tself; it descends constantly upon things, persons,
realities. It is a rushing stream which will not stop to be analyzed. It
has been urged that Whitman does not give the purely intellectual
satisfaction that would seem to be warranted by his mental grasp and
penetration. No, nor the aesthetic satisfaction warranted by his
essentially artistic habit of mind. Well, he did not promise satisfaction
in anything, but only to put us on the road to satisfaction. His book, he
says, is not a "good lesson," but it lets down the bars to a good lesson,
and that to another, and every one to another still.

Let me repeat that the sharp, distinct intellectual note--the note of
culture, books, clubs, etc., such as we get from so many modern writers,
you will not get from Whitman. In my opinion, the note he sounds is deeper
and better than that. It has been charged by an unfriendly critic that he
strikes lower than the intellect. If it is meant by this that he misses
the intellect, it is not true; he stimulates the intellect as few poets
do. He strikes lower because he strikes farther. He sounds the note of
character, personality, volition, the note of prophecy, of democracy, and
of love. He seems unintellectual to an abnormally intellectual age; he
seems unpoetic to a taste formed upon poetic tidbits; he seems irreligious
to standards founded upon the old models of devotional piety; he seems
disorderly, incoherent to all petty thumb and finger measurements. In his
ideas and convictions, Whitman was a modern of the moderns; yet in his
type, his tastes, his fundamental make-up, he was primitive, of an earlier
race and age,--before, as Emerson suggests, the gods had cut Man up into
men, with special talents of one kind or another.

XVI

Take any of Whitman's irregular-flowing lines, and clip and trim them, and
compress them into artificial verse-forms, and what have we gained to make
up for what we have lost? Take his lines called "Reconciliation," for
instance:--

"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 incessantly 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."

Or take his poem cal