unted the scaffold,"--

very near him he stood in spirit; very near him he stood in the person of
others, but not in his own proper person.

If we take this poet literally, we shall believe he has been in California
and Oregon; that he has set foot in every city on the continent; that he
grew up in Virginia; that every Southern State has been by turns his home;
that he has been a soldier, a sailor, a miner; that he has lived in
Dakota's woods, his "diet meat, his drink from the spring;" that he has
lived on the plains with hunters and ranchmen, etc. He lays claim to all
these characters, all these experiences, because what others do, what
others assume, or suffer, or enjoy, that he appropriates to himself.

"I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinned with the ooze of
my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears, and beat me violently over the head with whipstocks.

"Agonies are one of my changes of garments,
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels--I myself become the wounded
person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.

"I become any presence or truth of humanity here,
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

"For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barred at night.
Not a mutineer walks hand-cuffed to the jail, but I am hand-cuffed to him
and walk by his side."

XIII

It is charged against Whitman that he does not celebrate love at all, and
very justly. He had no purpose to celebrate the sentiment of love.
Literature is vastly overloaded with this element already. He celebrates
fatherhood and motherhood, and the need of well-begotten, physiologically
well-begotten, offspring. Of that veiled prurient suggestion which readers
so delight in--of "bosoms mutinously fair," and "the soul-lingering loops
of perfumed hair," as one of our latest poets puts it--there is no hint
in his volume. He would have fallen from grace the moment he had attempted
such a thing. Any trifling or dalliance on his part would have been his
ruin. Love as a sentiment has fairly run riot in literature. From
Whitman's point of view, it would have be