i! 
 
WALT WHITMAN S POETRY 
 A STUDY & A SELECTION 
 
By the Same Auihov 
 
 THE SILENCE OF LOVE 
 
 Fifth Thousand 
 
 WHAT is POETRY? AN ESSAY 
 
WALT WHITMAN S POETRY 
 A STUDY & A SELECTION 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMOND HOLMES 
 
 JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 LONDON & NEW YORK MDCCCCII 
 
Printed by 
 
 Richard Folkard & Son, 
 Devonshire Street, London, W.C. 
 
LIST OF SELECTIONS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 In Cabin d Ships at Sea 81 
 
 From the " Song of Myself" - - 82 
 
 Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances 83 
 
 Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes 84 
 
 Soon Shall the Winter s Foil be Here - - 84 
 
 Warbles for Lilac-Time 85 
 
 O Magnet-South 86 
 
 To a Locomotive in Winter 88 
 
 Spirit that Form d this Scene 89 
 
 Cavalry Crossing a Ford 9X3 
 
 Bivouac on a Mountain Side -..-.--90 
 
 By the Bivouac s Fitful Flame 91 
 
 Lo, Victress on the Peaks - 91 
 
 Reconciliation 92 
 
 When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom d 92 
 
 Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking 102 
 
 Tears 109 
 
 To the Man-of- War-Bird no 
 
 Patrolling Barnegat - - - in 
 
 284102 
 
With Husky-Haughty Lips, O Sea! 112 
 
 From Montauk Point 112 
 
 Proudly the Flood Comes In 113 
 
 Had I the Choice -113 
 
 By that Long Scan of Waves 114 
 
 Halcyon Days 114 
 
 A Prairie Sunset 115 
 
 Whispers of Heavenly Death 115 
 
 Assurances 116 
 
 Night on the Prairies 117 
 
 A Clear Midnight - - 118 
 
 Death s Valley - 118 
 
 Passage to India 119 
 
 That Music Always Round Me 130 
 
 The Unexpress d 131 
 
 A Riddle Song 131 
 
WALT WHITMAN S POETRY 
 
 WHENEVER I find that an imaginative writer is 
 either idolised or derided, I always assume, before 
 I begin to study him, that he has a very strong 
 personality, and that the right attitude towards 
 him is (in all probability) one neither of blind 
 enthusiasm nor of angry ridicule, but of warm 
 admiration, tempered by intermittent antipathy. 
 It was under the influence of this conviction 
 that I first began to study Walt Whitman, 
 the best loved and best hated of modern poets ; 
 and though in literature, as in other matters, 
 one s assumptions are apt to dominate one s 
 experience, I think I can honestly say that in 
 this particular case my experience fully verified 
 my assumptions. For, long before I had finished 
 that extraordinary work (poem I cannot call it), 
 the Song of Myself, I felt that I was face to 
 face with an abnormally vivid and aggressive 
 personality by which I was alternately, not to 
 
say simultaneously, fascinated and repelled. 
 Had Whitman been a lesser man, I should have 
 read his poetry, admired its beauties, laughed 
 at its eccentricities, shuddered at its crudities, 
 and then laid the book aside and gone on to 
 something else. But the very fact that his per 
 sonality seemed to be ever wrestling with and 
 striving to impose itself upon mine, made me 
 determine at all costs to understand him, to 
 discover the secret sources of his poetry, to 
 wrest from him the key to his heart and mind. 
 
 There are many ways in which we may 
 set to work to interpret an author in whom we 
 happen to be interested. The best way is, I 
 think, to study his writings, half-attentively, 
 half-broodingly, until some of the more salient 
 of their characteristics have detached themselves 
 from the rest and impressed themselves strongly 
 on our minds, such characteristics, let us say, 
 as are bound to disclose themselves, sooner or 
 later, to every thoughtful reader. Using these 
 as our base of operations, we may then advance 
 inferentially into the unknown country which 
 we wish to explore, taking care to secure our 
 communications as we proceed, by verifying 
 from our author s writings every conclusion that 
 we reach. We must beware (let me say in 
 passing) of allowing ourselves to be deluded 
 by the semblance of logic which our work of 
 
research will inevitably wear. The movement 
 of a poet s thought and feeling is always more 
 or less circular, its starting-post and its goal 
 being that primary attitude towards " things-in- 
 general " which constitutes his idiosyncrasy in 
 the region of his inner life. The different 
 characteristics of his mind, so far as it reveals 
 itself in his poetry, are all vitally interconnected; 
 and though we find it convenient and even 
 necessary to regard one of these as cause and 
 others as effects, we know well enough (or at 
 any rate we ought to know) that this is a mere 
 matter of notation, and that what we are really 
 trying to do is to show that a secret and quasi- 
 organic logic gives unity and coherence to the 
 whole of the poet s work. 
 
 To determine the leading characteristics 
 of a strong personality like Whitman s is a 
 comparatively easy task. f It is impossible to 
 read Whitman s poetry with any degree of 
 attention without seeing clearly that he is 
 intensely emotional, intensely self -conscious > in 
 tensely optimistic and intensely American. ) 
 These are his most prominent characteristics ; 
 and so entirely do they dominate the movement 
 of his poetic life, that there is nothing in his 
 poetry no beauty, no eccentricity, no height of 
 wisdom, no depth of folly which they cannot 
 help us to understand and account for. 
 
Whitman s emotionalness is thanks to his 
 self-consciousness only too apparent. Other 
 poets are compelled by their artistic instinct to 
 impose on themselves some measure of reserve 
 and self-restraint ; but Whitman seems almost 
 to glory in " wearing his heart upon his sleeve," 
 in unveiling all its wounds aad weaknesses, all 
 its passions and sympathies, to his own gaze 
 and to ours. Everything that he has written 
 is the overflow of strong feeling, and is to that 
 extent worthy of the sacred name of poetry. 
 The most beautiful, because the most sincere 
 and spontaneous, of all his writings is (as it 
 seems to me) a poem which he has named after 
 its first line "Out of the cradle endlessly 
 rocking," but to which he might well have given 
 the title of " Love and Death." From first to 
 last this poem thrills and glows with profound 
 and passionate emotion ; and I cannot imagine 
 anyone reading it without feeling that its author 
 had been endowed with no ordinary measure of 
 true poetic fire. 
 
 When I say that Whitman is self-conscious, 
 I do not merely mean that he is very fond of 
 using the pronoun,/. Many a poet has spoken 
 much about himself and yet been naively 
 unconscious. The Hebrew prophet is ever 
 obtruding his personality upon us ; but he 
 regards himself as the mouthpiece of the Lord, 
 
and is not conscious of anything about himself 
 except that the Divine afflatus has taken 
 possession of him and that he is overshadowed 
 by the Most High. Whitman s egoism is of a 
 different type from this. He is self-conscious 
 in the fullest sense of the word. He turns the 
 light of a strong consciousness on all that he 
 thinks, on all that he feels, on all that he does, 
 on all that he is. He is conscious of his own 
 personality, conscious of his mission, conscious of 
 his aims, conscious of his methods, conscious 
 of his ideas, conscious of his theories, conscious 
 of his very formulae. He introduces himself to 
 us as 
 
 " Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, 
 Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and 
 breeding, &c. 
 
 The Hebrew prophet is content to tell us that 
 "the word of the Lord came to him." In his 
 own eyes he is nothing, and the word of the 
 Lord is everything. 
 
 Whitman s optimism is of the best and 1 
 most lasting kind, being no mere theory or 
 conviction but the direct outcome of physical 
 and spiritual joy. The saying "out of the 
 abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh " is 
 pre-eminently applicable to the Poet ; and it is 
 with joy, first and foremost, that Whitman s 
 heart overflows. He has indeed his fleeting 
 
 
 Y 
 
moments of doubts and despondency ; but, 
 taken as a whole, his poetry is a veritable paean, 
 a song of thanksgiving and triumph. Here 
 again he shows himself to be a true poet ; for 
 the fountain-head of poetry is perception of 
 the half-hidden beauty of Nature, and beauty 
 must needs generate joy in all who are able to 
 discern it. 
 
 The flood of Whitman s optimism flows in 
 many channels, but in none more strongly or 
 more permanently than in the channel of his 
 Americanism, his enthusiastic faith in the social 
 and political constitution of the United States. 
 
 Having defined the leading characteristics 
 of Whitman s poetic personality, let us now try 
 to forecast their practical consequences ; let us 
 ask ourselves to what extent and in what direc 
 tions they are likely to affect the development 
 of Whitman s poetic genius. 
 
 The combination of intense emotionalness 
 with intense self-consciousness is very rare and 
 is sure to produce remarkable results. The 
 self-conscious poet is naturally disposed to take 
 himself very seriously and to think that all his 
 feelings are worth recording. Poetry has been 
 well defined as the " spontaneous overflow of 
 powerful feelings." That the overflow should 
 be spontaneous is quite as important as that the 
 
feelings should be powerful. The self-conscious 
 poet imagines that he has full control over the 
 fire-springs of his heart. If his feelings happen 
 to overflow, well and good. If not, he will 
 deliberately pump them up and pour them out. 
 When this happens, when he takes into his own 
 hands a work which he ought to leave to the 
 Muse, the chances are that feeling of the wrong 
 sort, feeling which is not genuinely poetical, 
 will find its way into his verse. 
 
 For, to begin with, in his desire to give 
 expression to all his feelings, the self-conscious 
 poet is apt to go very far afield. Everyone 
 who has ever communed with his own heart 
 knows well that it is haunted by strange and 
 obscure feelings, some transient, others more or 
 less permanent, vaporous feelings which now 
 and again condense into evanescent flakes of 
 cloud, but which remain for the most part 
 (like a thin haze on a summer s day) formless, 
 indeterminate and almost imperceptible. That 
 these feelings are genuine will be admitted by 
 all who have ever experienced them ; and some 
 of us will even affirm that for passing moments 
 they are intensely vivid and real. But those 
 who are most familiar with them will be the 
 first to insist that words cannot do justice to 
 them, and that they cannot be communicated to 
 other minds. It does not follow that they are 
 
meaningless. They are symptomatic of real 
 movements of our inner being; and it may well 
 be that they give us hints and suggestions to 
 which our inner life owes much. It is clear 
 then that they cannot be ignored ; and as it is 
 equally clear that they cannot be adequately 
 expressed, common sense seems to demand 
 that he who experiences them should keep 
 them to himself, in the belief that, if they are 
 really worth expressing, they will eventually, in 
 the natural course of their development, win 
 expression for themselves. But this is what a 
 self-conscious poet, like Whitman, cannot bring 
 himself to do. He is the last man in the world 
 to consume his own smoke. He insists on 
 communicating to us every wisp and speck of 
 emotion, and he even tries to put us in posses 
 sion of all that floating haze of feeling, out of 
 which, if it has any meaning, his desires and 
 passions, his thoughts and fancies are being 
 gradually shaped. In his attempt to do this, 
 the outward form of his poetry is sure to suffer : 
 for if all his feelings are to be accurately 
 expressed, his medium of expression must, as 
 far as possible, be free from trammels and 
 restrictions ; in other words, it must be quite 
 lawless and even formless. It is not so much 
 inability to write metrical and musical verse 
 that constrains Whitman to adopt his favourite 
 
 8 
 
recitative (if that is its correct title) as desire for 
 perfect freedom. He forgets that the freedom 
 which is not strong enough to submit to the 
 control of law is not really free, that it is ever 
 tending to degenerate into unbridled license. 
 Were he to adopt a harmonious and beautiful 
 form for his poetry, his obscurer feelings, in 
 their attempts to adapt themselves to it, would 
 either disappear from view or be entirely 
 transformed. One of the advantages of artis 
 tic form in poetry is that it makes for reserve 
 and self-control. The poet has to keep back 
 part of what he feels ; and this intensifies the 
 effect of what he says. His readers feel that 
 there is much behind his words, and their own 
 sympathetic imagination is stimulated by his 
 reticence. Another advantage of artistic form is 
 that it compels the poet to introduce (of course 
 more or less unconsciously) order and harmony 
 into the seething melee of his obscurer feelings, 
 and so lifts those feelings above the level of 
 mere potentiality by giving them formative 
 centres round which they may rally and re 
 organise their scattered forces. 
 
 It is, I suppose, vain to wish that a great 
 man had been other than he actually was, 
 or even to speculate on what he might have 
 been had he chosen to develop himself in this 
 direction rather than that. Still I cannot but 
 
think that Whitman s deeper and larger feelings 
 would have done themselves more justice than 
 his words have done them had they been 
 compelled to express themselves in a beautiful 
 form ; that they would have revealed themselves 
 more clearly and more truly than they do now 
 had they been freed from all that medley of 
 grotesque fancies, from all those rags and tatters 
 of chaotic passion, from which Whitman, in the 
 excess of his self-consciousness, is unable to 
 dissociate them. Also, I cannot but think that 
 through the half-sensuous, half-spiritual emotion 
 which charm of rhythm and metre is sure to 
 kindle, he would have awakened feelings akin to 
 his own in many hearts which must ever remain 
 beyond the reach of his influence. 
 
 The self-conscious poet thinks that all his 
 feelings are worth recording. But if he finds 
 that in trying to record them he has taken upon 
 himself a task which " exceeds man s might," 
 if he finds that he must discriminate amongst 
 them, he will as far as possible superintend this 
 work himself. He will not allow his feelings 
 to sift and organise themselves as they would 
 do, if he were less of a thinker and more of an 
 artist, under the control and guidance of the 
 feeling which ought to be paramount in his 
 heart, the love of and desire for ideal beauty. 
 He takes (or imagines that he takes) the control 
 
 10 
 
of his inner life into his own hands, and 
 deliberately tries to interpret himself to his 
 fellow men. In making this attempt there are 
 at least two directions in which he is liable to go 
 astray. As the searchlight of his consciousness 
 falls on his inner life, he realises that the play of 
 his strongest passions is far removed from those 
 correct and conventional feelings which consti 
 tute the emotional life of so many excellent souls ; 
 and this sense of aloofness from the world of 
 tradition and routine fills him with a desire to 
 break loose from restraints of every sort, and 
 start afresh. 
 
 " O to escape utterly from others anchors 
 and holds ! " exclaims Whitman : 
 
 " O something pernicious and dread ! 
 Something far away from a puny and pious life ! 
 Something unproved ! Something in a trance ! 
 Something escaped from the anchorage and driving 
 free." 
 
 This desire is one with which every poetical 
 nature does and must sympathise : for the poet, 
 with the vision of ideal beauty floating before 
 his inward eye, is always in a state of partial 
 revolt against what is established and accepted, \> 
 and is always striving to liberate himself and us 
 from the despotism of custom and convention. 
 But it is possible for this desire for a new start 
 and a new life to be carried too far ; and the 
 
 1 1 
 
self-conscious poet is of all men the most likely 
 to carry it too far, for in becoming aware of it 
 he instinctively throws the whole weight of his 
 consciousness on its side, supporting it with all 
 the forces of thought and feeling that are in any 
 degree under his control. Whitman s desire to 
 "escape utterly from others anchors and holds" 
 will carry him very far : it will lead him to sigh 
 for a " world primal again," and do his best to 
 realise his dream : it will lead him to strip off 
 from himself all those garments which Nature 
 herself has woven through myriads of years, 
 the delicacy, the reserve, the reticence, the self- 
 control with which civilised men veil from one 
 another their grosser and more animal souls : 
 it will lead him at last to perpetrate strange 
 outrages always with the best of intentions 
 and in no spirit of prurience or even of coarse 
 ness on decency, on good taste and (last but 
 not least) on the common sense of Humanity. 
 
 This then is one way in which the self- 
 conscious poet will sift and arrange his feelings. 
 He will reject as unworthy of attention all the 
 feelings that seem to range themselves on the 
 side of what is established and accepted, and 
 will attach undue importance to those that are 
 struggling to escape from their anchorage and 
 drive free. But this is not the only way. 
 The self-conscious mind is always liable to 
 
 12 
 
be dominated by theories of various kinds, 
 political, social, aesthetic, metaphysical, and so 
 forth : and the man who combines a self- 
 conscious mind with a passionate heart will hold 
 his theories, whatever they may be, not lightly, 
 as a more frivolous man might do; not half- 
 jestingly, as a man with a keen sense of humour 
 might do ; not " notionally," as a mere theorist 
 might do ; but with the whole-hearted earnest 
 ness of an intense and enthusiastic nature. It is 
 easy to see that when such a man tries to interpret 
 his own deeper and obscurer feelings, he will 
 be tempted to read into them the theory that 
 dominates his mind, and (if he happens to be a 
 poet) to make this theory, rather than his dream 
 of ideal beauty, the presiding genius of his poetic 
 life. No more fatal step could possibly be taken. 
 Social and political prejudices are things of to 
 day. They come and go. Beauty and the 
 pursuit of beauty are eternal. The poetry that 
 is composed under the influence of a theory is 
 charged from its very birth with the germs of 
 decay and death. 
 
 Now it happens, most unfortunately as I 
 must think, that Whitman brings to the inter 
 pretation of his deeper feelings a politico-social 
 theory which he holds with all the strength of 
 his ardent temperament. A theory I call it, 
 but it is far more than a mere theory. It is a 
 

 fervent conviction that Democracy (as exem- ] 
 plified in the social and political constitution of I, 
 the United States) is an ideal form of govern 
 ment and an ideal state of society. Whitman s 
 faith in Democracy is touching in its naivete. 
 Here is one expression of it. 
 
 " I was looking a long while for Intentions, 
 For a clew to the history of the past for myself and for 
 those chants and now I have found it. 
 
 It is in Democracy (the purport and aim of all the 
 past)." 
 
 " Sancta Simplicitas!" one may well mur 
 mur when one reads such words as these. Is 
 this indeed the final cause of all things ? The 
 Multi-millionaire, the worship of the Almighty 
 Dollar, the Wheat Corner, the Ice Trust, the 
 Tammany Ring and all its congeners, is the 
 system that has borne such fruits as these (let 
 its achievements in other directions be what 
 they may) the veritable end and aim of human 
 progress ? 
 
 I am not going to discuss the merits and 
 demerits of Democracy. I have a sincere admi 
 ration for the political constitution of the United 
 States, but I cannot think that wisdom said its 
 last word when that constitution was framed. 
 I have a sincere admiration for the people of 
 the United States, but I cannot think (and I am 
 
sure they do not think) that their social condition 
 is within measurable distance of perfection. 
 Feudalism had its work to do and did it. 
 Democracy has its work to do and will do it. 
 Systems come and go, but the ideal of the soul 
 remains. Some, day, perhaps, we shall have 
 a higher Feudalism, in which wisdom (in the 
 Platonic sense of the world) will be the supreme 
 authority, and love a love which is near of kin 
 to reverence will be the only fountain of force. 
 And in that golden age we shall perhaps look 
 back to Democracy with the pity (though not, 
 I hope, with the contempt) with which the 
 whole-hearted Democrat looks back to the 
 Feudalism of Mediaeval Europe. 
 
 But be that as it will. One thing is clear, 
 namely: that the politico-social ideal, like every 
 other ideal, is unattainable, and that the poet 
 who regards Democracy or any other form of 
 government as the reXo? reXeiorarov of "all the 
 past," is guilty of treason to his Muse, who 
 dwells in his heart as a vision of ideal beauty, 
 and who will assuredly cease to inspire him if 
 he allows himself to accept as final any achieve 
 ment of the spirit of man. 
 
