in his stomach to turn some of it into intense
and enjoyable occupation.

Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a sort of
outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells us, should be read;
"among the cooling influences of external nature"; and this
recommendation, like that other famous one which Hawthorne prefixed to
his collected tales, is in itself a character of the work. Every one who
has been upon a walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with
the body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true ease
and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at rest; we think
in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things seem big enough, and great
things no longer portentous; and the world is smilingly accepted as it
is. This is the spirit that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks
very ill of the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school
outdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of mind by
simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that the reader, to keep
the advantage over his author which most readers enjoy, is tricked into
professing the same view. And this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is
the greatest charm of his work. Thence, in spite of an uneven and
emphatic key of expression, something trenchant and straightforward,
something simple and surprising, distinguishes his poems. He has sayings
that come home to one like the Bible. We fall upon Whitman, after the
works of so many men who write better, with a sense of relief from
strain, with a sense of touching nature, as when one passes out of the
flaring, noisy thoroughfares of a great city, into what he himself has
called, with unexcelled imaginative justice of language, "the huge and
thoughtful night." And his book in consequence, whatever may be the
final judgment of its merit, whatever may be its influence on the
future, should be in the hands of all parents and guardians as a
specific for the distressing malady of being seventeen years old.
Green-sickness yields to his treatment as to a charm of magic; and the
youth, after a short course of reading, ceases to carry the universe
upon his shoulders.

III

Whitman is not one of those who can be deceived by familiarity. He
considers it just as wonderful that there are myriads of stars as that
one man should rise from the dead. He declares "a hair on the back of
his hand just as curious as any special revelation." His