e-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack'd cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death."

This is not only Art, but great Art. So fresh in their power, so
striking in their beauty, are Whitman's utterances on Death that they
take their place in our memories beside the large utterances of
Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley.

It is a mistake to think that where Whitman fails in expression it is
through carelessness; that he was a great poet by flashes, and that had
he taken more pains he would have been greater still. We have been
assured by those who knew him intimately that he took the greatest care
over his work, and would wait for days until he could get what he felt to
be the right word.

To the student who comes fresh to a study of Whitman it is conceivable
that the rude, strong, nonchalant utterances may seem like the work of an
inspired but careless and impatient artist. It is not so. It is done
deliberately.

"I furnish no specimens," he says; "I shower them by exhaustless laws,
fresh and modern continually, as Nature does."

He is content to be suggestive, to stir your imagination, to awaken your
sympathies. And when he fails, he fails as Wordsworth did, because he
lacked the power of self-criticism, lacked the faculty of humour--that
saving faculty which gives discrimination, and intuitively protects the
artist from confusing pathos with bathos, the grand and the grandiose.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in his treatment of Sex. Frankness,
outspokenness on the primal facts of life are to be welcomed in
literature. All the great masters--Shakespeare, Dante, Dostoievsky,
Tolstoy, have dealt openly and fearlessly with the elemental passions.
There is nothing to deplore in this, and Mr. Swinburne was quite right
when he contended that the domestic circle is not to be for all men and
writers the outer limit of their world of work. So far from regretting
that Whitman claimed right to equal freedom when speaking of the primal
fact of procreation as when speaking of sunrise, sunsetting, and the
primal fact of death, every clean-minded man and woman should rejoice in
the poet's attitude. For he believed and gloried in the separate
personalities of man and woman, claiming manhood and womanhood as the
poet's province, exulting in the potentialities