 Let us now ask ourselves how Whitman s 
 politico-social prejudices are likely to affect his 
 poetry. The cardinal doctrine of Democracy 
 
is that all men are equal. Whitman pushes this 
 doctrine to its extreme limits, and follows it out 
 into all its consequences. His deification of 
 the " average man" is of course, mathematically 
 speaking, absurd. An average is struck among 
 unequals, not among equals. If all things were 
 equal, the notion of an average would never 
 have been generated. But though Whitman, 
 having adopted a technical term, has delibe 
 rately ignored its technical meaning, to criticise 
 his poetry from a mathematical standpoint would 
 scarcely be fair and would certainly be futile. 
 An " average " is an entirely different thing from 
 a "common factor;" but whenever Whitman 
 uses the former term it is quite clear (from the 
 context) that he is intending to use the latter, 
 that he has in his mind some "common factor" 
 of man s being, some common element in human 
 nature, the possession of which lifts the lowest 
 of men to the level of the highest. 
 
 O 
 
 What is this common element in human 
 nature which Whitman apostrophises as divine ? 
 For an answer to this question we must turn 
 to Whitman s prose works. One of the many 
 objections to theorising in poetry is that the poet 
 cannot, as a poet, even begin to do justice to 
 his theories. For theories need to be first ex 
 pounded, and then supported with arguments ; 
 and there is no place either for exposition 
 
 16 
 
(properly so called) or for argument in poetry. 
 A great poet who happens also to be a great 
 artist (perhaps no poet is truly great who is 
 not also a great artist) may be able by some 
 " heavenly alchemy " to transmute a philoso 
 phical theory into a spiritual idea ; and having 
 done this he may be able to bring it home to 
 our hearts by illustration, by suggestion, by the 
 revelation of it in gleams and flashes, by the 
 prismatic decomposition of its abstract light. 
 But a poet, like Whitman, whose artistic 
 instincts are as weak as his poetic emotions 
 are strong, must present a theory to us in its 
 abstract nakedness or not at all. In other 
 words, since explanation and argument are for 
 bidden to him, he must give us a crude one-sided 
 statement of the theory by which his mind may 
 happen to be dominated, and then champion 
 this naked and inadequate formula with all the 
 zeal and vehemence of a prophet. Or, if he 
 does attempt to illustrate his theory, he will 
 draw outrageously paradoxical inferences from 
 it and submit these to us as self-evident truths. 
 When one has vainly tried to come to terms 
 with Whitman s doctrine of the " divine aver 
 age " and universal equality, as expounded in 
 Leaves of Grass, and then turned to the prose 
 essay called Democratic Vistas, in which he 
 handles the same theme (an essay, let me say 
 
 17 c 
 
in passing, which is the work of a chaotic 
 thinker and incoherent writer), one cannot but 
 feel that the prose exposition, with all its faults, 
 is by many degrees more lucid than the poetical. 
 At any rate it is sufficiently lucid to enable 
 one to criticise its author s philosophy. In 
 a remarkable passage in Democratic Vistas 
 Whitman tells us that democracy is to do for 
 mankind in the socio-political field what Christ 
 did for it " in the moral-spiritual field," namely 
 to convince it that " in respect to the absolute 
 soul there is in the possession of such by each 
 single individual something so transcendent, so 
 incapable of gradations (like life), that, to that 
 extent it places all beings on a common level, 
 utterly regardless of the distinctions of intellect, 
 virtue, station or any height or lowliness what 
 ever." There is a deep truth in this sentence ; 
 but it is vitiated, in all its depth, by a subtle 
 error. The words that I have emphasised are 
 all-important, for they show that the doctrine 
 of universal equality is based (in Whitman s 
 mind) on the assumption that spiritual life, like 
 physical, is " incapable of gradations. " Whether 
 physical life is or is not "capable of gradations" 
 is a verbal problem which I will not attempt to 
 solve ; but that life (both physical and spiritual) 
 is capable of development^ and that in the course 
 of its development it passes through innumer- 
 
 18 
 
able phases and stages, is a truth too obvious 
 to need demonstration. But if it is a truth, the 
 psychology that underlies Whitman s " sovereign 
 dogma" is false. All men are equal because 
 all men have souls; but in respect of their souls 
 men are all unequal, being all in different stages 
 of spiritual development. It follows that the 
 universal equality on which Whitman lays so 
 much stress is potential, not actual. All men 
 are equal and all men are divine because, though 
 all men are unequal and no man is divine, the 
 chief source of their inequality is also the chief 
 source of their manhood and the surest proof of 
 their kinship to God ;-for what is common to 
 alLjnen, and -therefore of the inmost essence of 
 human nature, is not the " average " FutTthe 
 germ of theddeal and the ideaL_is._dhdne, 
 
 Thus it is only from the standpoint of the 
 ideal that we can see a meaning in Whitman s 
 master theory. But the theory itself, as ex 
 pounded by Whitman in his poetry, is at open 
 feud with the ideal and with all that the pursuit 
 of an ideal involves. If all men are actually 
 equal, it is clear that there are certain qualities 
 of our complex nature which have no right to 
 exist. Humility, reverence, adoration, aspira 
 tion, what function do these fulfil if one man 
 is as good as another and if " there is no God 
 any more divine" than one s individual self? 
 
 2 
 
Whitman sees clearly enough that if there Is 
 nothing ideal in human nature, Jth ere can be 
 nothing~13eal above human nature^ and th_ere- 
 fore that, if all men_are_jsqual, each .man_jn 
 turn _ js_an "incredible God/ The idealistic 
 conception of the potential equality of all men is 
 an argument in support of his favourite paradox 
 which he would certainly disdain to use. For it is 
 the presence, in an embryonic state, of the ideal 
 self in our hearts that convicts us of imperfec 
 tion and inclines us to humility ; and humility 
 is, in Whitman s eyes, the first and last of 
 human vices. It is strange, to say the least, 
 that one who is bound by the charter of his 
 very idiosyncrasy to tolerate all things, and 
 who certainly tolerates many things that are 
 commonly accounted evil, should be intolerant 
 of humility and all the feelings that are akin to 
 it, should be intolerant, in other words, of one 
 great natural phenomenon, of the struggle of 
 the soul to lift itself above itself in the direction 
 of its inward and spiritual ideal. 
 
 Whitman s hatred of humility will have far- 
 reaching consequences. It will compel him at 
 
 last to 
 
 avert his ken 
 From half of human fate. 
 
 The function of the Poet is to liberate the 
 human spirit, to free it from the control of its 
 
 20 
 
narrower and more sordid self, by enabling it, 
 in each individual case, to escape through the 
 channel of disinterested emotion into the larger 
 life of Humanity and of Nature. Hence it is that 
 joy is of the essence of poetic genius. _ Pessimism 
 _is_always self-centred. Despair is the darkness 
 _jQ.f a self-regarding and self-imprisoned soul. 
 But joyjn its. purest form is an ecstasy, a trans 
 porting of the soul beyond Jts wonted ._ limits.; 
 and its presejice is a proof that the soul is trying 
 to outgrow ___ itself . ?ind_..ha.s. already won some 
 ..measure i__of .._._freedom._ As Whitman s heart 
 overflows, with exultant joy, it is certain that his 
 will be a liberating influence, that he will work 
 with energy and enthusiasm for the emancipation 
 of the human spirit. But in what direction will 
 his influence exert itself? Through what outlet 
 will he pour his soul (and help us to pour our 
 souls) abroad ? 
 
 It will be easy for us to find an answer to 
 this question. In the act of escaping from its 
 narrower self, the soul necessarily expands its 
 being. Escape from self, emancipation of self, 
 and expansion of self are in fact interchangeable 
 terms. And in the case of a living thing 
 expansion always takes the form of growth. 
 The Poet helps us to grow. This is the most 
 concise account that we can give of his mission. 
 Intensely alive himself, he is ever tending to 
 
 21 
 
vitalise us ; and the proof of vitality is con 
 tinuous growth. Now the growth of the soul, 
 if it is to be harmonious and complete, should 
 resemble that of a stately tree ; in other words 
 it should be both ^lp^vard and ontivard. The 
 tree that develops itself under perfectly favour 
 able conditions grows upward by means of its 
 aspiring " leader " and outward by means of its 
 innumerable branches ; and these two processes 
 are not merely contemporaneous but propor 
 tioned to and in a manner dependent on one 
 another. When trees are planted close together, 
 their struggle for light and air carries them up 
 to great heights, but they put forth very few 
 branches. Such trees are unsymmetrical and 
 imperfect. Their development is one-sided, 
 upward but not outward. When a tree has 
 been " pollarded " when its " leader " has been 
 excised it throws great energy into its lateral 
 growth, but its upward growth is entirely 
 arrested. Like the branchless giant, the pol 
 larded tree is unsymmetrical and imperfect. 
 Its development is one-sided, outward but not 
 upward. 
 
 It is the same with the growth of the soul. 
 Growth, whatever form it may assume, is always 
 the outward and visible sign of an inward and 
 invisible force. In the case of the soul this 
 inward and invisible force is love. Now love 
 
 22 
 
is of two kinds, or rather it energises in two 
 principal directions. On the one hand there is 
 love of the ideal, the love that lifts us above 
 ourselves, the love that humbles us even while 
 it exalts us, the love that is partly compounded 
 of reverence and that looks in the direction of 
 worship. We call this upward^ mpvement^gf 
 On the other hand, there is 
 
 love of the actual, the love that carries us outside 
 ^ourselves, the love that neither humbles us nor 
 exalts us, the love that makes us regard all things. 
 as^oujL kith and Jan. _ We call this outward 
 movement of love, sympathy. In the soul that 
 is growing as it ought to grow harmoniously 
 and symmetrically both kinds of love are strong 
 and active, and neither is allowed to develop 
 itself to the exclusion or even to the detriment 
 of the other. 
 
 Even on its more human and personal side 
 love presents this dual aspect. Thus on the 
 one hand we have the passionate love of another 
 human soul, the love that is ever tending to 
 idealise its object, the love that is not truly 
 love until it has begun to transform itself into 
 adoration. And on the other hand we have 
 comradeship, the love of one s fellow men as 
 one s companions and equals, the love of each 
 man as he actually is. There ought to be room 
 in the same heart for both these movements of 
 
love. Indeed it may be doubted if either love 
 has found its true self until it has begun to 
 assimilate itself to the other. It may be doubted 
 if the lover love s his mistress perfectly until he 
 has learned to love all men for her sake ; and it 
 may be doubted if the philanthropist loves his 
 fellow men perfectly until he has learned to look 
 up, with an adoring love, to the common ideal 
 of Humanity. 
 
 It is easy to see in which direction Whit 
 man s emancipating influence will exert itself. 
 His political prejudices will forbid him to look 
 upward. 
 
 What do you suppose I would intimate to you in a 
 
 hundred ways 
 
 But that man or woman is as good as God, 
 And that there is no God any more divine than 
 yourself." 
 
 This is no random utterance. It is in strict 
 accordance with the general tenor of his teaching. 
 To tell Man that he has attained to absolute 
 perfection (the words "as good as God" mean 
 this or they mean nothing) is to discredit and 
 discountenance the latent idealism of his heart. 
 Whitman s sincere hatred of humility will 
 make him impatient of spiritual aspiration 
 and incapable of understanding the passion 
 of adoring love. Debarred by one of his 
 strongest convictions from trying to rise above 
 
 24 
 
himself, and yet impelled by his poetic nature 
 to try to escape from himself, he will seek the 
 outlet of outward growth, he will become the J 
 Poet Laureate _ of sympathy and comradeship. \ 
 And because the outlet of upward growth is 
 closed against him, and because he is by nature 
 intense and vehement beyond measure, he will 
 throw himself with extraordinary force and 
 energy into the work of outward growth ; 
 though his leader" has been excised, or rather 
 because his leader has been excised, he will 
 put forth innumerable branches and a most 
 luxuriant growth of twigs and leaves. 
 
 The_desire to escape from self, which is of 
 the essence of the poetic nature, has its counter 
 part in a_.dsjre to merge one s being in the life 
 of the Universe_j(regarded as a living whole), 
 tcPbecome one with the very "soul of things." 
 This "soul of things" is in us quite as much 
 as it is outside us, and so far as it is in us it is 
 the object of aspiration and adoring love. For 
 Whitman it is outside, in Time and Space, 
 in the average man, in the animal world, in 
 inanimate nature. To become one with all 
 these, to merge his being in theirs, to clasp them 
 to his heart, to absorb them into himself is 
 the master passion of his life. Towards the end 
 of a poem on the music of Nature and of Art 
 (" Proud Music of the Storm") he exclaims 
 
 25 
 
" Give me to hold all sounds (I madly struggling cry), 
 Fill me with all the voices of the universe, 
 Endow me with their throbbings, Nature s also, 
 The tempests, waters, winds, operas and chants, 
 
 marches and dances, 
 Utter, pour in, for I would take them all ! " 
 
 This wish comes straight from Whitman s heart, 
 and is typical of his general attitude towards 
 Nature. It is not to sounds only that the words 
 "For I would take them all" refer, but to all 
 existent things. The "soul of things" for him 
 is not behind the veil of what is outward and 
 visible : it does not even burn through the veil : 
 it is the veil and the veil is it. When a poet 
 is at once passionately optimistic and bitterly 
 hostile to spiritual idealism, he has no choice 
 but to deify the actual ; and this Whitman does 
 with all the energy of his nature. His faith in 
 equality follows him wherever he goes. To 
 apply the corresponding conception to man only 
 would be both illogical and unnatural. The 
 Universe is a vast democracy. All things in it 
 are equal and each thing is divine. He tells us 
 that " all the things in the Universe are perfect 
 miracles, each as profound as any ; " that the 
 " minutest thing upon the earth " is perfect, and 
 that he "does not see one imperfection in the 
 Universe." As all things are equally perfect, 
 as he cannot discriminate among them, he must 
 
 26 
 
identify himself with each thing in turn, till he 
 has exhausted the Universe and made it all his 
 own. This is the explanation of those tedious 
 catalogues, often of sordid and unlovely things, 
 which are so repugnant to one s artistic sense. 
 Whitman is trying to make an inventory of the 
 contents of the Universe, so that he may make 
 us understand what he really is. "O lands" 
 he cries "all so dear to me, what you are, 
 whatever it is, I putting it at random in these 
 songs, become a part of that, whatever it is " 
 (he then proceeds to identify himself with gulls, 
 herons, king-birds, wild geese, the moose, &c.) 
 " Nativities, climates, the grass of the great 
 Pastoral plains, cities, labors, death, animals, 
 products, war, good and evil, these me." He is 
 the "hounded slave," the "wounded person," the 
 " mashed fireman," the " handcuffed mutineer," 
 the "cholera patient," and so forth. His lateral 
 growth, now that his inconvenient "leader" has 
 been excised, is indeed enormous. Each detail 
 of the outward life is sacred in his eyes, glorious, 
 wonderful, divine. He longs to make it his 
 own, to give himself to it, to unite its being 
 with his. Well may he go into raptures over 
 the "vast elemental sympathy which only the 
 human soul is capable of generating and emitting 
 in steady and limitless floods !" "Vast elemental 
 sympathy" with all outward things, animate 
 
 27 
 
and inanimate, and (in particular) a feeling of 
 impassioned comradeship with all his fellow- 
 men, these are the dominant emotions that 
 overflow into his verse. It is to be hoped that 
 they will continue to come forth in " steady and 
 limitless floods," for there is evidently much 
 work for them to do. What gives them their 
 peculiar character is that they are not modified, 
 even in the faintest degree, by aspiration, by 
 spiritual love. The divorce between the ideal 
 and the actual is complete in Whitman s mind. 
 The glory, the splendour, the divinity, which 
 we instinctively ascribe to the ideal, he transfers 
 or tries to transfer to every detail of the actual. 
 Frankest and most consistent of Eaiithei&ts, he 
 deifies Nature, not in her totality, not in the 
 unity of her infinite life, but in all the minutiae 
 of her phenomenal existence. 
 
 But does this vast overflow of elemental 
 sympathy bring him any nearer to the "soul of 
 things?" I think not. If each detail of the 
 actual is really divine, the " soul of things " is 
 ready to his hand, and he need not range over 
 the whole Universe in quest of it. But if it is 
 not to be found in the first detail that he meets, 
 it is not to be found in a billion details, and the 
 attempt to catalogue the contents of the Uni 
 verse had better be abandoned as futile. The 
 "soul of things " is the soul of Nature, and 
 
 28 
 
Nature is " not an aggregate but a whole." A 
 whole and a living whole, a living, growing, 
 organic whole. As such it is like the tree to 
 which I have likened the human soul. How 
 ever vast may be its lateral expansion, still 
 through all the breadth and complexity of its 
 growth it aspires upward (by means of its 
 central leader), and the highest point that it 
 attains is, as regards the totality of its being, 
 both central and supreme. He does not see 
 Nature as she really is who cannot look upward 
 towards that ideal height; but in order to look 
 upward one must be able to look inward, for 
 the higher life of this living whole which we 
 call Nature is (humanly speaking) in the spirit 
 of man, and reveals itself to man s spiritual 
 senses. It will perhaps be said that this con 
 ception justifies Whitman s deification of hu 
 manity. But then he expressly deifies the 
 "average man," the actual self; and it is 
 not in the actual but in the ideal self that 
 the "soul of things," so far as it is inward 
 and spiritual, has its appointed home. In 
 deed, if choice had to be made between up 
 ward and outward growth, it would be better 
 for us to choose the former ; for it offers us a 
 direct, though interminable, road to our goal, 
 whereas if we follow the road of outward growth, 
 for its own sake alone, we run the risk of losing 
 
 29 
 
ourselves in a labyrinth. But we are never 
 called upon to make this fatal choice. In the 
 life of Nature the two movements are not two, 
 but one. It is the whole tree the soaring stem, 
 with its immense outgrowth of branches that 
 is ever struggling upward through the central 
 leader. Aspiration, when divorced from sym 
 pathy, is aspiration no longer, but a refined form 
 of selfishness ; and sympathy, when divorced 
 from aspiration, is sympathy no longer, but the 
 mere overflow of animal " high spirits." Each 
 mode of growth has need of the other; and love 
 has need of both. 
 
 Is it through sympathy alone that we make 
 our way to the soul of outward things, the soul 
 of inanimate Nature ? No, for the soul of 
 things, as it burns through the veil of outward 
 Nature, reveals itself to us under the guise of 
 beauty ; and beauty always presents itself to 
 the heart that discerns it as an unrealised ideal, 
 as a vision which lures one onward, as the 
 object of aspiring love. Nor is it with the eye 
 alone that the lover of outward Nature sees the 
 beauty of what he admires (if it were, beauty 
 would be as palpable as colour) but with an 
 inward and spiritual sense by means of which 
 his soul looks through his eyes, just as the soul 
 of outward things looks through the veil of what 
 is visible, and makes it luminous and beautiful. 
 
It is an outrage on common sense to say that 
 each detail of the material universe is divine, 
 glorious, beautiful, wonderful, perfect. Con 
 sidered as details, very few of the things that 
 lie around us are beautiful, and many of them 
 are sordid and even repulsive. The details of 
 outward nature must be grouped into artistic 
 wholes, if their hidden beauty is to become 
 manifest, and this work of grouping must be 
 done by the percipient eye under the guidance 
 of the spirit s dream of ideal beauty. So need 
 ful is it that the outward movement of the soul 
 should be supported at every turn by the upward 
 (or inward) movement ; and so useless is it to 
 seek for the soul of things in the chaotic multi 
 plicity of the actual ! 
 
