matters of literature. I have studied
Whitman, enjoyed him, felt his force and his value. And, speaking with
all seriousness, I believe that he has helped me, and will help me,
inestimably, in my endeavour to become a sound and mature man.

'For in him I have met with one who is, first and foremost, a man, a
large, healthy, simple, powerful, full-developed man. Bead his poem
called 'A Song of Joys'--what glorious energy of delight, what
boundless sympathy, what _sense_, what _spirit_! He knows the truth of
the life that is in all things. From joy in a railway train 'the
laughing locomotive! To push with resistless way and speed off in the
distance'--to joy in fields and hillsides, joy in 'the dropping of
rain-drops in a song,' joy in the fighter's strength, joy in the life
of the fisherman, in every form of active being--aye, and

Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart,
Joys of the solitary work, the spirit bow'd yet proud, the
suffering and the struggle;
The agonistic throes, the ecstasies, joys of the solemn musings
day or night;
Joys of the thought of Death, the great spheres Time and Space!

What would not I give to know the completeness of manhood implied in
all that? Such an ideal of course is not a new-created thing for me,
but I never _felt_ it as in Whitman's work. It is so foreign to my own
habits of thought. I have always been so narrow, in a sense so
provincial. And indeed I doubt whether Whitman would have appealed to
me as he now does had I read him for the first time in England and
under the old conditions. These fifteen months of practical business
life in America has swept my brain of much that was mere prejudice,
even when I thought it worship. I was a pedantic starveling; now, at
all events, I _see_ the world about me, and all the goodliness of it.
Then I am far healthier in body than I was, which goes for much. It
would be no hardship to me to take an axe and go off to labour on the
Pacific coast; nay, a year so spent would do me a vast amount of good.

'I wonder whether you have read any of the twaddle that is written
about Whitman's grossness, his materialism, and so forth? If so, read
his poems now, and tell me how they impress you. Is he not _all_
spirit, rightly understood? For to him the body with its energies is
but manifestation of that something invisible which we call human soul.
And so pure is the soul in him, so mighty, so tender, so infinit