o live in the open air, even laying claim to the "rowdyish." He is
proud of freckles, sun-tan, brawn, and holds up the powerful and
unrefined.

"I am enamor'd of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes
and mauls, and the drivers of horses;
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out."

"Nothing endures," he says, "but personal qualities." "Produce great
persons and the rest follows." Does he glory in the present? he reverently
bows before the past also. Does he sound the call of battle for the Union?
but he nourishes the sick and wounded of the enemy as well. Does he flout
at the old religions? but he offers a larger religion in their stead. He
is never merely negative, he is never fanatical, he is never narrow. He
sees all and embraces and encloses all.

Then we see united and harmonized in Whitman the two great paramount
tendencies of our time and of the modern world,--the altruistic or
humanitarian tendency and the individualistic tendency; or, democracy and
individualism, pride and equality, or, rather, pride in equality. These
two forces, as they appear in separate individuals, are often
antagonistic. In Carlyle, individualism frowned upon democracy. In Whitman
they are blended and work together. Never was such audacious and
uncompromising individualism, and never was such bold and sweeping
fraternalism or otherism. The great pride of man in himself, which is one
motif of the poems, flows naturally into the great pride of man in his
fellows; his egoism does not separate him from, but rather unites him
with, all men. What he assumes they shall assume, and what he claims for
himself he demands in the same terms for all. He has set such an example
of self-trust and self-assertion as has no parallel in our literature, at
the same time that he has set an equal example in practical democracy and
universal brotherhood.

IX

Whitman's democracy is the breath of his nostrils, the light of his eyes,
the blood in his veins. The reader does not feel that here is some fine
scholar, some fine poet singing the praises of democracy; he feels that
here is a democrat, probably, as Thoreau surmised, the greatest the world
has yet seen, turning the light of a great love, a great intellect, a
great soul, upon America, upon contemporary life and events, and upon the
universe, and reading new lessons, n