 I am trying to show that Whitman s pas 
 sionate desire to merge his being in that of the 
 Universe is thwarted by his refusal to look up 
 ward, and by his consequent inability to use the 
 outlet of upward growth. The exuberance of 
 his outward growth avails him nothing. The 
 tree that continues to grow upward has in reality 
 a larger and more harmonious outward growth 
 than the tree that has sacrificed its " leader " in 
 order that it may throw all its expansive energy 
 into the development of its branches. Until 
 Whitman can bring himself to look upward, he 
 will be blind to the ideal side of Nature ; and 
 
until he can idealise the actual, instead of ac 
 cepting and deifying its actuality, the " soul of 
 things " (though he follow it through a million 
 details) will continue to elude him. The man 
 who can say that there will never be any more 
 perfection than there is now has fatally miscon 
 ceived of Nature, whose being is essentially a 
 life, and whose life expresses itself in eternal 
 growth. 
 
 If Whitman s "vast elemental sympathy" 
 is an inadequate outlet for the soul that desires 
 to escape from self, if even its "steady and limit 
 less floods " are unable to bring him into oneness 
 with the "soul of things," what will his sense 
 of comradeship the more human side of his 
 vast sympathy do for him? For Whitman 
 the man it will no doubt do much. Indeed, if 
 we may accept his own account of himself, it 
 will do everything. Of Whitman s life it is 
 impossible to speak except in terms of reveren 
 tial admiration. And no doubt he would tell 
 us that it was the sense of comradeship and 
 nothing more that made him, through the dark 
 and weary years of the great Civil War, the 
 friend, the nurse, and the consoler of thousands 
 of wounded and dying men. But I must be 
 allowed to believe that he was inspired by a 
 deeper and more spiritual emotion than this. 
 We shall presently see that, in defiance of his 
 
political and social theories, he was at heart 
 (after a fashion of his own) an ardent idealist ;* 
 and I cannot but think that there was a strong 
 strain of idealism in the sympathy that made 
 him do so much, at so great a cost to himself, 
 for his fellow men. 
 
 But we need not pause to discuss this ques 
 tion. It is with the Whitman of the " vision 
 and the faculty divine " that we are now con 
 cerned, not with the Whitman of the Civil War. 
 For the latter comradeship is a motive to action. 
 For the former it is a faith, a dream, a spiritual 
 idea. What is the value of this new religion 
 which Whitman is commissioned to reveal ? Is 
 the Gospel of Comradeship an adequate substi 
 tute for, or an adequate interpretation of, the 
 Gospel of Love ? It is as such that Whitman 
 preaches it. Of the higher and more spiritual 
 movements of love he knows nothing. The 
 passion of adoring love such a love as a man 
 might feel for a high-souled woman he does 
 not understand and is content to ignore. The 
 reason of this is that some strain of reverence 
 always enters into such a passion. When two 
 
 * We must always draw a distinction between 
 Whitman the self-conscious thinker and Whitman the 
 spontaneous poet. While the former is deifying the 
 actual, the latter is, unknown to himself, dreaming of the 
 ideal ; and sooner or later he will become conscious of 
 his dream. 
 
 33 
 
human beings love one another perfectly, they 
 do not love as equals. Each looks up to the 
 other. For though each loves, and passionately 
 loves, the actual self of the other, his love is not 
 limited to this. Love, which is the greatest of 
 all seers and initiators, gradually unveils to the 
 lover s eyes the beloved one s ideal self ; and as 
 this higher and purer beauty begins to dawn 
 upon him, something of reverence and adoration 
 begins to weave itself into his love. We laugh 
 at love for idealising its object ; but love is wiser 
 than we are. By idealising its object it both 
 proves the continuance of its own growth and 
 tests the sincerity of its passion. An unworthy 
 passion cannot idealise ; a misdirected passion 
 withers away when the test of idealisation is 
 applied to it. But the love that survives the 
 test, that grows stronger the more ardently it 
 idealises its object, is, we may be sure, making a 
 not wholly unsuccessful effort to see the Beloved 
 as she really is. Whitman does not understand 
 this. Whenever love is compounded in any 
 degree of reverence, whenever it ascends to 
 wards an ideal, whenever it is in the least akin 
 to adoration, it passes beyond his comprehen 
 sion and beyond his sympathy. Here, as else 
 where, the baneful influence of his politics makes 
 itself felt. The soul that adores has committed 
 the unpardonable offence of looking upward. 
 
 34 
 
If men are to love one another, they must love 
 as equals, in other words as comrades. Whit 
 man s faith in comradeship is boundless. To 
 teach men this new form of love is his self- 
 imposed mission. 
 
 " I will sing the song of companionship 
 I write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love 
 For who but I should be the poet of comrades ? " 
 Comradeship is to regenerate the human race. 
 
 " Come, I will make this continent indissoluble, 
 I will make the most splendid race the world ever 
 
 shone upon. 
 
 I will make divine magnetic lands 
 With the love of comrades, 
 With the lifelong love of comrades." 
 
 What is this new force which is to work these 
 miracles? One has heard of the "enthusiasm 
 of Humanity," and one sometimes meets with 
 persons who seem to be consumed with love 
 for their fellow men. But the " enthusiasm 
 of Humanity" is really love of the ideal of 
 Humanity ; an ideal which is of the inmost 
 essence of human nature and therefore poten 
 tially existent even in the basest of men ; and it 
 will be found that they love their fellow men 
 best whose faith in the ideal is so strong that 
 
 35 
 
 D 2 
 
they see some glow of its light in every human 
 face. This however cannot be the love of 
 comrades, for Whitman will have no commerce 
 with the inward ideal. If we cannot love the 
 actual average man for his own actual aver 
 age sake, we have not been initiated into the 
 mysteries of comradeship. But how are we to 
 compel ourselves to love him if, as a matter of 
 fact, he does not happen to attract us? If we 
 love him before we know him, we are idealising 
 him, loving him for the sake of the ideal nature 
 that is in him and yet not of him. Whitman 
 would, I presume, have us love the actual 
 average man at sight, but it is in the highest 
 degree unlikely that we shall find ourselves 
 able to do so. The truth of the matter is that 
 the sense of comradeship, when divorced from 
 love of the ideal, is unworthy of the sacred 
 name of love.* At best it is a feeling of being 
 
 * It is probable that in Whitman s " buried life " 
 the sense of comradeship is never wholly divorced 
 from love of the ideal. What he loves in each of his 
 innumerable " comrades " is undoubtedly that common 
 element which he miscalls the " average." I have else 
 where suggested that the " average " is really the 
 " promise and potency" of the ideal. This explanation 
 of Whitman s theory of universal equality would account 
 for his glorification of comradeship quite as readily as 
 for his deification of the " average man." But the 
 explanation is one which Whitman himself would, of 
 course, disown. 
 
 36 
 
hail-fellow-well-met with the first man you meet, 
 of being ready to like him and lend him a help 
 ing hand. Such a feeling, however worthy it 
 may be, will not carry us very far, and may 
 well carry us in the wrong direction. Experience 
 has amply proved that comradeship which is not 
 based on pursuit of a common ideal, comrade 
 ship which is wholly divorced from reverence, is 
 apt to degenerate into companionship in evil. 
 There is good-fellowship as well as "honour" 
 "among thieves;" and the members of swindling 
 gangs and plundering "trusts," of the Tammany 
 and other corrupt municipal " Rings," of the 
 Mania and other secret assassination societies, 
 are bound together by the closest ties of 
 comradeship. The end, the purpose is every 
 thing ; the mere fact of co-operation is nothing. 
 A band of comrades may be a band of heroes ; 
 but they need not be anything better than a 
 pack of ravenous wolves. 
 
 To misunderstand the nature of love is to 
 misconceive of the mission of Woman. N othing 
 is so characteristic of Whitman s philosophy as 
 the ignoble (not to say bestial) part that Woman 
 plays in it. When she is not ignored, which is 
 her usual fate, she is degraded and insulted. 
 The maternal aspect of womanhood has indeed 
 been glorified by Whitman, and the strong love 
 that he felt for his own mother was (strange to 
 
 37 
 
say !) not unmingled with reverence. But though 
 he proclaims himself the poet of " amativeness " 
 and " animality," he does not even profess to be 
 the poet of sexual love. Comradeship, which is 
 his substitute for love, seems to be an essentially 
 masculine institution. Comradeship among 
 women, or between men and women, does not 
 seem to be contemplated. Again and again love 
 reveals itself to him as the solver of problems, 
 the remover of doubts, the healer of wounds ; 
 but whenever this happens, the object of his love 
 is a man, not a woman. Woman, as Whitman 
 conceives of her, is the object of an animal pas 
 sion on the part of man, and her sole function is 
 to bear and rear children. With this end in view 
 it is desirable that she should be a fine, healthy 
 animal, the human equivalent of a prize brood 
 mare. She is to be muscular, brawny, supple, 
 strong, and above all arrogant. Arrogance, 
 the negation of humility and modesty, the most 
 unfeminine of qualities, is her ideal characteristic. 
 The spiritual role of Woman, the softening, re 
 fining and elevating influence that she exercises 
 through the medium of love, is entirely ignored. 
 There is surely something amiss with a philo 
 sophy which does such scant justice to half the 
 human race. The brawny, arrogant, brood-mare 
 woman is the reductio ad absurdum of Whit 
 man s conception of love. 
 
 38 
 
We can now see that the outward growth 
 of a tree which has lost its " leader" and can 
 no longer grow upward, is, even as outward 
 growth, incomplete, unsymmetrical and unlovely. 
 Sympathy, without aspiration, however vast and 
 elemental it may be, cannot reach, cannot even 
 begin to reach, the " soul of things," which is 
 ever escaping from us, as we strive to clasp it, 
 through the multitudinous meshes of the actual. 
 Love, when divorced from reverence and adora 
 tion, sinks either to the level of comradeship 
 (which may mean nothing more than com 
 panionship in evil) or of animal passion. In 
 either case it ceases to be love. 
 
 So much as to what Whitman has failed 
 to do. Let us now ask ourselves what he has 
 succeeded in doing. We have seen that what 
 is characteristic of his personality is its combin 
 ation of extreme emotionalness with extreme 
 self-consciousness, and that what is characteristic 
 of his philosophy is its combination of exuberant 
 optimism with an ardent belief in the democratic 
 ideal of universal equality. These combina 
 tions of incongruous forces produce explosives 
 of extraordinary strength. The former com 
 bination tends, as we have already seen, to 
 make a chaos of Whitman s own thoughts and 
 feelings. The latter tends, as we shall now see, 
 
 39 
 
to make a chaos of the world which he loves so 
 well. 
 
 Every poet is at heart an optimist, but no 
 poet s heart was ever so full of the vibrating 
 quasi-physical energy of joy as Whitman s. 
 " Who has been happiest?" he cries out in one 
 of his raptures, "O I think it is I I think no 
 one was ever happier than I. ... And 
 who has made hymns for the earth ? For 
 I am mad with devouring ecstasy to make 
 hymns for the whole earth." Splendid as 
 this joy is, there is something that it lacks. 
 " Devouring ecstasies " are apt to be short 
 lived. If the tissue of our joy is to last, 
 some threads of sadness must be woven into 
 it. The optimism that underlies all true 
 poetry is compounded of joy in the actual 
 and faith in the ideal ; but, as the ideal is ever 
 tending to disparage the actual, there is always 
 something of spiritual revolt, something of noble 
 discontent in the poet s heart. His function is to 
 find delight in the actual on account of the ideal 
 beauty that glows through it, and at the same 
 time to protest, in the name of the ideal beauty 
 which has not yet revealed itself, against what 
 ever claims to authority and finality the actual 
 order of things may seem to advance. But 
 Whitman s fervent belief in universal equality 
 forbids him to draw distinctions in Nature, and 
 
 40 
 
the flood of his joy must flow impartially round 
 every existent thing. 
 
 There is however one fatal drawback to 
 this all-embracing optimism. The heart that 
 finds joy in everything is in imminent peril of 
 finding joy in nothing. If all things are equally 
 wonderful and glorious, is there any reason why 
 we should call anything wonderful or glorious ? 
 These words suggest excellence, pre-eminence, 
 supremacy ; if this is not their meaning they 
 are wholly meaningless. In a world in which 
 there is " not a single imperfection," the primary 
 distinction between good and evil inevitably 
 vanishes. Whitman sees this clearly enough, 
 and does not shrink from stating it. " Good or 
 evil," he exclaims, " I do not question you I 
 love all I do not condemn anything." " What 
 is called good is perfect, and what is called evil 
 is just as perfect." " I make the poem of evil 
 also, I commemorate that part also, I am myself 
 just as much evil as good, and my nation is 
 and I say there is in fact no evil." But if good 
 and evil are interchangeable terms, if evil 
 equally with good is " perfect," it is surely 
 immaterial which term we apply to things. One 
 whose temperament is joyous will call the 
 whole world good ; one whose temperament 
 is gloomy will call the whole world evil ; 
 and the optimism of the former is not a whit 
 
more reasonable than the pessimism of the 
 latter. 
 
 The truth is that such words as good and 
 evil are correlative terms, each of which postu 
 lates the other, and has no meaning apart from 
 it. To say that everything is good is exactly 
 the same as to say that everything is evil. To 
 say that everything is beautiful is exactly the 
 same as to say that everything is ugly. If 
 Caesar Borgia is as good as St. Francis of 
 Assisi, it is an insult to St. Francis to revere 
 his goodness. If Thersites is as beautiful as 
 Adonis, it is an insult to Adonis to admire his 
 beauty. The doctrine of equality would speedily 
 reduce any community that tried to practise it 
 to a state of chaos. It would do the same to 
 the Universe. Organisation is of the essence 
 of life ; and organisation implies subordination 
 of means to ends, and of parts (through an in 
 finite gradation of means and ends) to the central 
 purpose of the whole. Evolution has been de 
 fined as a movement " from loose incoherent 
 homogeneity to close coherent heterogeneity," 
 in ether words, from an infinity of similars and 
 equals to an organic whole. The idea of uni 
 versal equality makes at last for pure atomism. 
 (I am assuming that atoms are all similar and 
 equal ; but I am told that even they repudiate 
 the doctrine of universal equality.) Serious 
 
criticism of such a doctrine is out of place. Our 
 author is playing fast and loose with language ; 
 in other words he is deliberately ignoring the 
 laws and properties of the material that he uses. 
 Behind the wild and bewildering word-jugglery 
 in which he indulges we see one thing and one 
 only, namely that his optimism is vainly strug 
 gling to bring itself into harmony with his faith 
 in equality. 
 
 The end of this struggle is, I repeat, chaos. 
 Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, pleasure 
 and pain, joy and sorrow, play the part in the 
 world of human life or (to use a word which will 
 cover both outward and inward Nature) in the 
 Cosmos, which light and darkness, with all the 
 gradations of colour, play in the material uni 
 verse. Imagine an outward world in which 
 light were the same as darkness, and you get 
 some idea of what the Cosmos would be like if 
 good and evil were interchangeable terms. The 
 antitheses of soul and body, of spirit and matter, 
 are of course as unreal in Whitman s eyes as 
 that of good and evil. The soul is the body. 
 " Behold the body includes and is the main 
 meaning^ the main concern, and includes and is 
 the soul." The spiritual is the material. " The 
 poems of materials " are " the most spiritual 
 poems." The universe is being uncreated, dis 
 integrated before our very eyes. Well may 
 
 43 
 
Whitman sigh " for a world primal again." He 
 is doing his best to realise his desire. And 
 well may another poet remind us that 
 
 " It takes the ideal to blow a hair s breadth off 
 The dust of the actual." 
 
 Nature is either a chaos or an organic whole. 
 If it is an organic whole, there must needs be 
 something in it which is both central and su 
 preme, some paramount end to which all its 
 parts (in their infinite gradation and complexity) 
 are subordinated, and for the sake of which they 
 live and work. Withdraw the conception of 
 what is central and supreme, of what claims our 
 reverence, our devotion, and our desire, with 
 draw the master thread of the ideal, and the 
 fabric of Nature unweaves itself with startling 
 rapidity, and the Cosmos transforms itself into 
 a Chaos. 
 
 It is by cancelling the category of the beau 
 tiful that Whitman s political bias does most 
 harm both to his poetry and to his philosophy. 
 In a world in which every detail is divinely 
 beautiful there can be no such thing as beauty. 
 Whitman s optimistic belief that the world is 
 beautiful is one with which we can all sympa 
 thise. Faith in the intrinsic loveliness of Nature 
 is indeed one of the strongest and surest sources 
 of poetic inspiration. But this faith is the out- 
 
 44 
 
come of prophetic hope as well as of actual 
 experience. One element in it (and that the 
 most essential) is the poet s undying conviction 
 that the real loveliness of Nature has not un 
 veiled itself to him, and never will. If he should 
 ever come to believe that what he saw and felt 
 was the whole of Nature s beauty, the light that 
 gladdens him would be eclipsed, and the joy 
 that inspires him would be changed to despair. 
 In his heart of hearts, in the depths of his buried 
 life, Whitman knows this better than most of us ; 
 but the despotism of the doctrine of equality 
 compels him to ascribe to each detail of Nature 
 the divine attributes of the totality of things, 
 and therefore to see the perfection of beauty in 
 each material thing. Had he been less of a 
 thinker and more of an artist, he would have 
 stopped short of this impossible conclusion. 
 But if we may say, as perhaps we may, that in 
 every poetic nature there are two principal ele 
 ments, the prophetic and the artistic, we must, 
 I think, admit that in Whitman the prophet (or 
 emotional thinker) completely overshadows the 
 artist. Not that his heart is dead, or even 
 .callous, to the influence of beauty. Far from it. 
 His sensitive and sympathetic nature is keenly 
 alive to the profound and subtle charms of out 
 ward Nature ; and whenever his emotions are 
 so strongly quickened by what he sees and hears 
 
 45 
 
as to be able to swamp his self-consciousness, 
 he shows himself to be a word-painter (in the 
 larger sense of the word) of extraordinary power 
 and skill. But he has neither the patience nor 
 the self-forgetfulness of the true artist. His re 
 action on his experiences is, as a rule, immediate 
 and intentional. The true artist is inexhaustibly 
 receptive, but also inexhaustibly patient. He 
 is well content that the feelings which his expe 
 riences generate should go through a period, 
 perhaps a long period, of spiritual gestation. 
 He takes for granted that they know their own 
 ideal worth far better than he does, or rather 
 that there is some one master feeling among 
 them the feeling after ideal beauty which 
 knows the respective values of all the rest, and 
 which may therefore be trusted to sift and group 
 them until it has given artistic form to such 
 among them as really deserve artistic treat 
 ment. On one point he is clear. He will not 
 reproduce his experiences, be their period of 
 gestation short or long, until by some secret 
 process (a process which belongs to the organic 
 chemistry of the soul) they have begun to as 
 sume a beautiful form. Then the more con 
 scious side of his spirit will act as their midwife 
 and help to bring them to the birth. A vividly 
 self-conscious nature, like Whitman s, is, as a 
 rule, incapable of this masterly inactivity, this 
 
far-seeing self-restraint. He must needs take 
 the control of his feelings, and the consequent 
 reproduction of his experiences, into his own 
 hands, the result being that the Muse, the spirit 
 of beauty, deserts him when he needs her most. 
 For example. There is nothing in Nature 
 more beautiful (when it happens to be beautiful) 
 than the human form, for in it the veil that 
 hides the " soul of things " is thinnest and most 
 luminous ; but just because it is supremely 
 beautiful, and because unity the unity that 
 spirit confers on all that it animates is of its 
 essence, the great masters have always been 
 extremely reticent in their description of human 
 beauty, and have always scrupulously abstained 
 from enumerating its details. A profoundly 
 artistic instinct has made them follow Lessing s 
 wise advice. " Poets, paint for us the pleasure, 
 the inclination, the love, the rapture, which 
 beauty causes, and you have painted beauty 
 itself! " They have felt that the best, the only 
 way, to paint human beauty is to make the 
 reader enter sympathetically into the feeling 
 that beauty kindles, love. But when Whitman 
 wishes to communicate to us his poetic delight 
 in the human form, he must needs give us a 
 long list of the component parts, outward and 
 inward, of the human frame. Here are some 
 of them. 
 
