n a brave, vivacious note, and
build the man up in courage while we demolish its substitute,
indifference.

Whitman is alive to all this. He sees that, if the poet is to be of any
help, he must testify to the livableness of life. His poems, he tells
us, are to be "hymns of the praise of things." They are to make for a
certain high joy in living, or what he calls himself "a brave delight
fit for freedom's athletes." And he has had no difficulty in introducing
his optimism: it fitted readily enough with his system; for the average
man is truly a courageous person and truly fond of living. One of
Whitman's remarks upon this head is worth quotation, as he is there
perfectly successful, and does precisely what he designs to do
throughout: Takes ordinary and even commonplace circumstances; throws
them out, by a happy turn of thinking, into significance and something
like beauty; and tacks a hopeful moral lesson to the end.

"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers,
cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of
healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of
horses, the passion for light and the open air,--all is an old
unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and of a
residence of the poetic in outdoor people."

There seems to me something truly original in this choice of trite
examples. You will remark how adroitly Whitman begins, hunters and
woodmen being confessedly romantic. And one thing more. If he had said
"the love of healthy men for the female form," he would have said almost
a silliness; for the thing has never been dissembled out of delicacy,
and is so obvious as to be a public nuisance. But by reversing it, he
tells us something not unlike news; something that sounds quite freshly
in words; and, if the reader be a man, gives him a moment of great
self-satisfaction and spiritual aggrandisement. In many different
authors you may find passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a
more ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in our
connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in ordinary pursuits is
a sort of standing challenge to everybody else. If one man can grow
absorbed in delving his garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over
something else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener is
to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to take his food if
he has not alchemy enough