eness, and its mystery go together. Browning has put it in a
line:--

". . . savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--_and GOD renews_
_His ancient rapture_."

It is the "rapture" and the mystery which Whitman misses in many of his
songs of Sex.

There is no need to give here any theological significance to the word
"God." Let the phrase stand for the mystic poetry of animalism. Whitman
has no sense of mystery.

I have another objection against "The Children of Adam." The loud,
self-assertive, genial, boastful style of Whitman suits very well many of
his democratic utterances, his sweeping cosmic emotions. But here it
gives one the impression of a kind of showman, who with a flourishing
stick is shouting out to a gaping crowd the excellences of manhood and
womanhood. Deliberately he has refrained from the mood of imaginative
fervour which alone could give a high seriousness to his treatment--a
high seriousness which is really indispensable. And his rough, slangy,
matter-of-fact comments give an atmosphere of unworthy vulgarity to his
subject. Occasionally he is carried away by the sheer imaginative beauty
of the subject, then note how different the effect:--

"Have you ever loved the body of a woman,
Have you ever loved the body of a man,
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all
Nations and times all over the earth?"

"If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred,
And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted,
And in man or woman a clean, strong, firm-fibred body is
More beautiful than the most beautiful face."

If only all had been of this quality. But interspersed with lines of
great force and beauty are cumbrous irrelevancies, wholly superfluous
details.

William Morris has also treated the subject of Sex in a frank, open
fashion. And there is in his work something of the easy, deliberate
spaciousness that we find in Whitman. But Morris was an artist first and
foremost, and he never misses the _poetry_ of animalism; as readers of
the "Earthly Paradise" and the prose romances especially know full well.

It is not then because Whitman treats love as an animal passion that I
take objection to much in his "Children of Adam." There are poets enough
and to spare who sing of the sentimental aspects of love. We need have
no quarrel with Whitman's aim as expressed by Mr. John Burroughs: "To put
in his