ely
sympathetic, that it may stand for Humanity itself. I am often moved
profoundly by his words. He makes me feel that I am a very part of the
universe, and that in health I can deny kinship with nothing that
exists. I believe that he for the first time has spoken with the very
voice of nature; forests and seas sing to us through him, and through
him the healthy, unconscious man, 'the average man,' utters what before
he had no voice to tell of, his secret aspirations, his mute love and
praise.

'Look you! I write a sort of essay, and in doing so prove that I am
myself still. Were it not that I have mercy on you, I could preach on
even as I used to do to my class in Lambeth. Ha, if I had known Whitman
then! I believe that by persuading those men to read him, and helping
them to understand him, I should really have done an honest day's work.
There were some who could have relished his meaning, and whose lives he
would have helped. For there it is; Whitman helps one; he is a tonic
beyond all to be found in the druggist's shop. I imagine that to live
with the man himself for a few days would be the best thing that could
befall an invalid; surely vital force would come out of him.

'He makes one ashamed to groan at anything. Whatever comes to us is in
the order of things, and the sound man accepts it as his lot. Yes, even
Death--of which he says noble things. The old melodious weeping of the
poets--Moschus over his mallows, and Catullus with his '_Soles occidere
et redire possunt_'--Whitman has no touch of that. Noble grief there is
in him, and noble melancholy can come upon him, but acquiescence is his
last word. He holds that all is good, because it exists, for everything
plays its part in the scheme of nature. When his day comes, he will
die, as the greatest have done before him, and there will be no puny
repining at the order of things.

'Has he then made me a thorough-going optimist? Scarcely, for the
willow cannot become the oak, Your old name for me was 'The Idealist,'
and I suppose in a measure I deserved it; I know I did in the most
foolish sense of the word. And in my idealism was of course implied a
good deal of optimism. But shall I tell you what was there in a yet
larger measure? That which is termed self-conceit. An enemy speaking of
me now--Dalmaine for example, if he chose to tell the truth--would say
that a business life in America has taken a great deal of the humbug
out of me. I shall always be rather