have loved in vain and shall love in vain
until the end--to Her who wears, even in the triumph of her
Immortality, the close-clinging, heavily-scented cerements of the
Dead!

"The old bards shall cease and their memory that lingers
Of frail brides and faithless shall be shrivelled as with fire,
For they loved us not nor knew us and our lips were dumb, our
fingers
Could wake not the secret of the lyre.
Else, else, O God, the Singer,
I had sung, amid their rages,
The long tale of Man,
And his deeds for good and ill.
But the Old World knoweth--'tis the speech of all his ages--
Man's wrong and ours; he knoweth and is still."

WALT WHITMAN

I want to approach this great Soothsayer from the angle least of all
profaned by popular verdicts. I mean from the angle of his poetry.
We all know what a splendid heroic Anarchist he was. We all know
with what rude zest he gave himself up to that "Cosmic Emotion," to
which in these days the world does respectful, if distant, reverence.
We know his mania for the word "en masse," for the words
"ensemble," "democracy" and "libertad." We know his defiant
celebrations of Sex, of amorousness, of maternity; of that Love of
Comrades which "passeth the love of women." We know the world-shaking
effort he made--and to have made it at all, quite apart from
its success, marks him a unique genius!--to write poetry about every
mortal thing that exists, and to bring the whole breathing palpable
world into his Gargantuan Catalogues. It is absurd to grumble at
these Inventories of the Round Earth. They may not all move to
Dorian flutes, but they form a background--like the lists of the Kings
in the Bible and the lists of the Ships in Homer--against which, as
against the great blank spaces of Life itself, "the writing upon the
wall" may make itself visible.

What seems much less universally realized is the extraordinary
genius for sheer "poetry" which this Prophet of Optimism possessed.
I agree that Walt Whitman's Optimism is the only kind, of that sort
of thing, that one can submit to without a blush. At least it is not
indecent, bourgeois, and ill-bred, like the fourth-hand Protestantism
that Browning dishes up, for the delectation of Ethical Societies. It is
the optimism of a person who has seen the American Civil War. It is
the optimism of a man who knows "the Bowery" and "the road," and
has had queer friends in his mortal pilgri