ossed
beard streaming in the wind, he seems _to hold open_ by main,
gigantic force that door of hope which Fate and God and Man and
the Laws of Nature are all endeavoring to close! _And he holds it
open!_ And it is open still. It is for this reason--let the profane hold
their peace!--that I do not hesitate to understand very clearly why he
addresses a certain poem to the Lord Christ! Whether it be true or
not that the Pure in Heart see God, it is certainly true that they have
a power of saving us from God's Law of Cause and Effect!
According to this Law, we all "have our reward" and reap what we
have sown. But sometimes, like a deep-sea murmur, there rises from
the poetry of Walt Whitman a Protest that _must_ be heard! Then it
is that the Tetrarchs of Science forbid in vain "that one should raise
the Dead." For the Dead are raised up, and come forth, even in the
likeness wherein we loved them! If words, my friends; if the use of
words in poetry can convey such intimations as these to such a
generation as ours, can anyone deny that Walt Whitman is a great
poet?

Deny it, who may or will. There will always gather round him--as he
predicted--out of City-Tenements and Artist-Studios and Factory-Shops
and Ware-Houses and Bordelloes--aye! and, it may be, out of
the purlieus of Palaces themselves--a strange, mad, heart-broken
company of life-defeated derelicts, who come, not for Cosmic
Emotion or Democracy or Anarchy or Amorousness, or even
"Comradeship," but for that touch, that whisper, that word, that hand
outstretched in the darkness, which makes them _know_--against
reason and argument and all evidence--that they may hope still--_for
the Impossible is true!_

CONCLUSION

We have been together, you who read this--and to you, whoever you
are, whether pleased or angry, I make a comrade's signal. Who
knows? We might be the very ones to understand each other, if we
met! We have been together, in the shadow of the presences that
make life tolerable; and now we must draw our conclusion and go
our way.

Our conclusion? Ah! that is a hard matter. The world we live in
lends itself better to beginnings than conclusions. Or does anything,
in this terrible flowing tide, even _begin_? End or beginning, we
find ourselves floating upon it--this great tide--and we must do what
we can to get a clear glimpse of the high stars before we sink. I
wonder if, in the midst of the stammered and blurted incoherences,
the lapses and levi