to us the magical _ugliness_ of certain aspects
of Nature--the bleak, stunted, God-forsaken things; the murky pools
where the grey leaves fall; the dead reeds where the wind whistles
no sweet fairy tunes; the unspeakable margins of murderous floods;
the tangled sea-drift, scurfed with scum; the black sea-winrow of
broken shells and dead fishes' scales; the roots of willow trees in
moonlit places crying out for demon-lovers; the long, moaning grass
that grows outside the walls of prisons; the leprous mosses that
cover paupers' graves; the mountainous wastes and blighted
marshlands which only unknown wild-birds ever touch with their
flying wings, and of which madmen dream--these are the things, the
ugly, terrible things, that this great optimist turns into poetry. "Yo
honk!" cries the wild goose, as it crosses the midnight sky. Others
may miss that mad-tossed shadow, that heartbreaking defiance--but
from amid the drift of leaves by the roadside, this bearded Fakir of
Outcasts has caught its meaning; has heard, and given it its answer.

Ah, gentle and tender reader; thou whose heart, it may be has never
cried all night for what it must not name, did you think Swinburne
or Byron were the poets of "love"? Perhaps you do not know that the
only "short story" on the title-page of which Guy de Maupassant
found it in him to write _that word_ is a story about the wild things
we go out to kill?

Walt Whitman, too, does not confine his notions of love to normal
human coquetries. The most devastating love-cry ever uttered,
except that of King David over his friend, is the cry this American
poet dares to put into the heart of "a wild-bird from Alabama" that
has lost its mate. I wonder if critics have done justice to the
incredible genius of this man who can find words for that aching of
the soul we do not confess even to our dearest? The sudden words
he makes use of, in certain connections, awe us, hush us, confound
us, take our breath,--as some of Shakespeare's do--with their
mysterious congruity. Has my reader ever read the little poem called
"Tears"? And what _purity_ in the truest, deepest sense, lies behind
his pity for such tragic craving; his understanding of what
love-stricken, banished ones feel. I do not speak now of his happily
amorous verses. They have their place. I speak of those desperate
lines that come, here and there, throughout his work, where, with his
huge, Titanic back set against the world-wall, and his wild-t