terror and agonized doubt reflected in parts of the Moslem book are nowhere found in "Leaves of Grass." Whitman is at times denunciatory-most bitterly against himself too—yet he never doubts, never argues; is absolutely fearless. Heated discussions, pro and con, born of the "craving sensibilities of the conscience," are hateful to him. He cheerfully-what matter if a bit absurdly-bids us, rather, to give heed to the "satisfaction and aplomb of animals." He even seems a bit ashamed of betraying a too thorough acquaintance with the effete perfection of the standard works in history, philosophy and travel, taking pains to assure us: "Beginning my studies, the first step pleased me so much-the mere fact consciousness, the least insect or animal, these forms, the power of motion-I have hardly gone, hardly wish to go, any further, but stop and loiter all the time, to sing it in ecstatic songs." In spite of this profession of ignorance, as it were, he takes us soaring through the ages, through the living age, over the dense peopled cities of the world, over desolate steppes and wide plains, down rivers teeming with shipping, under the seas, across mountains, along streets and into houses, homes, and finally hearts and thoughts behind faces; meanings behind forms so rapidly as to daze us, so vividly touching each detail as to startle us into greater wonder at his power to show than at what he has shown. He makes nothing, in itself then, of an astonishingly vast knowledge, but after gazing, by means of it, upon the universe, he gravely nods assent as Coleridge murmurs: "In wonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fills up the interspace." Whitman's philosophy, nevertheless, evolved from these "loose-fingered chords," thrummed on such themes as nature, war, death and the immortal soul; would lead passive wonder into active worship, the ritual of which should be utter usefulness. The various conclusions hit upon by Whitman are many of them practicable; all imminently cheerful and healthy. We are a bit shocked out of our customary idea of reverence when he assures us that "nothing, not God, is greater than one's self is," but we acknowledge the truism directly. "The elemental laws never apologize," says he, and then, in defense of his attitude: "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by." The level inexorably follows the laws of its being, and so does he. This does not mean do as you please: be a Calaban, under the plea of "fatalism," the most impersonal of attitudes. But, rather, if self-expression be the law of man's being, then the fuller the expression, the more lawful, in every sense of the word, the man. In what sort of expression the law of man's being is preeminently made manifest appears in Whitman's doctrineessentially Christian, by the way,-of an all-pervading love. "Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems; Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling and Hegel, Stated the lore of Plato and Socrates, greater than Plato, And greater than Socrates sought and stated-Christ, the divine having studied long; I see reminiscent to-day those Greek and Germanic systems, Yet underneath Socrates clearly see and underneath Christ the divine I see The dear love of man for his comrade, the attraction of friend for friend, Of the well-married husband and wife, of children and parents, |