d old cause
in it?
Has it not dangled long at the heels of the poets, politicians,
literats of enemies' lands?
Does it not assume that what is notoriously gone is still here?
Does it answer universal needs? will it improve manners?
Can your performance face the open fields and the seaside?
Will it absorb into me as I absorb food, air, to appear again in my
strength, gait, face?
Have real employments contributed to it? Original makers, not mere
amanuenses?

So far as Whitman's poetry falls within any of the old divisions it is
lyrical,--a personal and individual utterance. Open the book anywhere and
you are face to face with a man. His eye is fixed upon you. It is a man's
voice you hear, and it is directed to _you_. He is not elaborating a
theme: he is suggesting a relation or hinting a meaning. He is not
chiseling, or carving a work of art: he is roughly outlining a man; he is
planting a seed, or tilling a field.

XXV

I believe it was the lamented Professor Clifford who first used the term
"cosmic emotion" in connection with "Leaves of Grass." Whitman's
atmosphere is so distinctly outside of and above that which ministers to
our social and domestic wants,--the confined and perfumed air of an indoor
life; his mood and temper are so habitually begotten by the contemplation
of the orbs and the laws and processes of universal nature, that the
phrase often comes to mind in considering him. He is not in any sense,
except perhaps in a few minor pieces, a domestic and fireside poet,--a
solace to our social instincts and cultivated ideals. He is too large, too
aboriginal, too elemental, too strong for that. I seem to understand and
appreciate him best when I keep in mind the earth as a whole, and its
relation to the system. Any large view or thought, or survey of life or
mankind, is a preparation for him. He demands the outdoor temper and
habit, he demands a sense of space and power, he demands above all things
a feeling for reality. "Vastness" is a word that applies to him; abysmal
man, cosmic consciousness, the standards of the natural universal,--all
hint some phase of his genius. His survey of life and duty is from a point
not included in any four walls, or in any school or convention. It is a
survey from out the depths of being; the breath of worlds and systems is
in these utterances. His treatment of sex, of comradeship, of death, of
democracy, of religion, of art, of i