 47 
 
* Strong shoulders, manly beard , scapulas, hind-shoulders, 
 and the ample side-round of the chest, 
 
 Upper arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm- 
 sinews, arm-bones, 
 
 Wrist and wrist -joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, 
 forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails, 
 
 Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast 
 bone, breast-side," (&c. &c.) 
 
 This is not poetry, but elementary anatomy. 
 An anatomist who knew his business could give 
 us an equally artistic and much more exhaus 
 tive list. What would be thought of the painter 
 who, instead of depicting the human body in 
 the beauty of its spiritual unity, instead of 
 making us forget all about its parts and think 
 only of the living whole, inflicted upon us, in a 
 series of sketches, the contents of a medical (or 
 anatomical) museum ? 
 
 There is no spontaneous overflow of emotion 
 in these wearisome catalogues. They are deli 
 berately drawn up in obedience to a quasi- 
 philosophical theory. As Whitman sees the 
 whole of Humanity in each individual man, so 
 he sees the whole of Nature in each individual 
 thing ; and he seriously believes that in crowd 
 ing his pages with lists of material things he is 
 representing Reality in all its splendour and 
 beauty. The form of his poetry has to adapt 
 itself to this conception of Nature and of Art. I 
 have elsewhere pointed out that if he is to give 
 
 48 
 
utterance to all the feelings that reveal them 
 selves in the fierce light of his extreme self- 
 consciousness, if he is to pour them all out as he 
 feels or seems to feel them, he must free himself 
 from the trammels of rhyme and metre. There 
 is another reason, as we can now see, why he 
 should discard all conventional restrictions. If 
 poetry is to be used for purposes which are 
 frankly, arid even grossly, prosaic, its outward 
 form must be able and ready to sink, at a 
 moment s notice, to the level of ordinary prose. 
 Whitman s " recitative " admirably fulfils this 
 requirement. At its best it is singularly 
 impressive. There are certain inexpressible 
 feelings large, stormy, dreamy feelings that 
 can never quite come to the birth which it 
 expresses (if I may be allowed the paradox) 
 with marvellous power and effect. For this 
 particular purpose it has no rival. Indeed, after 
 reading some of Whitman s inspired passages, I 
 feel for the moment as if all forms of metrical 
 verse were by comparison cold, tame, and formal. 
 But there is no other medium of expression in 
 which the transition from poetry to prose is so 
 rapidly or so easily made. Sometimes we find 
 ourselves in the middle of plain, inoffensive 
 prose without quite knowing how we got there. 
 Sometimes there is a sudden descent from lofty 
 heights to ignominious depths. Sometimes a 
 
 49 
 
momentary plunge into the commonplace or the 
 grotesque mars the movement of an otherwise 
 beautiful passage. But through all its ups and 
 downs the form of Whitman s poetry suits 
 itself admirably to the matter or rather to the 
 spirit. The want of harmony and rhythm is 
 quite as much inward as outward. A chaotic 
 philosophy a philosophy which does its best to 
 give back to the "void and formless Infinite" 
 all that Time has won from it is fitly mirrored 
 in a formless outward form.* 
 
 What developments would Whitman s 
 philosophy undergo if its influence were to 
 make itself widely felt ? In other words, to 
 what practical conclusions is it likely to lead us ? 
 I do not know what place Whitman holds in 
 the estimation of his fellow-countrymen, t In 
 
 * Whitman is well aware that the form of his poetry 
 is formless. See " Spirit that form d this scene " p. 89. 
 of this volume. 
 
 I I am told that Whitman, like other prophets, has 
 little or no honour in his own country. As he has offered 
 his fellow-countrymen the sweet incense of sincere but 
 extravagant flattery, one wonders at first why they have 
 refused to accept him. But perhaps it is the very 
 extravagance of his flattery that has hardened their 
 hearts against him. He is never weary of telling them 
 that their social and political condition is potentially, if 
 not actually, perfect ; and it may well be that some 
 
this country his audience, though small, is select; 
 but his admirers are for the most part men who 
 either take a semi-dilettantist interest in the 
 originality of his thought and the eccentricities 
 of his style or are genuinely captivated by his 
 passionate sympathy with his fellow men and 
 with outward Nature. Popular he certainly is 
 not, and is not likely to become. But the circle 
 of his influence might conceivably widen as time 
 went on ; and it is therefore well to consider 
 to what extent and in what directions his con 
 ceptions are calculated to affect the spiritual 
 development of Humanity. 
 
 Whitman glorified and deified the average 
 man. Did he ever ask himself what the aver 
 age man would make of his poetry ? He teaches 
 the average man that he is as good as God, 
 and therefore a fortiori as good as the best and 
 greatest of his fellow men. He forbids him to 
 look upward. He warns him against humility 
 and all the feelings that are in any degree akin 
 to it, obedience, reverence, adoration, awe. 
 Now every man instinctively loves himself, and 
 
 deep-seated instinct of spiritual self-preservation, some 
 secret resolve to keep open at all costs their communica 
 tions with their ideal, has forbidden them to lay this too 
 flattering unction to their souls, and has induced them to 
 reject the poet (in spite of the genuineness of his poetry) 
 who has ministered so prodigally to their self-esteem, 
 
 51 E 2 
 
every man instinctively desires to be worthy of 
 his own self-love ; but not every man desires to 
 make himself worthy of his self-love. For the 
 real object of self-love is the true or ideal self; 
 and it is only by a life of self-development 
 and self-expansion that this higher self can be 
 found. To lead such a life (with all the 
 toil and self-sacrifice which it involves) makes 
 a demand upon us which few are ready to 
 meet ; and so the average man spends his 
 days in trying to cheat himself into the be 
 lief that his average self is worthy of his 
 self-love.* So long as this process of self- 
 deception is incomplete so long as some secret 
 uneasiness, some feeling of discontent with self, 
 some power of self-criticism, remains there is 
 hope for the man ; but when the love which 
 belongs to his ideal self has been wholly and 
 finally transferred to the average self, the 
 spiritual growth of the man has been arrested 
 and his soul has begun to die. That being so, 
 the worst service that can be rendered to any 
 man is to persuade him that he is actually divine. 
 What kind of a self is it that Whitman 
 invites us to deify? Is it the average self, or 
 is it something even lower than this? The 
 
 * Hence his undue regard for the judgment of his 
 fellow men, whose good opinion he is all too ready to 
 accept as a guarantee of his own intrinsic worth. 
 
doctrine of universal equality abases Man exactly 
 as much as it exalts him ; for if it raises him to 
 the level of God, it also lowers him to the level 
 of the animals. As the most animal of men is, 
 presumably, on a level with the most spiritual, 
 it is clear that animality as such is in no way 
 inferior to humanity as such. Far from shrink 
 ing from this paradoxical conclusion, Whitman 
 accepts it and even goes beyond it. The 
 animals are to be preferred to jnen in that they 
 have no sense either of imperfection or of shame. 
 
 " They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 
 They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their 
 
 sins, 
 They do not make me sick discussing their duty to 
 
 God." * 
 
 * It will be said that such passages as this embody 
 a reaction from the extreme of self-abasement, and a 
 protest against hypocrisy and cant. No doubt they do ; 
 but the protest is overdone, and the reaction goes too far. 
 When a poet becomes polemical, he exposes himself to 
 serious criticism ; and when he flagrantly overstates his 
 case and then adopts his overstatement as his gospel, 
 it is but reasonable that his doctrines should be dealt 
 with on their own merits and without regard to their 
 antecedents. If it is a mistake to tell men that they are 
 all " miserable sinners," it is not less of a mistake to tell 
 them that they are all " incredible Gods." Would it not 
 be nearer the truth to say, with Browning, that each of 
 us is " a God, though in the germ " ? 
 
 53 
 
They "never once skulk or find themselves 
 indecent." Herodotus tells of certain barbarous 
 tribes who "like the beasts" were entirely des 
 titute of shame. (//,/ tv TOVTCOV rcuv dv0p(t)Tra)V ewai 
 /A<f>avea [X^yerat] Kardirep Toicri TrpojBaToio-i,.) The 
 words "like the beasts" are, as he uses them, 
 expressive of extreme degradation. In Whit 
 man s mouth they would, I imagine, express 
 sympathetic approval. The Massagetae were 
 certainly free from the "meanness" of "skulk 
 ing and finding themselves indecent," and they 
 seem to have been as " heroically nude " in their 
 habits as Whitman himself was in his thought 
 and speech. But whatever Whitman might 
 have thought of the Massagetae, it is clear that 
 he admired the animals on account of their 
 Massage tsean propensities ; and the " average 
 man," who can scarcely be expected to see the 
 deeper meaning of his master s poetry, may well 
 be pardoned if, after listening to his laudation 
 of the animals and of all that is animal in human 
 nature, he interprets his message to Mankind 
 as a proclamation that the life of free, healthy 
 animality is the true life of man. Whitman s 
 substitution of impulse for duty of the fitful 
 gusts of Nature s breath for the steady pressure 
 of her higher life would naturally point to the 
 same conclusion. So would his degradation of 
 love the soul-transfiguring passion of love to 
 
 54 
 
comradeship on the one hand and to animal 
 desire on the other. 
 
 But the life of free, healthy animality would 
 content the average man only so long as he 
 remained a free, healthy animal. When those 
 days were over he would begin to look about 
 him for other sources of happiness. And though 
 he had been taught that all men are equal and 
 that he was as good as the best of men, he could 
 not fail to see (the facts would be too strong for 
 any theory to prevail against them) that in one 
 respect at least men are hopelessly unequal, 
 namely in the distribution of this world s goods. 
 He could not fail to see that in democratic 
 societies, which have abandoned other standards 
 of worth, the power of wealth is greater than 
 elsewhere ; and the very fact that his own mind 
 had been freed from the taint of feudalism, with 
 its prejudices in favour of birth, position, tradi 
 tion, education, honour and other such " idols," 
 would make him the more susceptible of the 
 attractive influence of " great possessions," and 
 the more ready to pay homage to financial and 
 commercial success. The pursuit of wealth 
 might engross his mind for a time ; but sooner 
 or later, as the shadows lengthened, he would 
 find himself meditating half-unconsciously on 
 " great matters " which he had hitherto been 
 content to ignore, on the meaning of existence, 
 
 55 
 
on the problem of reality, on the destiny of the 
 soul. When that day came, what guidance 
 would he get from his teacher? He would 
 learn that " the body is the main concern, that 
 it includes and is the soul," that material things 
 are the real things of the spirit, that material 
 occupations (hog-slaughtering and the like) 
 are " realities " and "poems ;" and though these 
 doctrines might seem to justify both his early 
 life of animality and his subsequent pursuit of 
 wealth,* they would infallibly lead him the 
 average man to one dark conclusion, namely 
 that death is the end of life. Nor would he be 
 able to assimilate the consolation which Whit 
 man s poetry, as distinguished from his philo 
 sophy, offers him so freely. He would see 
 nothing in Whitman s exultant joy but the over 
 flow of animal spirits ; and animal spirits, as he 
 knows from experience, are largely dependent 
 on youth and health. As for Whitman s faith 
 in death as the larger life, and in the soul as the 
 subjective side of the Universe, these mystical 
 conceptions would not only be beyond his com- 
 
 * For which (let me hasten to add) Whitman would 
 have been the first to despise him. The material, 
 objective side of the pursuit of wealth might well have 
 been glorified by the author of "A Song for Occupa 
 tions ; " but the " mania of owning things " is one with 
 which he had no sympathy. 
 
 56 
 
prehension, but, so far as he could comprehend 
 them, they would seem to him incompatible with 
 the general tenour of his master s teaching. I 
 doubt if Whitman will ever become a popular 
 or even a semi-popular author ; but if his 
 influence were to diffuse itself widely, if the 
 average man were to accept so much of his 
 philosophy as the average man is able to under 
 stand, I think that a great wave of materialism, 
 with all that materialism implies sensuality, 
 Mammon-worship, selfishness, hardness, vul 
 garity, cynicism, pessimism would sweep over 
 human life. 
 
 But Whitman s own life will never be sub 
 merged by that soul-destroying wave. No 
 deluge can reach the sunlit heights of his 
 soaring joy. For his joy (the joy of his inmost 
 soul, not the impossible optimism which his 
 political theories postulate) is joy in the fullest 
 sense of that sacred word : it is compounded of 
 hope and faith as well as of delight in the actual ; 
 and hope and faith will come to his rescue when 
 delight, pure and simple, fails him. Sooner or 
 later, delight, pure and simple, will fail him. 
 Whitman, the apostle of universal equality, may 
 flatter himself that all things are equally perfect 
 and all men equally divine ; but Whitman, the 
 poet the seer, the discerner of reality knows 
 
 57 
 
well enough that his other self is imagining a 
 vain thing. For Whitman, like everyone else, 
 is what he is, not what he professes to be, not 
 even what he believes himself to be. Deep 
 below the surface movement of his thought 
 flows the real current of his poetic life, 
 
 " The central stream of what he feels indeed." 
 
 He sees he cannot fail to see that there is 
 wickedness and misery and injustice in human 
 life ; and, now and again, breaking through his 
 very raptures, 
 
 " There sobs I know not what ground-tone 
 Of human agony." 
 
 (It is because, in defiance of his theories, this 
 thread of sadness is woven into its tissue, that 
 the joy of his inmost soul is imperishable). 
 Here is one significant passage 
 
 "I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, 
 
 and upon all oppression and shame, 
 I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish 
 
 with themselves, remorseful after deeds dope, 
 I see in low life the mother misused by her children, 
 
 dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate, 
 I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the 
 
 treacherous seducer of young women, 
 I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love 
 
 attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth, 
 I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see 
 
 martyrs and prisoners, 
 
 58 
 
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting 
 
 lots who shall be kill d to preserve the lives of 
 
 the rest, 
 I observe the slights and degradations cast by arro 
 
 gant persons upon labourers, the poor, and upon 
 
 negroes, and the like ; 
 All these all the meanness and agony without end I 
 
 sitting look out upon, 
 See, hear, and am silent." 
 
 He is silent ; but he will speak at last. In 
 another poem he passes in review a succession 
 of human faces. Some of these are miserable 
 and repulsive ; but he tells them .that they can 
 not "trick" him, that he sees what is behind 
 their "haggard and mean disguises." 
 
 " I saw the face of the most smear d and slobbering 
 
 idiot they had at the asylum, 
 
 And I knew for my consolation what they knew not, 
 I knew of the agents that emptied and broke my 
 
 brother, 
 The same wait to clear the rubbish from the fallen 
 
 tenement, 
 
 And I shall look again in a score or two of ages, 
 And I shall meet the real landlord, perfect and un- 
 
 harm d, every inch as good as myself." 
 
 Yet he knows full well that these unhappy faces 
 will never change for the better on this side of 
 the grave. What then is the solution of this 
 terrible problem ? If these evil faces are ever 
 
 59 
 
to be redeemed, their redemption must be 
 effected by the divine grace of Death. 
 
 Here we come to the " sovereign dogma " 
 of Whitman s deeper philosophy, the cardinal 
 faith on which the joy of his heart is hinged. 
 Uncompromising realist that he is, he sees 
 clearly enough that death is one of Nature s 
 central facts, a fact too which seems to give 
 the lie to his optimism, to bar its further pro 
 gress, to turn its triumphant advance into a 
 disastrous retreat. If the joy of his heart is to 
 lead him to final victory, he must recognise that 
 death is the key to Nature s fortress, that as such 
 it can neither be masked nor outflanked, and 
 that if he is not to retire from it in confusion he 
 must storm its terrible stronghold. And storm 
 it he does with all the passionate energy of his 
 vehement nature. He is not content to ac 
 quiesce in death, to speculate about it, to hope 
 the best from it. He sees the futility of half- 
 measures. He must " rush " the heights of 
 death with the force and elan of unconquerable 
 joy. He must find a deeper joyjn death_t^an 
 in anything else in Nature. He. must " glorify 
 it.aboy_e_all ;" he must " chant for it a chant of 
 fullest welcome." These chants of welcome 
 abound in his poems. He offers praise for " the 
 fathomless universe, for life and joy, for love," 
 but threefold praise 
 
 60 
 
" For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death." 
 He joyously sings the dead, 
 
 " Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, 
 Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death." 
 
 Death is the " purport of all life," the " opener 
 and usherer to the heavenly mansion." " Life 
 cannot exhibit all " to him : he must wait for 
 the " exquisite transition," for the " superb 
 vistas" of death. Life does not provide for 
 all, but " Heavenly Death provides for all." 
 What," he asks, "is finally beautiful except 
 love and death ? " 
 
 So sure, so steadfast, so triumphant is his 
 faith in the " strong deliveress," that whatever 
 is symbolical of her has a peculiar fascination 
 for him. His sympathy with outward Nature 
 in all her moods and aspects is extraordinarily 
 subtle, deep, and strong. But there is one 
 thing in her life with which he seems to have a 
 two-fold measure of sympathy, a sympathy 
 which gives him insight into its very soul, just 
 as love gives us insight into the soul of a friend. 
 That one thing is the sea. The sea, vast, ubi 
 quitous, all-embracing, unfathomable, myste 
 rious the sea with its loneliness, its dumbness, 
 its might, its majesty, its profound repose is 
 for him the very symbol (the very embodiment, 
 
 6r 
 
one might almost say) of death ; and his love of 
 the sea is the very counterpart of his love of 
 death. 
 
 What makes his attitude towards death the 
 more significant is the fact that he had bent 
 over more death beds than any man perhaps has 
 ever done. While ministering to the sick and 
 wounded soldiers of the Federal and Confede 
 rate armies, he saw many thousands of souls 
 pass behind the veil of death ; and I needs must 
 think that for his intensely sensitive and sym 
 pathetic nature the veil became strangely lumi 
 nous, so that his love of death was in some sort 
 the outcome of an actual experience, shadowy 
 indeed and intangible, but transcendently real. 
 It sometimes happens that the loss of a dear 
 friend generates in one s breast an entirely new 
 feeling which, while it lasts, cancels and even 
 laughs to scorn one s instinctive fear of death ; 
 and it is not unreasonable to suppose that in 
 Whitman s case the loss of thousands of dear 
 friends (for every wounded soldier was his be 
 loved comrade) gave both permanence and 
 intensity to this emancipative feeling, which for 
 most of us (if experienced at all) is transient 
 and all too easily effaced. 
 
 The philosophy that takes possession of 
 Whitman s mind when his political prejudices 
 are swamped by the spontaneous overflow of 
 
 62 
 
his profounder emotions, is as true as it is deep. 
 Of the weaving of philosophical systems there 
 is no end, but in point of fact there are only 
 three philosophies, optimism, pessimism, and 
 indifference. The optimist the man who has 
 made up his mind that light, not darkness, is at 
 the heart of Nature ought always to have the 
 courage of his opinions, for if he is half-hearted 
 he breaks the rules of his own game. What 
 ever theories, whatever beliefs, whatever appa 
 rent experiences are at war with his paramount 
 conviction, he will, if he is wise, either repudiate 
 or ignore. Whitman, whose whole nature is 
 vehement and intense, is, as might be expected, 
 the most thoroughgoing of optimists. He sees, 
 as we all see, that misery and injustice dis 
 figure, or seem to disfigure, the fair face of 
 Nature. He feels, as we all feel, that death 
 casts, or seems to cast, a dark and ever- 
 deepening shadow on human life. These feel 
 ings are the stock-in-trade of every pessimist. 
 Whitman cancels both of them at one stroke by 
 his bold assumption that death, instead of being 
 the crowning evil of existence, that death itself 
 is the healer of all wounds, the redresser of all 
 injustices, the righter of all wrongs. Here is 
 one of many passages in which he expresses 
 this conviction : 
 
 " I do not doubt that the passionately- wept deaths of 
 
 63 
 
young men are provided for, and that the deaths 
 of young women and the deaths of little children 
 are provided for, . . . 
 
