rely outside the sources of character
and power of action.

Whitman identifies himself with our lives. We associate him with reality,
with days, scenes, persons, events. The youth who reads Poe or Lowell
wants to be a scholar, a wit, a poet, a writer; the youth who reads
Whitman wants to be a man, and to get at the meaning and value of life.
Our author's bent towards real things, real men and women, and his power
to feed and foster personality, are unmistakable.

Life, reality, alone proves him; a saner and more robust fatherhood and
motherhood, more practical democracy, more charity, more love, more
comradeship, more social equality, more robust ideals of womanly and manly
character, prove him. When we are more tolerant and patient and
long-suffering, when the strain of our worldly, commercial spirit relaxes,
then is he justified. Whitman means a letting-up of the strain all along
the line,--less hurry, less greed, less rivalry, more leisure, more
charity, more fraternalism and altruism, more religion, less formality and
convention.

"When America does what was promised,
When each part is peopled with free people,
When there is no city on earth to lead my city, the city of young men,
the Mannahatta city--but when the Mannahatta leads all the cities
of the earth,
When there are plentiful athletic bards, inland and seaboard,
When through these States walk a hundred millions of superb persons,
When the rest part away for superb persons, and contribute to them,
When fathers, firm, unconstrained, open-eyed--when breeds of the most
perfect mothers denote America,
Then to me ripeness and conclusion."

XV

After all I think it matters little whether we call him poet or not. Grant
that he is not a poet in the usual or technical sense, but poet-prophet,
or poet-seer, or all combined. He is a poet plus something else. It is
when he is judged less than poet, or no poet at all, that we feel
injustice is done him. Grant that his work is not art, that it does not
give off the perfume, the atmosphere of the highly wrought artistic works
like those of Tennyson, but of something quite different.

We have all been slow to see that his cherished ends were religious rather
than literary; that, over and above all else, he was a great religious
teacher and prophet. Had he been strictly a literary poet, like Lowell, or
Longfellow, or Tennyson,--that is, a writer working for purely artistic
ef