t necessary to prepare yourself for a
course of Whitman. And this, not because there is any exotic mystery
about Whitman, not because there are any intellectual subtleties about
his work, as there are in Browning, but because he is the pioneer of a
new order, and the pioneer always challenges the old order; our tastes
require adjusting before they can value it properly.

There is no question about a "Return to Nature" with Whitman. He never
left it. Thoreau quitted the Emersonian study to get fresh inspiration
from the woods. Even Jefferies, bred up in the country, carried about
with him the delicate susceptibilities of the neurotic modern. Borrow
retained a firm grip-hold of many conventions of the city. But Whitman?
It was no case with him of a sojourn in the woods, or a ramble on the
heath. He was a spiritual native of the woods and heath; not, as some
seem to think, because he was a kind of wild barbarian who loved the
rough and uncouth, and could be found only in unfrequented parts, but
because he was in touch with the elemental everywhere. The wildness of
Whitman, the barbarian aspects of the man, have been overrated. He is
wild only in so far as he is cosmic, and the greater contains the less.
He loves the rough and the smooth, not merely the rough. His songs are
no mere paeans of rustic solitudes; they are songs of the crowded
streets, as well of the country roads; of men and women--of every
type--no less than of the fields and the streams. In fact, he seeks the
elemental everywhere. Thoreau found it in the Indian, Borrow in the
gypsies, Whitman, with a finer comprehensiveness, finds it in the
multitude. His business is to bring it to the surface, to make men and
women rejoice in--not shrink from--the great primal forces of life. But
he is not for moralizing--

"I give nothing as duties,
What others give as duties I give as loving impulses.
(Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)"

He has no quarrel with civilization as such. The teeming life of the
town is as wonderful to him as the big solitude of the Earth. Carlyle's
pleasantry about the communistic experiments of the American
Transcendentalists would have no application for him. "A return to
Acorns and expecting the Golden Age to arrive."

Here is no exclusive child of Nature:--

"I tramp a perpetual journey, . . .
My signs are a rainproof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the
woods . . .
I hav