 I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the 
 horrors of them, no matter whose wife, child, hus 
 band, father, lover, has gone down, are provided 
 for, to the minutest points, . . . 
 
 I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and 
 Space, but I believe Heavenly Death provides 
 for all." 
 
 This assumption is fraught with momen 
 tous consequences. The soul that is " included 
 in the body " necessarily dies in the hour of 
 death ; and the soul that dies in the hour of 
 death is (obviously) a mere function of the 
 body, in other words, as soul it is non-existent. 
 But the soul that escapes into the larger world 
 of death assimilates itself to its new environ 
 ment and expands its being up to the illimitable 
 limits of existence. The language that Whitman 
 uses about the soul is certainly perplexing and 
 self-contradictory ; but whenever the deeper 
 philosophy of his heart asserts itself, his psycho 
 logy undergoes a singular change. Instead of 
 identifying the soul with the body, he sends it 
 abroad till it becomes conterminous with the 
 Universe. The fact that he is ever trying to 
 identify himself with all existent things, shows 
 that the soul, as he conceives of it, far from 
 being " included " in the body or anything else 
 is well able to 
 
" Centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell." 
 
 In one poem indeed the beautiful and mystical 
 "Passage to India" he speaks of the soul as 
 creative, in the fullest sense of the word. 
 
 Thou transcendent, 
 Nameless, the fibre and the breath, 
 
 Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre 
 of them, 
 
 Thou pulse thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, 
 That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, 
 Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space, 
 How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how 
 speak, if, out of myself, 
 
 1 could not launch, to those, superior universes ? 
 
 Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, 
 
 At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, 
 
 But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me, 
 
 And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, 
 
 Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, 
 
 And fillest, swellest full the Vastnesses of Space. 
 
 As Whitman s conception of the soul 
 widens, his attitude towards the actual and the 
 ideal undergoes a corresponding change. The 
 infinite possibilities of death begin to disparage 
 the actualities of life. The latter are still 
 conceived of as wonderful and glorious ; but 
 Whitman feels that there are wonders beyond 
 their wonder and glories beyond their glory ; 
 
 6 5 F 
 

 and a quenchless thirst for the ideal begins to 
 take possession of his soul. Not that he will 
 ever look above himself, or sink into himself, in 
 his quest of this unattainable goal. Reverence 
 is and always will be entirely foreign to his 
 temperament ; and the idea of finding himself 
 by losing himself, of pruning his nature in order 
 that it may bear fruit more abundantly, is one 
 which he will never entertain. But with these 
 limitations (for limitations they certainly are) he 
 is one of the most audacious and adventurous 
 of idealists. To be in love with death is to be 
 in love with all the mystery and infinitude of 
 Nature ; and such a love both stimulates a 
 man s desires and hopes, and provides them 
 with a boundless field for the play of their 
 energies. Death, for Whitman, is the be 
 ginning of an endless voyage. While this life 
 lasts we are in harbour preparing for our 
 journey. When death comes we weigh anchor 
 and set sail. 
 
 " Joy, shipmate, joy ! 
 (Pleas d to my soul at death I cry,) 
 Our life is closed, our life begins, 
 The long, long anchorage we leave, 
 The ship is clear at last, she leaps ! 
 She swiftly courses from the shore, 
 Joy, shipmate, joy." 
 
 The sea is as mysterious as it is boundless, and 
 
 66 
 
the course of the ship is uncertain ; but her 
 goings are in safe hands, and the harbour that 
 she makes for is ideal good. 
 
 " They go ! They go ! I know that they go, but I know 
 
 not where they go, 
 
 But I know that they go toward the best toward 
 something great." 
 
 The harbour will never be reached. The goal 
 is unattainable. Whitman, the politician, may 
 regard Democracy as the final solution of the 
 political problem, and the America of to-day as 
 the final end of existence ; but Whitman, the 
 poet, knows that failure is the very soul of 
 success. 
 
 " This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look d at 
 
 the crowded heaven, 
 And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of 
 
 those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in 
 
 them, shall we be fill d and satisfied then ? 
 And my spirit said, No, we but level that lift to pass and 
 
 continue beyond" 
 
 11 Have the past struggles succeeded ? 
 
 What has succeeded ? yourself ? your nation ? Nature ? 
 
 Now understand me well it is provided in the essence 
 of things that from any fruition of success, no matter 
 what, shall come forth something to make a greater 
 struggle necessary." 
 
 When we read such words as these, we begin 
 to think that the poet has emancipated himself 
 
 67 F 2 
 
from the false control of the politician. But no : 
 the emancipation will never be complete. Whit 
 man s political theories are the outcome of 
 earnest conviction, and they will control and 
 direct the very efforts that his deeper nature 
 makes to free itself from their influence. Just 
 as he tries to find his soul by making it fill all 
 the spaces and all the ages, rather than by 
 making it forget its lower self and burn upward 
 towards its own ideal purity, so his movement 
 towards " the best " is always outward and 
 onward, never inward and upward. His false 
 assumption that all the strata of existence are 
 equally divine and glorious discountenances, as 
 a theory, the very idealism which, as an emotion, 
 as a sentiment of unconquerable joy, it is ever 
 tending to generate ; for if the actual is really 
 perfect, why should we ever weigh anchor and 
 quit its harbour ? Lover of death that Whitman 
 is, he ought to know that death is the chief 
 instrument of Nature s progressive regenera 
 tion ; that the "soul of things " is re-incarnated 
 again and again ; that life is ever preparing the 
 way for death, and death for birth into a purer 
 ether and a wider world. The truth is (but it is 
 a truth which Whitman will never consciously 
 learn) that reverence and humility, far from 
 being repugnant to Nature, are the very breath 
 of her higher life ; that it is because she is 
 
 68 
 
always discontented with herself, and alway 
 looking upward, that she is able to work out he 
 salvation by rising continuously 
 
 " On stepping stones 
 Of her dead selves to higher things." 
 
 Whitman tries hard to persuade himself that 
 there are no distinctions in Nature, that all 
 things are equally perfect and absolutely divine ; 
 but his heart is wiser than his mind, and the 
 optimism which found its earlier expression in 
 the fatal conception of universal equality, saves 
 itself from premature extinction by changing, in 
 defiance of his theories, into the desire for and 
 pursuit of ideal good. And this desire and this 
 pursuit mean, if they have any meaning, that 
 there are distinctions in Nature; that contrast, 
 not to say conflict, is the law of her being; that, 
 far from being everywhere and at all times 
 perfect, she is everywhere and at all times pass 
 ing through phases of change and stages of 
 development which are incompatible with per 
 fection, lifting herself above herself, disowning 
 her own earlier efforts, forgetting the things 
 that are behind, transforming herself in fine 
 through every fibre of her existence from 
 chaos to order, from discord to harmony, from 
 the lower and narrower to the higher and wider 
 life. 
 
 69 
 
While we protest against Whitman s fatal 
 deification of the actual, let us be thankful that 
 the joy of his heart which caused that premature 
 outburst of exultation was strong enough to 
 break loose from the theories in which he strove 
 to imprison it and to lead him, unknown to 
 himself, to the conception of infinite progress 
 towards an unattainable goal. Ideal perfection, 
 ideal beauty, ideal good, it matters little by 
 which name we call that goal so long as we 
 realise that it is in its very essence unattainable; 
 that every achievement, so far as it is an 
 achievement, has missed its mark ; that the 
 path of progress is the path of continuous 
 failure ; but that failure, if only (in all humility] 
 we will accept it as such, is the prelude to 
 triumphant success. Let us be thankful that 
 Whitman has inflamed our hearts (as in his I 
 inspired moods he has surely done) with some 
 thing of his own deep-seated desire for the ideal, 
 that he has awakened in us a restless longing 
 " to escape from our anchorage and drive free." 
 For this service the greatest that man can 
 render to man we may well forget the short 
 comings of the creed that he professed ; and 
 when he calls to us to heave anchor and start 
 on our great voyage, we may well answer him 
 with his own cry of hope and triumph, "Joy, 
 shipmate, joy." The very shortcomings of his 
 
 70 
 
formal creed the lawlessness and irreverence 
 that threaten at last to unweave the whole tissue 
 of human progress, by freeing us from the 
 despotism of custom and convention, may have 
 helped to beget in us that large discontent, that 
 restlessness after we know not what," which 
 predisposes the soul to daring adventures. In 
 any case the spirit, the inner meaning, of his 
 creed is sublimely grand and true. For the 
 essence of his esoteric teaching is, that the 
 unattainable, the inexpressible " that which 
 eludes this verse and every verse" is the 
 "real of the real." 
 
 " Haply God s riddle it, so vague and yet so certain, 
 The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it, 
 And heaven at last for it." 
 
 Were I to try to sum up in a few words 
 the impression that Whitman s poetry has made 
 upon me, I should say that, consciously and 
 theoretically, he is the poet of democratic 
 equality, and therefore of chaos ; that uncon 
 sciously, and in spite of himself, he is the poet 
 of the ideal, of the 
 
 "one far-off divine event 
 To which the whole Creation moves ; " 
 
 and that along the whole range of his nature 
 he is the poet of joy, and therefore of death. 
 
 / 
 
His personality is intensely aggressive ; and his 
 influence on those whom he attracts is propor 
 tionately strong. Indeed, if once one were 
 drawn entirely within the circle of his attrac 
 tion, there would, I think, be no escape from 
 it. That being so, it is well that one should 
 sometimes feel the counter-attraction of some 
 diametrically opposite influence, and so be kept 
 from quitting the orbit of one s own personal 
 life. Such a counter-attraction I have found in 
 the influence of a book, which is as intense, as 
 single-hearted, and as one-sided as Whitman s 
 poetry, and yet has so little in common with it 
 that it seems to belong to an entirely different 
 world, the Imitation of Christ. 
 
 I have pointed out that a harmonious soul 
 is one which grows both upward and outward, 
 and I have contended that in Whitman s poetry 
 the growth is entirely outward, that he has as 
 it were lost his aspiring " leader," and that, so 
 far as he liberates us from our ordinary selves, 
 he does so by carrying us outside ourselves into 
 the life of outward Nature, and into the social 
 life of Mankind. In the Imitation of Christ 
 the growth of the soul is entirely upward. The 
 ascent of the tree is everything. Not a single 
 branch is put forth but the few that cluster round 
 the " leader " as it struggles upward towards the 
 sky. Of sympathy with outward Nature ; of 
 
 72 
 
the expansion of the soul in the direction of art 
 and poetry, of knowledge and action ; of interest 
 in political, in social, in domestic life, or even of 
 recognition of their lawful claims, there is not a 
 trace. The individualism, the "austere inward 
 ness," of the book is complete. The soul has 
 but one thought, to struggle inward and up- 
 ward, in sublime solitude, towards spiritual per 
 fection. Far from developing the tendencies 
 that make for its outward growth, it sternly 
 represses them. Self-denial the cutting back 
 of every natural instinctTthe stifling of every 
 desire that might conceivably distract the soul 
 from its central purpose is the only way that 
 it will deign to follow to its goal. Humility, or 
 the consciousness of imperfection, is~tKe very 
 breath of its being ; humility, with all that it 
 implies, reverence, adoration, awe. Submission 
 to discipline, to constraint, to self-impose~H~suf- 
 fering ; Patience under affliction ; meek accep 
 tance ofinsult, injury, and degradation ; are 
 its appointed means of grace. WithJove_,(in 
 the human sense of the word), witlTsympafhy, 
 with comradeship, with natural affection, it has 
 no concern. Aspiration hunger and thirst 
 after righteousness is the beginning and end 
 of its desire. Love of the ideal, as embodied 
 in Christ, is its only flame. 
 
 Such a conception of life is as far removed 
 
 73 
 
from Whitman s as it can possibly be. The 
 whole " diameter of being" separates the Imi 
 tation from the Song of Myself. It is true 
 that, just because they are antipodal to one 
 another, the two minds have some striking 
 points of resemblance. Thus both are passion 
 ately in earnest. Both have a strong sense of 
 reality. Both have a deep contempt for " the 
 world." Both are impatient of conventionality, 
 of fashion, of opinion. These, however, are 
 features on which we need not dwell. What it 
 does concern us to notice is, that the two 
 conceptions are vehemently and fundamentally 
 antagonistic to one another, and that both are 
 far removed (perhaps equally far removed) from 
 the true centre of gravity of human life. 
 
 If the tree that has ceased to ascend, and 
 can only grow outward, is, in spite of the 
 immense development of its branches, maimed 
 and misshapen, the same must be said of the 
 tree that has no branches and can do nothing 
 but ascend. In each case the growth is one 
 sided, inharmonious. The balance has been 
 lost. 
 
 Are we to say that the path of health and 
 safety is in a mean between these extremes; 
 that their respective influences should be allowed 
 to cancel one another; that our attitude towards 
 them should be one of colourless neutrality? No; 
 
 74 
 
there is room in our life for both conceptions ; 
 and the soul may safely submit itself to the 
 influence of either, so long as it does not allow 
 itself to be deadened to the influence of the 
 other. What is needed is a larger and pro- 
 founder philosophy which shall reconcile these 
 " fell, incensed opposites " by absorbing them 
 into itself, which shall harmonise sympathy with 
 aspiration, manliness with humility, freedom 
 with duty, delight in the actual with love of the 
 ideal, naturalism with spiritualism, outward with 
 upward growth. Same day or other this higher 
 creed will disclose itself to human thought. 
 Meanwhile, as the soul, as the whole inner life 
 of man, moves forward in quest of ideal truth, 
 it will advance in safety so long as its right 
 flank is guarded by the aspiring inwardness of 
 mediaeval monasticism, its left by the exultant 
 naturalism of modern democracy. For the 
 present these extreme conceptions, so antago 
 nistic and yet so essential to one another, will 
 co-operate at equal distances from the Head- 
 Quarters of our inner life ; but as the envelop 
 ing movement of the soul (round the stronghold 
 of the Ideal) begins to declare itself, they will 
 tend to unite and become one. 
 
 When that happier day comes, the Poet 
 will be the first to welcome and proclaim it. 
 Indeed there is no day in the ideal future to 
 
 75 
 
which his prophetic insight looks forward so 
 eagerly or so hopefully. The very mission of 
 Poetry, as Whitman himself has told us in feli 
 citous words, is to make peace between " out- 
 wardness"and "inwardness, "between "Nature" 
 and the "soul :" 
 
 " When the full-grown poet came, 
 
 Out spake pleased Nature (the round impassive globe, 
 
 with all its shows of day and night) saying, He is 
 
 mint ; 
 But out spake too the Soul of man, proud, jealous, and 
 
 unreconciled, Nay, he is mine alont ; 
 Then the full-grown poet stood between the two, and 
 
 took each by the hand ; 
 And to-day and ever so stands, as blender, uniter, tightly 
 
 holding hands, 
 
 Which he will never release until he reconciles the two, 
 And wholly and joyously blends them." 
 
Selections from Leaves of Grass 
 
PREFACE TO SELECTIONS 
 
 TN compiling this brief anthology, my object 
 has been to induce persons who may have 
 been repelled by Whitmans earlier and more 
 "characteristic" writings, to reconsider their 
 adverse verdict and renew their study of his 
 poetry. The passages that I have strung to 
 gether have been selected for their poetic merits 
 only. I do not pretend that they are " character 
 istic" in the sense which those who regard 
 " Leaves of Grass" as a literary and psycho logical 
 curiosity might attach to that word. But are 
 they the less representative of Whitmans genius 
 because they happen to possess poetic charm ? 
 One s answer to this question will depend on the 
 estimate that one forms of Whitman. It is 
 impossible to study his writings without realising 
 that he has a dual personality. Which self is 
 
 79 
 
the trite Whitman? Is it the inspired poet, 
 the singer of life, of love, of death, of joy, of 
 cosmic sympathy, of the unattainable ideal? Or 
 is it the fervent democrat ; the defiant advocate 
 of equality, "of" animality, "of" heroic nudity ; 
 the deifier of the average and the actual ; the 
 painter of the crude, the gross, the sordid, the 
 grotesque ? This is a problem which each student 
 of Whitman must solve for himself. To me it 
 seems more than probable that the poet, pure and 
 simple, will be remembered and honoured when 
 the socio-political prophet has been forgotten or, 
 if remembered, has fallen into disesteem. And 
 I cannot but think that the most truly_charac- 
 teristic of his writings are those in which insight_ 
 _and imagination have triumphed over_prejudic^ 
 __and theory, with the result that beautifuL 
 thoughts and profound feelings have overflowed^ 
 _into other hearts through the channel of im- 
 passioned speech. 
 
 80 
 
IN CABIN D SHIPS AT SEA. 
 
 IN cabin d ships at sea, 
 
 The boundless blue on every side expanding, 
 
 With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large 
 
 imperious waves, 
 
 Or some lone bark buoy d on the dense marine, 
 Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails, 
 She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of 
 
 day, or under many a star at night, 
 By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of 
 
 the land, be read, 
 In full rapport at last. 
 
 Here are our thoughts, voyagers thoughts, 
 
 Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by 
 
 them be said, 
 The sky overarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our 
 
 feet, 
 
 We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion, 
 The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of 
 
 the bnny world, the liquid-flowing syllables, 
 The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy 
 
 rhythm., 
 
 The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here, 
 And this is ocean s poem* 
 
 8l G 
 
Then falter not O book, fulfil your destiny, 
 
 You not a reminiscence of the land alone, 
 
 You too as a lone bark cleaving the ether, purpos d I 
 
 know not whither, yet ever full of faith, 
 Consort to every ship that sails, sail you ! 
 Bear forth to them folded my love, (dear manners, for 
 
 you I fold it here in every leaf ;) 
 Speed on my book ! spread your white sails my little 
 
 bark athwart the imperious waves, 
 Chant on, sail on, bear o er the boundless blue from me 
 
 to every sea, 
 This song for mariners and all their ships. 
 
 FROM THE " SONG OF MYSELF." 
 
 I am he that walks with the tender and growing night, 
 
 I call to the earth and sea half-held by the night. 
 
 Press close bare-bosom d night press close magnetic 
 
 nourishing night ! 
 
 Night of south winds night of the large few stars ! 
 Still nodding night mad naked summer night. 
 
 Smile O voluptuous cool-breath d earth ! 
 
 Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees ! 
 
 Earth of departed sunset earth of the mountains misty- 
 
 topt ! 
 Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged 
 
 with blue ! 
 
 Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river ! 
 Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer 
 
 for my sake ! 
 
 Far-swooping elbow d earth rich apple-blossom d earth ! 
 Smile, for your lover comes. 
 
 82 
 
Prodigal, you have given me love therefore I to you 
 
 give love ! 
 O unspeakable passionate love. 
 
 OF THE TERRIBLE DOUBT OF 
 APPEARANCES. 
 
 OF the terrible doubt of appearances, 
 
 Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded, 
 
 That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations 
 
 after all, 
 That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful 
 
 fable only, 
 May-be the things I perceive, the animals, plants, men, 
 
 hills, shining and flowing waters, 
 The skies of day and night, colors, densities, forms, 
 
 may-be these are (as doubtless they are) only 
 
 apparitions, and the real something has yet to be 
 
 known, 
 (How often they dart out of themselves as if to confound 
 
 me and mock me ! 
 How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, 
 
 aught of them,) 
 May-be seeming to me what they are (as doubtless they 
 
 indeed but seem) as from my present point of view, 
 
 and might prove (as of course they would) nought 
 
 of what they appear, or nought anyhow, from 
 
 entirely changed points of view ; 
 To me these and the like of these are curiously answer d 
 
 by my lovers, my dear friends, 
 When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long 
 
 while holding me by the hand, 
 When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that 
 
 words and reason hold not, surround us and 
 
 pervade us, 
 
 83 G 2 
 
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom, 
 
 I am silent, I require nothing further, 
 I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of 
 
 identity beyond the grave, 
 But I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied, 
 He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me. 
 
