that a plausible criticism might be made against Whitman, perhaps
has been made, that in him we find the big merely,--strength without
power, size without quality. A hasty reader might carry away this
impression from his work, because undoubtedly one of the most obvious
things about him is his great size. It is impossible not to feel that here
is a large body of some sort. We have come upon a great river, a great
lake, an immense plain, a rugged mountain. We feel that this mind requires
a large space to turn in. The page nearly always gives a sense of mass and
multitude. All attempts at the playful or humorous seem ungainly. The
style is processional and agglomerative. Out of these vast, rolling,
cloud-like masses does there leap forth the true lightning? It seems to me
there can be no doubt about that. The spirit easily triumphs. There is not
only mass, there is penetration; not only vastness, there is sublimity;
not only breadth, there is quality and charm. He is both Dantesque and
Darwinian, as has been said.

Mr. Symonds was impressed with this quality of vastness in Whitman, and,
despairing of conveying an adequate notion of him by any process of
literary analysis, resorts to the use of a succession of metaphors,--the
symbolic use of objects that convey the idea of size and power. Thus, "he
is Behemoth, wallowing in primeval jungles;" "he is a gigantic elk or
buffalo, trampling the grass of the wilderness;" "he is an immense tree, a
kind of Ygdrasil, striking its roots deep down into the bowels of the
world;" "he is the circumambient air in which float shadowy shapes, rise
mirage-towers and palm-groves;" "he is the globe itself,--all seas,
lands, forests, climates, storms, snows, sunshines, rains of universal
earth."

Colonel Ingersoll said there was something in him akin to mountains and
plains, and to the globe itself.

But Whitman is something more than a literary colossus. Pigmies can only
claim pigmy honors. Size, after all, rules in this universe, because size
and power go together. The large bodies rule the small. There is no
impression of greatness in art without something that is analogous to
size,--breadth, depth, height. The sense of vastness is never the gift of
a minor poet. You cannot paint Niagara on the thumb-nail. Great artists
are distinguished from small by the majesty of their conceptions.

Whitman's air is continental. He implies a big country, vast masses of
humanity, sweeping and stirring