he
functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all,
in fact, are divine; and that matter is as divine as spirit. The
effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought
just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing
objects without selection. His single expressions are often
unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth. He speaks of "the
vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue," of the "lisp"
of the plane, of the prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling
spread of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction
between poetry and prose the most liberal canons of the poetic art will
never agree to accept lines like these:

"And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck
and ankles;
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and
passed north."

Whitman is the spokesman of Democracy and of the future; full of
brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the
crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow in the ranks. He liked the
people--multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway
omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Negro {549}
truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the
scholar. "I loafe and invite my soul," he writes: "I sound my barbaric
yawp over the roofs of the world." His poem _Walt Whitman_, frankly
egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man--the same
as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has
great tenderness and heartiness--"the good gray poet;" and during the
civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in
the Washington hospitals--an experience which he has related in the
_Dresser_ and elsewhere. It is characteristic of his rough and ready
_camaraderie_ to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call
himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a
slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His decriers
allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in
the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra
civilization--like Thoreau, though in a different way. But with all
his mistakes in art there is a healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of
life in his lyric utterance and a great sweep of imagination in his
panoramic view of times and countries. One likes to r