 NOT HEAT FLAMES UP AND CONSUMES. 
 
 NOT heat flames up and consumes, 
 
 Not sea-waves hurry in and out, 
 
 Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, 
 
 bears lightly along white down-balls of myriads of 
 
 seeds, 
 
 Wafted, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may ; 
 Not these, O none of these more than the flames of me, 
 
 consuming, burning for his love whom I love, 
 O none more than I hurrying in and out ; 
 Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give 
 
 up ? O I the same, 
 O nor down-balls nor perfumes, nor the high rain-emitting 
 
 clouds, are borne through the open air, 
 Any more than my soul is borne through the open air, 
 Wafted in all directions, O love, for friendship, for you. 
 
 SOON SHALL THE WINTER S FOIL 
 BE HERE. 
 
 Soon shall the winter s foil be here ; 
 
 Soon shall these icy ligatures unbind and melt A little 
 
 while, 
 And air, soil, wave, suffused, shall be in softness, bloom 
 
 and growth a thousand forms shall rise 
 
From these dead clods and chills as from low burial 
 
 graves. 
 Thine eyes, ears all thy best attributes all that takes 
 
 cognizance of natural beauty, 
 Shall wake and fill. Thou shalt perceive the simple 
 
 shows, the delicate miracles of earth, 
 Dandelions, clover, the emerald grass, the early scents 
 
 and flowers, 
 The arbutus under foot, the willow s yellow-green, the 
 
 blossoming plum and cherry ; 
 With these the robin, lark and thrush, singing their 
 
 songs the flitting bluebird ; 
 For such the scenes the annual play brings on. 
 
 WARBLE FOR LILAC-TIME. 
 
 WARBLE me now for joy of lilac-time, (returning in 
 
 reminiscence,) 
 Sort me O tongue and lips for Nature s sake, souvenirs 
 
 of earliest summer, 
 Gather the welcome signs, (as children with pebbles or 
 
 stringing shells,) 
 Put in April and May, the hylas croaking in the ponds, 
 
 the elastic air, 
 
 Bees, butterflies, the sparrow with its simple notes, 
 Blue-bird and darting swallow, nor forget the high-hole 
 
 flashing his golden wings, 
 
 The tranquil sunny haze, the clinging smoke, the vapor, 
 Shimmer of waters with fish in them, the cerulean above, 
 All that is jocund and sparkling, the brooks running, 
 The maple woods, the crisp February days and the 
 
 sugar-making, 
 
 The robin where he hops, bright-eyed, brown-breasted, 
 With musical clear call at sunrise, and again at sunset, 
 
 85 
 
Or flitting among the trees of the apple-orchard, building 
 
 the nest of his mate, 
 The melted snow of March, the willow sending forth its 
 
 yellow-green sprouts, 
 For spring-time is here ! the summer is here ! and what 
 
 is this in it and from it ? 
 Thou, soul, unloosen d the restlessness after I know 
 
 not what ; 
 
 Come, let us lag here no longer, let us be up and away ! 
 O if one could but fly like a bird ! 
 O to escape, to sail forth as in a ship ! 
 To glide with thee O soul, o er all, in all, as a ship o er 
 
 the waters ; 
 Gathering these hints, the preludes, the blue sky, the 
 
 grass, the morning drops of dew, 
 The lilac-scent, the bushes with dark green heart-shaped 
 
 leaves, 
 Wood-violets, the little delicate pale blossoms called 
 
 innocence, 
 Samples and sorts not for themselves alone, but for their 
 
 atmosphere, 
 
 To grace the bush I love to sing with the birds, 
 A warble for joy of lilac-time, returning in reminiscence. 
 
 O MAGNET-SOUTH. 
 
 O MAGNET-SOUTH ! O glistening perfumed South ! my 
 
 South ! 
 O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love ! good and 
 
 evil ! O all dear to me ! 
 O dear to me my birth-thingsall moving things and 
 
 the trees where I was born the grains, plants, 
 
 rivers, 
 
 86 
 
Dear to me my own slow sluggish rivers where they 
 
 flow, distant, over flats of silvery sands or through 
 
 swamps, 
 Dear to me the Roanoke, the Savannah, the Altamahaw, 
 
 the Pedee, the Tombigbee, the Santee, the Coosa 
 
 and the Sabine, 
 
 pensive, far away wandering, I return with my soul 
 
 to haunt their banks again, 
 
 Again in Florida I float on transparent lakes, I float 
 on the Okeechobee, I cross the hummock-land or 
 through pleasant openings or dense forests, 
 
 1 see the parrots in the woods, I see the papaw-tree and 
 
 the blossoming titi ; 
 
 Again, sailing in my coaster on deck, I coast off Georgia, 
 I coast up the Carolinas, 
 
 I see where the live-oak is growing, I see where the 
 yellow-pine, the scented bay-tree, the lemon and 
 orange, the cypress, the graceful palmetto, 
 
 I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound 
 through an inlet, and dart my vision inland ; 
 
 O the cotton plant ! the growing fields of rice, sugar, 
 hemp ! 
 
 The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with 
 large white flowers, 
 
 The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old 
 woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss, 
 
 The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, 
 (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries 
 his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal d hut ;) 
 
 O the strange fascination of these half-known half- 
 impassable swamps, infested by reptiles, resounding 
 with the bellow of the alligator, the sad noises of 
 the night-owl and the wild-cat, and the whirr of the 
 rattlesnake. 
 
 The mocking-bird, the American mimic, singing all the 
 forenoon, singing through the moon-lit night, 
 
 87 
 
The humming-bird, the wild turkey, the raccoon, the 
 
 opossum ; 
 A Kentucky corn-field, the tall, graceful, long-leav d 
 
 corn, slender, flapping, bright green, with tassels, 
 
 with beautiful ears each well-sheath d in its husk ; 
 O my heart ! O tender and fierce pangs, I can stand 
 
 them not, I will depart ; 
 O to be a Virginian where I grew up ! O to be a 
 
 Carolinian ! 
 O longings irrepressible ! O I will go back to old 
 
 Tennessee and never wander more. 
 
 TO A LOCOMOTIVE IN WINTER. 
 
 THEE for my recitative, 
 
 Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the 
 
 winter-day declining, 
 Thee in thy panoply, thy measur d dual throbbing and 
 
 thy beat convulsive, 
 
 Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel, 
 Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, 
 
 gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, 
 Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering 
 
 in the distance, 
 
 Thy great protruding head-light fix d in front, 
 Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with 
 
 delicate purple, 
 The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy 
 
 smoke-stack, 
 Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous 
 
 twinkle of thy wheels, 
 
 Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following, 
 Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily 
 
 careering ; 
 
 88 
 
Type of the modern emblem of motion and power 
 
 pulse of the continent, 
 For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even 
 
 as here I see thee, 
 
 With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow, 
 By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes, 
 By night thy silent signal lamps to swing. 
 
 Fierce-throated beauty ! 
 
 Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy 
 
 swinging lamps at night, 
 Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an 
 
 earthquake, rousing all, 
 
 Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, 
 (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano 
 
 thine,) 
 
 Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return d, 
 Launch d o er the prairies wide, across the lakes, 
 To the free skies unpent and glad and strong. 
 
 SPIRIT THAT FORM D THIS SCENE. 
 
 Written in Platte Canon, Colorado. 
 
 SPIRIT that form d this scene, 
 
 These tumbled rock-piles grim and red. 
 
 These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks, 
 
 These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked fresh 
 ness, 
 
 These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own, 
 
 I know thee, savage spirit we have communed together, 
 
 Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own ; 
 
 Was t charged against my chants they had forgotten 
 art? 
 
 8 9 
 
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and 
 
 delicatesse ? 
 The lyrist s measur d beat, the wrought-out temple s 
 
 grace column and polish d arch forgot ? 
 But thou that revelest here spirit that formed this 
 
 scene, 
 They have remember d thee. 
 
 CAVALRY CROSSING A FORD. 
 
 A LINE in long array where they wind betwixt green 
 
 islands, 
 They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the 
 
 sun hark to the musical clank, 
 Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses 
 
 loitering stop to drink, 
 Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a 
 
 picture, the negligent rest on the saddles, 
 Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just 
 
 entering the ford while, 
 Scarlet and blue and snowy white, 
 The guidon flags flutter gaily in the wind. 
 
 BIVOUAC ON A MOUNTAIN SIDE. 
 
 I SEE before me now a traveling army halting, 
 
 Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards 
 
 of summer, 
 Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in 
 
 places rising high, 
 Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall 
 
 shapes dingily seen, 
 The numerous camp-fires scattered near and far, some 
 
 away up on the mountain, 
 
 90 
 
The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large- 
 sized, flickering. 
 
 And over all the sky the sky! far, far out of reach, 
 studded, breaking out, the eternal stars. 
 
 BY THE BIVOUAC S FITFUL FLAME. 
 
 BY the bivouac s fitful flame, 
 
 A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and 
 
 slow but first I note 
 The tents of the sleeping army, the fields and woods 
 
 dim outline, 
 
 The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire, the silence, 
 Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving, 
 The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be 
 
 stealthily watching me,) 
 While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and 
 
 wondrous thoughts, 
 Of life and death, of home and the past and loved, 
 
 and of those that are far away ; 
 A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the 
 
 ground, 
 By the bivouac s fitful flame. 
 
 LO, VICTRESS ON THE PEAKS. 
 
 Lo, Victress on the peaks, 
 
 Where thou with mighty brow regarding the world, 
 
 (The world O Libertad, that vainly conspired against 
 
 thee,) 
 Out of its countless beleaguering toils, after thwarting 
 
 them all 
 Dominant, with the dazzling sun around thee, 
 
 9 i 
 
Flauntest now unharm d in immortal soundness and 
 bloom lo, in these hours supreme, 
 
 No poem proud, I chanting bring to thee, nor mastery s 
 rapturous verse, 
 
 But a cluster containing night s darkness and blood- 
 dripping wounds, 
 
 And psalms of the dead. 
 
 RECONCILIATION. 
 
 WORD over all, beautiful as the sky, 
 
 Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in 
 time be utterly lost, 
 
 That the hands of the sisters Death and Night in 
 cessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this 
 soil d world ; 
 
 For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead, 
 
 I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin 
 I draw near, 
 
 Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white 
 face in the coffin. 
 
 WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD 
 BLOOM D. 
 
 i 
 
 WHEN lilacs last in the dooryard bloom d, 
 
 And the great star early droop d in the western sky in 
 
 the night, 
 I mourn d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning 
 
 spring. 
 
 Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, 
 Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, 
 And thought of him I love. 
 
O powerful western fallen star ! 
 
 O shades of night O moody, tearful night ! 
 
 O great star disappear d O the black murk that hides 
 
 the star ! 
 O cruel hands that hold me powerless O helpless soul 
 
 of me ! 
 O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul. 
 
 In the dooryard fronting an old farmhouse near the 
 
 ~f! white- washed palings, 
 
 Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing, with heart-shaped 
 
 leaves of rich green, 
 With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the 
 
 perfume strong I love, 
 With every leaf a miracle and from this bush in the 
 
 dooryard, 
 With delicate-color d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves 
 
 of rich green, 
 A sprig with its flower I break. 
 
 4 
 
 In the swamp in secluded recesses, 
 
 A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. 
 
 Solitary the thrush, 
 
 The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settle 
 ments, 
 Sings by himself a song. 
 
 Song of the bleeding throat, 
 
 Death s outlet song of life (for well dear brother I know, 
 
 If thou wast not granted to sing thou would st surely die.) 
 
 93 
 
5 
 
 Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities, 
 Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets 
 
 peep d from the ground, spotting the gray debris, 
 Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing 
 
 the endless grass, 
 Passing the yellow-spear d wheat, every grain from its 
 
 shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen, 
 Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the 
 
 orchards, 
 
 Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, 
 Night and day journeys a coffin. 
 
 6 
 
 Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, 
 
 Through day and night with the great cloud darkening 
 
 the land, 
 With the pomp of the inloop d flags with the cities 
 
 draped in black, 
 With the show of the States themselves as of crape- 
 
 veil d women standing, 
 With processions long and winding and the flambeaus 
 
 of the night, 
 With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of 
 
 faces and the unbared heads, 
 With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the 
 
 sombre faces, 
 With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices 
 
 rising strong and solemn, 
 With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour d around 
 
 the coffin, 
 The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs where 
 
 amid these you journey, 
 
 With the tolling tolling bells perpetual clang, 
 Here, coffin that slowly passes, 
 I give you my sprig of lilac. 
 
 94 
 
7 
 
 (Nor for you, for ore alone, 
 
 Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring. 
 For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for 
 you, O sane and sacred death. 
 
 All over bouquets of roses, 
 
 O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies, 
 
 But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first, 
 
 Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, 
 
 With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, 
 
 For you and the coffins all of you, O death.) 
 
 8 
 
 O western orb sailing the heaven, 
 
 Now I know what you must have meant as a month 
 
 since I walk d, 
 
 As I walk d in silence the transparent shadowy night, 
 As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me 
 
 night after night, 
 As you droop d from the sky low down as if to my side, 
 
 (while the other stars all look d on,) 
 As we wander d together the solemn night, (for something 
 
 I know not what kept me from sleep,) 
 As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west 
 
 how full you were of woe, 
 As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool 
 
 transparent night, 
 As I watch d where you pass d and was lost in the 
 
 netherward black of the night, 
 As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you 
 
 sad orb, 
 Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone. 
 
 95 
 
Sing on there in the swamp, 
 
 singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear 
 
 your call, 
 
 1 hear, I come presently, I understand you, 
 
 But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain 1 d 
 
 me, 
 The star my departing comrade holds and detains me. 
 
 10 
 
 O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I 
 
 loved ? 
 And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul 
 
 that has gone ? 
 And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I 
 
 love ? 
 
 Sea-winds blown from east and west, 
 
 Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western 
 
 sea, till there on the prairies meeting, 
 These and with these and the breath of my chant, 
 I ll perfume the grave of him I love. 
 
 ii 
 
 O what shall I hang on the chamber walls ? 
 
 And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, 
 
 To adorn the burial-house of him I love ? 
 
 Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, 
 With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray 
 
 smoke lucid and bright, 
 With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, 
 
 sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, 
 
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale 
 
 green leaves of the trees prolific, 
 In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, 
 
 with a wind-dapple here and there, 
 With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line 
 
 against the sky, and shadows, 
 And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks 
 
 of chimneys, 
 And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the 
 
 workmen homeward returning. 
 
 12 
 
 Lo, body and soul this land, 
 
 My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and 
 
 hurrying tides, and the ships, 
 The varied and ample land, the South and the North in 
 
 the light, Ohio s shores and flashing Missouri, 
 And ever the far-spreading prairies cover d with grass 
 
 and corn. 
 
 Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty, 
 The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes, 
 The gentle soft-born measureless light, 
 The miracle-spreading bathing all, the fulfill d noon, 
 The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the 
 
 stars, 
 Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land. 
 
 13 
 
 Sing on, sing on, you gray-brown bird, 
 
 Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant 
 
 from the bushes, 
 Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines. 
 
 Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song, 
 Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe. 
 
 97 
 
O liquid and free and tender ! 
 
 O wild and loose to my soul O wondrous singer ! 
 
 You only I hear yet the star holds me, (but will soon 
 
 depart,) 
 Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me. 
 
 Now while I sat in the day and look d forth, 
 
 In the close of the day with its light and the fields of 
 
 spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, 
 In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its 
 
 lakes and forests, 
 In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb d winds 
 
 and the storms,) 
 Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, 
 
 and the voices of children and women, 
 The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships, how 
 
 they sail d, 
 And the summer approaching with richness, and the 
 
 fields all busy with labor, 
 And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, 
 
 each with its meals and minutia of daily usages, 
 And the streets how their throbbings throbb d, and the 
 
 cities pent lo, then and there, 
 Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping 
 
 me with the rest, 
 
 Appear d the cloud, appear d the long black trail, 
 And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred know 
 ledge of death. 
 
 Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side 
 
 of me, 
 And the thought of death close-walking the other side 
 
 of me, 
 
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding 
 
 the hands of companions, 
 
 I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not, 
 Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp 
 
 in the dimness, 
 To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still. 
 
 And the singer so shy to the rest receiv d me, 
 The gray-brown bird I know receiv d us comrades three, 
 And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I 
 love. 
 
 From deep secluded recesses, 
 
 From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still, 
 
 Came the carol of the bird. 
 
 And the charm of the carol rapt me, 
 
 As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night. 
 
 And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird. 
 
 Come lovely and soothing death, 
 
 Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving. 
 
 In the day, in the night, to all, to each, 
 
 Sooner or later delicate death. 
 
 Prais d be the fathomless universe, 
 For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, 
 And for love, sweet love but praise / praise / praist I 
 For the sure enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death. 
 
 Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, 
 Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome ? 
 Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, 
 I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come 
 unfalteringly. 
 
 99 H 2 
 
Approach strong deliver ess. 
 
 When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the 
 
 dtad, 
 
 Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, 
 Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O death. 
 
 From me to thee glad serenades, 
 
 Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings 
 
 for thee, 
 And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky 
 
 are fitting, 
 And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night. 
 
 The night in silence under many a star, 
 
 The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice 
 
 I know, 
 
 And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil d death, 
 A nd the body gratefully nestling close to thee. 
 
 Over tlu tree-tops I float thee a song, 
 
 Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and 
 
 the prairies wide, 
 Ovtr the dense-pack d cities all and the teeming wharves and 
 
 ways, 
 I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death. 
 
 15 
 
 To the tally of my soul, 
 
 Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, 
 With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night. 
 
 Loud in the pines and cedars dim, 
 
 Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume, 
 
 And I with my comrades there in the night. 
 
 While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, 
 
 As to long panoramas of visions. 
 
 IOO 
 
And I saw askant the armies, 
 
 I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags, 
 
 Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc d with 
 
 missiles I saw them, 
 And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn 
 
 and bloody, 
 And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all 
 
 in silence,) 
 And the staffs all splinter d and broken. 
 
 I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, 
 
 And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, 
 
 I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of 
 
 the war, 
 
 But I saw they were not as was thought, 
 They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer d not, 
 The living remain d and suffer d, the mother suffer d, 
 And the wife and the child and the musing comrade 
 
 suffer d, 
 And the armies that remain d suffer d. 
 
 16 
 
 Passing the visions, passing the night, 
 
 Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades hands, 
 
 Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song 
 
 of my soul, 
 
 Victorious song, death s outlet song, yet varying ever- 
 altering song, 
 As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, 
 
 flooding the night, 
 Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and 
 
 yet again bursting with joy, 
 
 Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven, 
 As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses, 
 
 IOI 
 
Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, 
 I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning 
 with spring. 
 
 I cease from my song for thee, 
 
 From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, 
 
 communing with thee, 
 O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night. 
 
 Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night, 
 The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, 
 And the tallying chant, the echo arous d in my soul, 
 With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance 
 
 full of woe, 
 With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of 
 
 the bird, 
 Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory 
 
 ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, 
 For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands 
 
 and this for his dear sake, 
 
 Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, 
 There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim. 
 
 OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY 
 ROCKING. 
 
 OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking, 
 
 Out of the mocking-bird s throat, the musical shuttle, 
 
 Out of the Ninth-month midnight, 
 
 Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the 
 
 child leaving his bed wander d alone, bareheaded, 
 
 barefoot, 
 Down from the shower d halo, 
 
 IO2 
 
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting 
 
 as if they were alive, 
 
 Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, 
 From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, 
 From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings 
 
 and fallings I heard, 
 From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen 
 
 as if with tears, 
 From those beginning notes of yearning and love there 
 
 in the mist, 
 
 From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, 
 From the myriad thence-arous d words, 
 From the word stronger and more delicious than any, 
 From such as now they start the scene revisiting, 
 As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing, 
 Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, 
 A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, 
 Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, 
 I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, 
 Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond 
 
 them, 
 A reminiscence sing. 
 
 Once Paumanok, 
 
 When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth-month 
 
 grass was growing, 
 Up this seashore in some briers, 
 Two feather d guests from Alabama, two together, 
 And their nest, and four light-green eggs spotted with 
 
 brown, 
 
 And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, 
 And every day the she-bird crouch d on her nest, silent, 
 
 with bright eyes, 
 And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never 
 
 disturbing them, 
 Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating. 
 
 103 
 
Shine / Shine ! Shine / 
 
 Pour down your warmth, great sun / 
 
 While we bask, we two together. 
 
 Two together / 
 
 Winds blow south, or winds blow north t 
 Day come white, or night come black, 
 Home, or rivers and mountains from home. 
 Singing all time, minding no time, 
 While we two keep together* 
 
 Till of a sudden, 
 
 May-be kill d, unknown to her mate, 
 
 One forenoon the she-bird crouch d not on the nest, 
 
 Nor return d that afternoon, nor the next, 
 
 Nor ever appeared again. 
 
 And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea, 
 
 And at night under the full of the moon in calmer 
 weather, 
 
 Over the hoarse surging of the sea, 
 
 Or flitting from brier to brier by day, 
 
 I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the he- 
 bird, 
 
 The solitary guest from Alabama. 
 
 Blow / blow / blow / 
 
 Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok s shore ; 
 
 I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me. 
 
 Yes, when the stars glisten d, 
 
 All night long on the prong of a moss-scallop d stake, 
 
 Down almost amid the slapping waves, 
 
 Sat the lone singer wonderful causing tears. 
 
 He call d on his mate, 
 
 He pour d forth the meanings which I of all men know. 
 
 104 
 
Yes my brother 1 know, 
 
 The rest might not, but I have treasur d every note, 
 For more than once dimly down to the beach gliding, 
 Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with 
 
 the shadows, 
 Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds 
 
 and sights after their sorts, 
 
 The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing, 
 I, with bare feet, a child, the wind wafting my hair, 
 Listen d long and long. 
 
 Listen d to keep, to sing, now translating the notes, 
 Following you my brother. 
 
 Soothe I soothe f soothe ! 
 
 Close, on its wave soothes the wave behind, 
 
 And again anothtr behind embracing and lapping, every one 
 
 close, 
 But my love soothes itot me, not me. 
 
 Low hangs the moon, it rose late, 
 
 It is lagging O / think it is heavy with love, with love. 
 
 O madly the sea pushes upon the land, 
 With lovt, with love. 
 
 O night/ do I not see my love f uttering out among the 
 
 breakers ? 
 What is that little black thing I see there in the white f 
 
 Loud ! loud ! loud ! 
 
 Loud I call to you, my love / 
 
 High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, 
 
 Surely you must know who is here, is here, 
 
 You must know who I am, my love. 
 
 105 
 
Low -hanging moon ! 
 
 What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow ? 
 O it is the shape, the shape of my mate / 
 O moon do not keep her from me any longer. 
 
 Land / land / O land / 
 
 Whichever way I turn, O I think you could give me my mate 
 
 back again if you only would, 
 For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look. 
 
 O rising stars / 
 
 Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some 
 of you. 
 
 O throat / O trembling throat / 
 
 Sound clearer through the atmosphere ! 
 
 Pierce the woods, the earth, 
 
 Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want. 
 
 Shake out carols I 
 
 Solitary here, the night s carols ! 
 
 Carols of lonesome love ! death s carols ! 
 
 Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon ! 
 
 O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea ! 
 
 O reckless despairing carols. 
 
 But soft ! sink low ! 
 Soft ! let me just murmur , 
 A nd do you wait a moment you husky-noised sea t 
 For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me, 
 So faint, I must be still, be still to listen, 
 But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately 
 to me. 
 
 Hither my love / 
 
 Here I am ! here / 
 
 With this just-sustain* d note I announce myself to you, 
 
 This gentle call is for you my love, for you. 
 
 1 06 
 
Do not be decoy d elsewhere. 
 That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice, 
 That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray, 
 Those are the shadows of leaves. 
 
 O darkness ! in vain / 
 
 O I am very sick and sorrowful. 
 
 O brown halo in the sky near th* moon, drooping upon the sea ! 
 
 O troubled reflection in the sea I 
 
 O throat / O throbbing heart / 
 
 And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night. 
 
 O past / happy life ! O songs of joy f 
 In the air, in the woods, over fields, 
 Loved! loved! loved! loved ! loved! 
 But my matt no more, no more with me ! 
 We two together no more. 
 
 The aria sinking, 
 
 All else continuing, the stars shining, 
 
 The winds blowing, the notes of the bird continuous 
 
 echoing. 
 With angry moans the fierce old mother incessantly 
 
 moaning, 
 
 On the sands of Paumanok s shore grey and rustling, 
 The yellow half-moon enlarged, sagging down, drooping, 
 
 the face of the sea almost touching, 
 The boy ecstatic, with his bare feet the waves, with his 
 
 hair the atmosphere dallying, 
 The love in the heart long pent, now loose, now at last 
 
 tumultuously bursting, 
 
 The aria s meaning, the ears, the soul, swiftly depositing, 
 The strange tears down the cheeks coursing, 
 The colloquy there, the trio, each uttering, 
 The undertone, the savage old mother incessantly crying, 
 
 107 
 
To the boy s soul s questions sullenly timing, some 
 
 drown d secret hissing, 
 To the outsetting bard. 
 
 Demon or bird ! (said the boy s soul,) 
 
 Is it indeed toward your mate you sing ? or is it really 
 
 to me ? 
 For I, that was a child, my tongue s use sleeping, now I 
 
 have heard you, 
 
 Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake, 
 And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, 
 
 clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours, 
 A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within 
 
 me, never to die. 
 
 O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me, 
 O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease per 
 petuating you, 
 
 Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations. 
 Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from 
 
 me, 
 Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was 
 
 before what there in the night, 
 By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon, 
 The messenger there arous d, the fire, the sweet hell 
 
 within, 
 The unknown want, the destiny of me. 
 
 O give me the clew ! (it lurks in the night here some 
 where,) 
 O if I am to have so much, let me have more ! 
 
 A word then, (for I will conquer it,) 
 The word final, superior to all, 
 Subtle, sent up what is it ? I listen ; 
 
 1 08 
 
Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you 
 
 sea-waves ? 
 Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands ? 
 
 Whereto answering, the sea, 
 
 Delaying not, hurrying not, 
 
 Whisper d me through the night, and very plainly before 
 
 daybreak, 
 
 Lisp d to me the low and delicious word death, 
 And again death, death, death, death, 
 Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my 
 
 arous d child s heart, 
 
 But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, 
 Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me 
 
 softly all over, 
 Death, death, death, death, death. 
 
 Which I do not forget, 
 
 But fuse the song of my dusky demon and brother, 
 
 That he sang to me in the moonlight on Paumanok s 
 
 gray beach, 
 
 With the thousand responsive songs at random, 
 My own songs awaked from that hour, 
 And with them the key, the word up from the waves, 
 The word of the sweetest song and all songs, 
 That strong and delicious word which, creeping to my 
 
 feet, 
 (Or like some old crone rocking the cradle, swathed in 
 
 sweet garments, bending aside,) 
 The sea whisper d me. 
 
 TEARS 
 
 TEARS! tears! tears! 
 In the night, in solitude, tears, 
 
 On the white shore dripping, dripping, suck d in by the 
 sand, 
 
 109 
 
Tears, not a star shining, all dark and desolate, 
 
 Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head ; 
 
 O who is that ghost? that form in the dark, with 
 
 tears ? 
 What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouch d there on 
 
 the sand? 
 Streaming tears, sobbing tears, throes, choked with wild 
 
 cries ; 
 O storm, embodied, rising, careering with swift steps 
 
 along the beach ! 
 O wild and dismal night storm, with wind O belching 
 
 and desperate ! 
 
 O shade so sedate and decorous by day, with calm coun 
 tenance and regulated pace, 
 But away at night as you fly, none looking O then the 
 
 unloosen d ocean 
 Of tears! tears! tears! 
 
 TO THE MAN-OF- WAR-BIRD 
 
 THOU who hast slept all night upon the storm, 
 
 Waking renew d on thy prodigious pinions, 
 
 (Burst the wild storm ? above it thou ascend st, 
 
 And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee,) 
 
 Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating, 
 
 As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee, 
 
 (Myself a speck, a point on the world s floating vast.) 
 
 Far, far at sea, 
 
 After the night s fierce drifts have strewn the shore with 
 
 wrecks, 
 
 With re-appearing day as now so happy and serene, 
 The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun, 
 The limpid spread of air cerulean, 
 Thou also re-appearest. 
 
 110 
 
Thou born to match the gale, (thou art all wings,) 
 To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, 
 Thou ship of air that never furl st thy sails, 
 Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, 
 
 realms gyrating, 
 
 At dusk that look st on Senegal, at morn America. 
 That sport st amid the lightning-flash and thunder 
 cloud, 
 
 In them, in thy experiences, had st thou my soul, 
 What joys ! what joys were thine ! 
 
 PATROLING BARNEGAT. 
 
 WILD, wild the storm, and the sea high running, 
 Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone 
 
 muttering, 
 
 Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing, 
 Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, 
 Out in the shadows their milk-white combs careering, 
 On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce 
 
 slanting, 
 Where through the murk the easterly death-wind 
 
 breasting, 
 Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm 
 
 advancing, 
 (That in the distance ! is that a wreck ? is the red signal 
 
 flaring ?) 
 
 Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending, 
 Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting, 
 Along the midnight edge by those milk-white combs 
 
 careering, 
 A group of dim, weird forms, struggling, the night 
 
 confronting, 
 That savage trinity warily watching. 
 
 Ill 
 
WITH HUSKY-HAUGHTY LIPS, O SEA ! 
 WITH husky-haughty lips, O sea ! 
 Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore, 
 Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions, 
 (I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,) 
 Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal, 
 Thy ample, smiling face, dash d with the sparkling 
 
 dimples of the sun, 
 
 Thy brooding scowl and murk thy unloos d hurricanes, 
 Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness ; 
 Great as thou art above the rest, thy many tears a lack 
 
 from all eternity in thy content, 
 (Naught but the greatest struggles, wrongs, defeats, 
 
 could make thee greatest no less could make thee,) 
 Thy lonely state something thou ever seek st and 
 
 seek st, yet never gain st, 
 Surely some right withheld some voice, in huge 
 
 monotonous rage, of freedom-lover pent, 
 Some vast heart, like a planet s, chain d and chafing 
 
 in those breakers, 
 
 By lengthen d swell, and spasm, and panting breath, 
 And rhythmic rasping of thy sands and waves, 
 And serpent hiss, and savage peals of laughter, 
 And undertones of distant lion roar, 
 (Sounding, appealing to the sky s deaf earbut now, 
 
 rapport for once, 
 
 A phantom in the night thy confidant for once,) 
 The first and last confession of the globe, 
 Outsurging, muttering from thy soul s abysms, 
 The tale of cosmic elemental passion 
 Thou tellest to a kindred soul. 
 
 FROM MONTAUK POINT. 
 
 I STAND as on some mighty eagle s beak, 
 Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea 
 and sky,) 
 
 112 
 
The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance, 
 The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps that inbound 
 
 urge and urge of waves, 
 Seeking the shores forever. 
 
 PROUDLY THE FLOOD COMES IN. 
 
 PROUDLY the flood comes in, shouting, foaming, 
 
 advancing, 
 
 Long it holds at the high, with bosom broad outswelling, 
 All throbs, dilates the farms, woods, streets of cities 
 
 workmen at work, 
 Mainsails, topsails, jibs, appear in the offing steamers 
 
 pennants of smoke and under the forenoon sun, 
 Freighted with human lives, gaily the outward bound, 
 
 gaily the inward bound, 
 Flaunting from many a spar the flag I love. 
 
 HAD I THE CHOICE. 
 
 HAD I the choice to tally greatest bards, 
 
 To limn their portraits, stately, beautiful, and emulate 
 
 at will, 
 Homer with all his wars and warriors Hector, Achilles, 
 
 Ajax, 
 Or Shakspere s woe-entangled Hamlet, Lear, Othello 
 
 Tennyson s fair ladies, 
 Metre or wit the best, or choice conceit to wield in 
 
 perfect rhyme, delight of singers ; 
 These, these, O sea, all these I d gladly barter, 
 Would you the undulation of one wave, its trick to me 
 
 transfer, 
 
 Or breathe one breath of yours upon my verse, 
 And leave its odor there. 
 
BY THAT LONG SCAN OF WAVES. 
 
 BY that long scan of waves, myself call d back, resumed 
 
 upon myself, 
 In every crest some undulating light or shade some 
 
 retrospect, 
 
 Joys, travels, studies, silent panoramas scenes ephemeral, 
 The long past war, the battles, hospital sights, the 
 
 wounded and the dead, 
 Myself through every by-gone phase my idle youth 
 
 old age at hand, 
 My three-score years of life summ d up, and more, and 
 
 past, 
 By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a 
 
 nothing, 
 And haply yet some drop within God s scheme s 
 
 ensemble some wave, or part of wave, 
 Like one of yours, ye multitudinous ocean. 
 
 HALCYON DAYS. 
 
 Not from successful love alone, 
 
 Nor wealth, nor honor d middle age, nor victories of 
 
 politics or war ; 
 
 But as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, 
 As gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening 
 
 sky, 
 As softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like freshier, 
 
 balmier air, 
 As the days take on a mellower light, and the apple at 
 
 last hangs really fmish d and indolent-ripe on the 
 
 tree, 
 
 Then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all ! 
 The brooding and blissful halcyon days ! 
 
 114 
 
A PRAIRIE SUNSET. 
 
 Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, 
 
 fawn, 
 The earth s whole amplitude and Nature s multiform 
 
 power consign d for once to colors ; 
 The light, the general air possess d by them colors till 
 
 now unknown, 
 No limit, confine not the Western sky alone the high 
 
 meridian North, South, all, 
 Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the 
 
 last. 
 
 WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH. 
 
 WHISPERS of heavenly death murmur d I hear, 
 
 Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals, 
 
 Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft 
 
 and low, 
 Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, 
 
 forever flowing, 
 (Or is it the plashing of tears ? the measureless waters 
 
 of human tears ?) 
 
 I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses, 
 Mournfully slowly they roll, silently swelling and 
 
 mixing, 
 
 With at times a half-dimm d sadden d far-off star, 
 Appearing and disappearing. 
 
 (Some parturition rather, some solemn immortal birth ; 
 On the frontiers to eyes impenetrable, 
 Some soul is passing over.) 
 
 115 12 
 
ASSURANCES. 
 
 I NEED no assurances, I am a man who is pre-occupied 
 of his own soul ; 
 
 I do not doubt that from under the feet and beside the 
 hands and face I am cognizant of, are now looking 
 faces I am not cognizant of, calm and actual faces, 
 
 I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world 
 are latent in any iota of the world, 
 
 I do not doubt I am limitless, and that the universes are 
 limitless, in vain I try to think how limitless, 
 
 I do not doubt that the orbs and the systems of orbs 
 play their swift sports through the air on purpose, 
 and that I shall one day be eligible to do as much 
 as they, and more than they, 
 
 I do not doubt that temporary affairs keep on and on 
 millions of years, 
 
 I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors 
 have their exteriors, and that the eyesight has 
 another eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, 
 and the voice another voice, 
 
 I do not doubt that the passionately-wept deaths of 
 young men are provided for, and that the deaths 
 of young women and the deaths of little children 
 are provided for, 
 
 (Did you think Life was so well provided for, and Death, 
 the purport of all Life, is not well provided for ?) 
 
 I do not doubt that wrecks at sea, no matter what the 
 horrors of them, no matter whose wife, child, hus 
 band, father, lover, has gone down, are provided for, 
 to the minutest points, 
 
 I do not doubt that whatever can possibly happen any 
 where at any time, is provided for in the inherences 
 of things, 
 
 I do not think Life provides for all and for Time and 
 Space, but I believe Heavenly Death provides 
 for all. 
 
NIGHT ON THE PRAIRIES. 
 
 NIGHT on the prairies, 
 
 The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low, 
 The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets ; 
 I walk by myself I stand and look at the stars, which 
 
 I think now I never realized before. 
 Now I absorb immortality and peace, 
 I admire death and test propositions. 
 
 How plenteous ! how spiritual ! how resume* ! 
 The same old man and soul the same old aspirations, 
 and the same content. 
 
 I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the 
 
 not-day exhibited, 
 I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so 
 
 noiseless around me myriads of other globes. 
 
 Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill 
 
 me I will measure myself by them, 
 And now touch d with the lives of other globes arrived 
 
 as far along as those of the earth, 
 Or waiting to arrive, or pass d on farther than those of 
 
 the earth, 
 I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own 
 
 life, 
 Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or 
 
 waiting to arrive. 
 
 I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the 
 
 day cannot, 
 
 1 see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by 
 
 death. 
 
 117 
 
A CLEAR MIDNIGHT. 
 
 THIS is thy hour, O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, 
 Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the 
 
 lesson done, 
 Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the 
 
 themes thou lovest best, 
 Night, sleep, death and the stars. 
 
 DEATH S VALLEY. 
 
 To accompany a picture ; by request. " The Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death" from the painting by George Inness. 
 
 NAY, do not dream, designer dark, 
 
 Thou hast portray d or hit thy theme entire ; 
 
 I, hoverer of late by this dark valley, by its confines, 
 
 having glimpses of it, 
 Here enter lists with thee, claiming my right to make a 
 
 symbol too. 
 
 For I have seen many wounded soldiers die, 
 After dread suffering have seen their lives pass off with 
 
 smiles ; 
 And I have watch d the death-hours of the old ; and seen 
 
 the infant die ; 
 
 The rich, with all his nurses and his doctors ; 
 And then the poor, in meagreness and poverty ; 
 And I myself for long, O Death, have breath d my every 
 
 breath 
 
 Amid the nearness and the silent thought of thee. 
 And out of these and thee, 
 I make a scene, a song (not fear of thee, 
 Nor gloom s ravines, nor bleak, nor dark for I do not 
 
 fear thee, 
 Nor celebrate the struggle, or contortion, or hard-tied 
 
 knot), 
 
Of the broad blessed light and perfect air, with meadows, 
 rippling tides, and trees and flowers and grass, 
 
 And the low hum of living breeze and in the midst 
 God s beautiful eternal right hand, 
 
 Thee, holiest minister of Heaven thee, envoy, usherer, 
 guide at last of all, 
 
 Rich, florid, loosener of the stricture-knot call d life, 
 
 Sweet, peaceful, welcome Death. 
 
 PASSAGE TO INDIA. 
 
 SINGING my days, 
 
 Singing the great achievements of the present, 
 
 Singing the strong light works of engineers, 
 
 Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven 
 
 outvied,) 
 
 In the Old World the east the Suez canal, 
 The New by its mighty railroad spann d, 
 The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires ; 
 Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee, O 
 
 soul, 
 The Past ! the Past ! the Past ! 
 
 The Past the dark unfathom d retrospect ! 
 
 The teeming gulf the sleepers and the shadows ! 
 
 The past the infinite greatness of the past ! 
 
 For what is the present after all but a growth out of the 
 
 past ? 
 (As a projectile form d, impell d, passing a certain line, 
 
 still keeps on, 
 So the present, utterly form d, impell d by the past.) 
 
 119 
 
Passage, O soul, to India ! 
 
 Eclaircise the myths Asiatic, the primitive fables. 
 
 Not you alone, proud truths of the world, 
 
 Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science, 
 
 But myths and fables of eld, Asia s, Africa s fables, 
 
 The far-darting beams of the spirit, the unloos d dreams, 
 
 The deep diving bibles and legends, 
 
 The daring plots of the poets, the elder religions ; 
 
 O you temples fairer than lilies pour d over by the rising 
 
 sun ! 
 O you fables spurning the known, eluding the hold of 
 
 the known, mounting to heaven ! 
 You lofty and dazzling towers, pinnacled, red as roses, 
 
 burnish d with gold ! 
 
 Towers of fables immortal fashion d from mortal dreams ! 
 You too I welcome and fully the same as the rest ! 
 You too with joy I sing. 
 
 Passage to India ! 
 
 Lo, soul, seest thou not God s purpose from the first ? 
 
 The earth to be spann d, connected by network, 
 
 The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage, 
 
 The oceans to be cross d, the distant brought near, 
 
 The lands to be welded together. 
 
 A worship new I sing, 
 
 You captains, voyagers, explorers, yours, 
 
 You engineers, you architects, machinists, yours, 
 
 You, not for trade or transportation only, 
 
 But in God s name, and for thy sake, O soul. 
 
 3 
 
 Passage to India ! 
 
 Lo soul for thee of tableaus twain, 
 
 1 2O 
 
I see in one the Suez canal initiated, open d, 
 
 I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie s 
 
 leading the van, 
 I mark from on deck the strange landscape, the pure 
 
 sky, the level sand in the distance, 
 I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen 
 
 gather d. 
 The gigantic dredging machines. 
 
 In one again, different, (yet thine, all thine, O soul, the 
 
 same,) 
 
 I see over my own continent the pacific railroad sur 
 mounting every barrier, 
 I see continual trains of cars winding along the Platte 
 
 carrying freight and passengers, 
 I hear the locomotives rushing and roaring, and the 
 
 shrill steam-whistle, 
 I hear the echoes reverberate through the grandest 
 
 scenery in the world, 
 I cross the Laramie plains, I note the rocks in grotesque 
 
 shapes, the buttes, 
 I see the plentiful larkspur and wild onions, the barren, 
 
 colorless, sage-deserts, 
 I see in glimpses afar or towering immediately above me 
 
 the great mountains, I see the Wind river and the 
 
 Wahsatch mountains, 
 I see the Monument mountain and the Eagle s Nest, I 
 
 pass the Promontory, I ascend the Nevadas, 
 I scan the noble Elk mountain and wind around its 
 
 base, 
 I see the Humboldt range, I thread the valley and cross 
 
 the river, 
 I see the clear waters of lake Tahoe, I see forests of 
 
 majestic pines, 
 Or crossing the great desert, the alkaline plains, I behold 
 
 enchanting mirages of waters and meadows, 
 
 121 
 
Marking through these and after all, in duplicate slender 
 
 lines, 
 
 Bridging the three or four thousand miles of land travel, 
 Tying the Eastern to the Western sea, 
 The road between Europe and Asia. 
 
 (Ah Genoese thy dream ! thy dream ! 
 Centuries after thou art laid in thy grave, 
 The shore thou foundest verifies thy dream.) 
 
 4 
 
 Passage to India ! 
 
 Struggles of many a captain, tales of many a sailor dead, 
 Over my mood stealing and spreading they come, 
 Like clouds and cloudlets in the unreach d sky. 
 
 Along all history, down the slopes, 
 
 As a rivulet running, sinking now, and now again to the 
 
 surface rising, 
 A ceaseless thought, a varied train lo, soul, to thee, 
 
 thy sight, they rise, 
 
 The plans, the voyages again, the expeditions ; 
 Again Vasco de Gama sails forth, 
 Again the knowledge gain d, the mariner s compass, 
 Lands found and nations born, thou born America, 
 For purpose vast, man s long probation fill d, 
 Thou rondure of the world at last accomplish d. 
 
 5 
 
 O vast Rondure, swimming in space, 
 Cover d all over with visible power and beauty, 
 Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual dark 
 ness, 
 
 Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and 
 countless stars above, 
 
 122 
 
Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, moun 
 tains, trees, 
 
 With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic in 
 tention, 
 
 Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee. 
 
 Down from the gardens of Asia descending radiating, 
 Adam and Eve appear, then their myriad progeny after 
 
 them, 
 
 Wandering, yearning, curious, with restless explorations, 
 With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never- 
 happy hearts, 
 
 With that sad incessant refrain. Wherefore unsatisfied 
 soul P and Whither O mocking life ? 
 
 Ah who shall soothe these feverish children ? 
 
 Who justify these restless explorations ? 
 
 Who speak the secret of impassive earth ? 
 
 Who bind it to us ? what is this separate Nature so 
 
 unnatural ? 
 What is this earth to our affections ? (unloving earth, 
 
 without a throb to answer ours, 
 Cold earth, the place of graves.) 
 
 Yet soul be sure the first intent remains, and shall be 
 
 carried out, 
 Perhaps even now the time has arrived. 
 
 After the seas are all cross d, (as they seem already 
 
 cross d,) 
 After the great captains and engineers have accomplish d 
 
 their work, 
 After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the 
 
 chemist, the geologist, ethnologist, 
 Finally shall come the poet worthy that name, 
 The true son of God shall come singing his songs. 
 
 123 
 
Then not your deeds only, O voyagers, O scientists and 
 
 inventors, shall be justified, 
 
 All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth d, 
 All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall 
 
 be told, 
 All these separations and gaps shall be taken up and 
 
 hook d and link d together, 
 The whole earth, this cold, impassive, voiceless earth, 
 
 shall be completely justified, 
 Trinitas divine shall be gloriously accomplish d and 
 
 compacted by the true son of God, the poet, 
 (He shall indeed pass the straits and conquer the 
 
 mountains, 
 
 He shall double the cape of Good Hope to some purpose,) 
 Nature and Man shall be disjoin d and diffused no more, 
 The true son of God shall absolutely fuse them. 
 
 Year at whose wide-flung door I sing ! 
 
 Year of the purpose accomplish d ! 
 
 Year of the marriage of continents, climates and oceans ! 
 
 (No mere doge of Venice now wedding the Adriatic,) 
 
 I see O year in you the vast terraqueous globe given 
 
 and giving all, 
 Europe to Asia, Africa join d, and they to the New 
 
 World, 
 The lands, geographies, dancing before you, holding a 
 
 festival garland, 
 As brides and bridegrooms hand in hand. 
 
 Passage to India ! 
 
 Cooling airs from Caucasus far, soothing cradle of man, 
 
 The river Euphrates flowing, the past lit up again. 
 
 Lo soul, the retrospect brought forward, 
 
 The old, most populous, wealthiest of earth s lands, 
 
 124 
 
The streams of the Indus and the Ganges and their 
 
 many affluents, 
 (I my shores of America walking to-day behold, resuming 
 
 all,) 
 The tale of Alexander on his warlike marches suddenly 
 
 dying, 
 On one side China and on the other side Persia and 
 
 Arabia, 
 
 To the south the great seas and the bay of Bengal, 
 The flowing literatures, tremendous epics, religions, 
 
 castes, 
 Old occult Brahma interminably far back, the tender 
 
 and junior Buddha, 
 Central and southern empires and all their belongings, 
 
 possessors, 
 
 The wars of Tamerlane, the reign of Aurungzebe, 
 The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, 
 
 Byzantium, the Arabs, Portuguese, 
 The first travelers famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the 
 
 Moor, 
 Doubts to be solv d, the map incognita, blanks to be 
 
 fill d, 
 
 The foot of man unstay d, the hands never at rest, 
 Thyself, O soul, that will not brook a challenge. 
 
 The mediaeval navigators rise before me, 
 
 The world of 1492, with its awaken d enterprise, 
 
 Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the 
 
 earth in spring, 
 The sunset splendor of chivalry declining. 
 
 And who art thou sad shade ? 
 Gigantic, visionary, thyself a visionary, 
 With majestic limbs and pious beaming eyes, 
 Spreading around with every look of thine a golden world, 
 Enhuing it with gorgeous hues. 
 
 125 
 
As the chief histrion, 
 
 Down to the footlights walks in some great scena, 
 
 Dominating the rest I see the Admiral himself, 
 
 (History s type of courage, action, faith,) 
 
 Behold him sail from Palos leading his little fleet, 
 
 His voyage behold, his return, his great fame, 
 
 His misfortunes, calumniators, behold him a prisoner, 
 
 chain d, 
 Behold his dejection, poverty, death. 
 
 (Curious in time I stand, noting the efforts of heroes, 
 Is the deferment long? bitter the slander, poverty, death? 
 Lies the seed unreck d for centuries in the ground ? lo, 
 
 to God s due occasion, 
 Uprising in the night, it sprouts, blooms, 
 And fills the earth with use and beauty.) 
 
 7 
 
 Passage indeed, O soul, to primal thought, 
 Not lands and seas alone, thy own clear freshness, 
 The young maturity of brood and bloom, 
 To realms of budding bibles. 
 
 O soul, repressless, I with thee and thou with me, 
 
 Thy circumnavigation of the world begin, 
 
 Of man, the voyage of his mind s return, 
 
 To reason s early paradise, 
 
 Back, back to wisdom s birth, to innocent intuitions, 
 
 Again with fair creation. 
 
 8 
 
 O we can wait no longer, 
 We too take ship, O soul, 
 Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, 
 
 126 
 
Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail 
 Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I 
 
 thee to me, O soul,) 
 Caroling free, singing our song of God, 
 Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration. 
 
 With laugh and many a kiss, 
 
 (Let others deprecate, let others weep for sin, remorse, 
 
 humiliation,) 
 O soul thou pleasest me, I thee. 
 
 Ah more than any priest, O soul, we too believe in God, 
 But with the mystery of God we dare not dally. 
 
 soul thou pleasest me, I thee, 
 
 Sailing these seas or on the hills, or waking in the night, 
 Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and 
 
 Death, like waters flowing, 
 Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite, 
 Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, lave me all 
 
 over, 
 Bathe me, O God, in thee, mounting to thee, 
 
 1 and my soul to range in range of thee. 
 
 O Thou transcendent, 
 
 Nameless, the fibre and the breath, 
 
 Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre 
 
 of them, 
 
 Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, 
 Thou moral, spiritual fountain affection s source thou 
 
 reservoir, 
 (O pensive soul of me O thirst unsatisfied waitest 
 
 not there ? 
 Waitest not haply for us somewhere there the Comrade 
 
 perfect ?) 
 
 127 
 
Thou pulse thou motive of the stars, suns, systems, 
 That, circling, move in order, safe, harmonious, 
 Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space, 
 How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how 
 
 speak, if, out of myself, 
 I could not launch, to those, superior universes ? 
 
 Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, 
 
 At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, 
 
 But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, thou actual Me, 
 
 And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, 
 
 Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, 
 
 And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of Space. 
 
 Greater than stars or suns, 
 
 Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth ; 
 
 What love than thine and ours could wider amplify ? 
 
 What aspirations, wishes, outvie thine and ours, O soul ? 
 
 What dreams of the ideal ? what plans of purity, 
 
 perfection, strength ? 
 
 What cheerful willingness for others sake to give up all ? 
 For others sake to suffer all ? 
 
 Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achiev d, 
 The seas all cross d, weather d the capes, the voyage 
 
 done, 
 Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim 
 
 attain d, 
 As fill d with friendship, love complete, the Elder 
 
 Brother found, 
 The Younger melts in fondness in his arms. 
 
 9 
 
 Passage to more than India ! 
 Are thy wings plumed indeed for such far flights ? 
 
 128 
 
O soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those ? 
 Disportest thou on waters such as those ? 
 Soundest below the Sanscrit and the Vedas ? 
 Then have thy bent unleash d. 
 
 Passage to you, your shores, ye aged fierce enigmas ! 
 Passage to you, to mastership of you, ye strangling 
 
 problems ! 
 You, strew d with the wrecks of skeletons, that, living, 
 
 never reach d you. 
 
 Passage to more than India ! 
 
 O secret of the earth and sky ! 
 
 Of you, O waters of the sea ! O winding creeks and 
 
 rivers ! 
 Of you, O woods and fields ! of you, strong mountains of 
 
 my land ! 
 
 Of you, O prairies ! of you, gray rocks ! 
 O morning red ! O clouds ! O rain and snows I 
 O day and night, passage to you I 
 
 O sun and moon, and all you stars ! Sirius and Jupiter ! 
 Passage to you ! 
 
 Passage, immediate passage! the blood burns in my 
 
 veins ! 
 
 Away, O soul ! hoist instantly the anchor ! 
 Cut the hawsers haul out shake out every sail ! 
 Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long 
 
 enough ? 
 Have we not grovel d here long enough, eating and 
 
 drinking like mere brutes ? 
 Have we not darken d and dazed ourselves with books 
 
 long enough ? 
 
 129 
 
Sail forth steer for the deep waters only, 
 
 Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with 
 
 me, 
 For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared 
 
 to go, 
 And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. 
 
 O my brave soul ! 
 
 O farther farther sail ! 
 
 O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of 
 
 God? 
 O farther, farther, farther sail ! 
 
 THAT MUSIC ALWAYS ROUND ME. 
 
 THAT music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, 
 
 yet long untaught I did not hear, 
 But now the chorus I hear and am elated, 
 A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with 
 
 glad notes of daybreak I hear, 
 A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of 
 
 immense waves, 
 A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and 
 
 through the universe, 
 The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet 
 
 flutes and violins, all these I fill myself with, 
 I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by 
 
 the exquisite meanings, 
 I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, 
 
 contending with fiery vehemence to excel each other 
 
 in emotion 
 I do not thing the performers know themselves but 
 
 now I think I begin to know them. 
 
THE UNEXPRESS D. 
 
 How dare one say it ? 
 
 After the cycles, poems, singers, plays, 
 
 Vaunted Ionia s, India s Homer, Shakspere the long, 
 long times thick dotted roads, areas, 
 
 The shining clusters and the Milky Ways of stars- 
 Nature s pulses reap d, 
 
 All retrospective passions, heroes, war, love, adoration, 
 
 All ages plummets dropt to their utmost depths, 
 
 All human lives, throats, wishes, brains all experiences* 
 utterance ; 
 
 After the countless songs, or long or short, all tongues, 
 all lands, 
 
 Still something not yet told in poesy s voice or print 
 something lacking, 
 
 (Who knows ? the best yet unexpress d and lacking.) 
 
 A RIDDLE SONG. 
 
 THAT which eludes this verse and any verse, 
 
 Unheard by sharpest ear, unform d in clearest eye or 
 
 cunningest mind, 
 
 Nor lore nor fame, nor happiness nor wealth, 
 And yet the pulse of every heart and life throughout the 
 
 world incessantly, 
 
 Which you and I and all pursuing ever ever miss, 
 Open but still a secret, the real of the real, an illusion, 
 Costless, vouchsafed to each, yet never man the owner, 
 Which poets vainly seek to put in rhyme, historians in 
 
 prose, 
 
 Which sculptor never chisel d yet, nor painter painted, 
 Which vocalist never sung, nor orator nor actor ever 
 
 utter d, 
 Invoking here and now I challenge for my song. 
 
Indifferently, mid public, private haunts, in solitude, 
 
 Behind the mountain and the wood, 
 
 Companion of the city s busiest streets, through the 
 
 assemblage, 
 It and its radiations constantly glide. 
 
 In looks of fair unconscious babes, 
 
 Or strangely in the coffin d dead, 
 
 Or show of breaking dawn or stars by night, 
 
 As some dissolving delicate film of dreams, 
 
 Hiding yet lingering. 
 
 Two little breaths of words comprising it, 
 
 Two words, yet all from first to last comprised in it. 
 
 How ardently for it ! 
 
 How many ships have sail d and sunk for it ! 
 
 How many travelers started from their homes and ne er 
 
 return d ! 
 
 How much of genius boldly staked and lost for it ! 
 What countless stores of beauty, love, ventur d for it ! 
 How all superbest deeds since Time began are traceable 
 
 to it and shall be to the end ! 
 How all heroic martyrdoms to it ! 
 How, justified by it, the horrors, evils, battles of the 
 
 earth ! 
 How the bright fascinating lambent flames of it, in every 
 
 age and land, have drawn men s eyes, 
 Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the 
 
 islands, and the cliffs, 
 Or midnight s silent glowing northern lights unreachable. 
 
 Haply God s riddle it, so vague and yet so certain, 
 The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it, 
 And heaven at last for it. 
 
 132 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Uniform in size and price with this volume. Also to be had 
 in " The Lover s Library." Bound in Leather or Cloth. 
 
 THE SILENCE OF LOVE. 
 
 TIMES. " A volume of quite uncommon beauty and distinction. 
 The Shakesperian influence that is suggested shows that the author has 
 gone to school with the best masters, and his mastery of the form he 
 has chosen gives the best evidence of conscientious workmanship." 
 
 ECHO. " The work of an artist. All of them are distinguished 
 by a lucidity, a sweetness, and a sincerity that will commend them to 
 the lover of poetry." 
 
 OUTLOOK. " Contains work of much more than ordinary quality, 
 there is power behind it, and faculty." 
 
 SCOTSMAN. "These sonnets are always clear in expression . . . 
 readers must admire the dignity and elevation of their style. . . . He 
 is more cultured and more intellectual than most singers upon this theme." 
 
 LITERATURE. "Remarkable activity of imagination, and ample 
 command of the technical resources of his art. . . . The little 
 volume contains a good deal of work of no little beauty and power." 
 
 DAILY MAIL. " These are scholarly sonnets, full of passion and 
 grace." 
 
 PILOT. "Mr. Holmes, in his book of sonnets, The Silence of 
 Love, proved himself a verse writer of more than ordinary merit and, 
 indeed, many on slighter grounds have received nomen famamque 
 poetcK. 
 
 JOHN LANE, LONDON AND NEW YORK. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 Uniform in Size and Price with this Volume. 
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? AN ESSAY. 
 
 TIMES. " Mr. Holmes has the first requisite of one who would 
 write philosophically upon poetry ; he has a clear understanding of the 
 main problems that have to be met. . . . Writes both clearly and 
 agreeably, has a ready command of illustration, and, though he is 
 dealing with truths that sound elementary, he has a true instinct for 
 the avoidance of the commonplace." 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. Full of profoundly suggestive and really 
 illumining remarks expressed with an eloquence and fervour not 
 unworthy of the author of the Second Apology for Poetry." 
 
 SPECTATOR. " When Mr. Holmes gives us detailed criticism of 
 poetry, he is quite admirable." 
 
 ACADEMY. " A deeply conceived and mainly right essay. . . . 
 A brilliant essay, full of the insight of which he speaks. It is essentially 
 poets work." 
 
 REVIEW OF THE WEEK. " This ingenious and suggestive essay 
 seems to us to stand alone as a sustained effort of thought to get to the 
 root of a very difficult matter. 
 
 BOOKMAN. "A strong and serious and dignified piece of work, 
 which rouses admiration in us far more than disagreement." 
 
 ECHO. " A piece of admirable and stimulating criticism well 
 worth reading." 
 
 JOHN LANE, LONDON AND NEW YORK. 
 
BOOK IS - 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFQRNIA LIBRARY