ed and
concentrated, but the all but impalpable odor of the open air, the shore,
the wood, the hilltop. It aims, not to be a book, but to be a man.

Its purpose is to stimulate and arouse, rather than to soothe and satisfy.
It addresses the character, the intuitions, the ego, more than the
intellect or the purely aesthetic faculties. Its end is not taste, but
growth in the manly virtues and powers.

Its religion shows no trace of theology, or the conventional pietism.

It aspires to a candor and a directness like that of Nature herself.

It aims to let Nature speak without check, with original energy. The only
checks are those which health and wholeness demand.

Its standards are those of the natural universal.

Its method is egocentric. The poet never goes out of himself, but draws
everything into himself and makes it all serve to illustrate his
personality.

Its form is not what is called artistic. Its suggestion is to be found in
organic nature, in trees, clouds, and in the vital and flowing currents.

In its composition the author was doubtless greatly influenced by the
opera and the great singers, and the music of the great composers. He
would let himself go in the same manner and seek his effects through
multitude and the quality of the living voice.

Finally, "Leaves of Grass" is an utterance out of the depths of
primordial, aboriginal human nature. It embodies and exploits a character
not rendered anaemic by civilization, but preserving a sweet and sane
savagery, indebted to culture only as a means to escape culture, reaching
back always, through books, art, civilization, to fresh, unsophisticated
nature, and drawing his strength thence.

Another of the ideas that master Whitman and rule him is the idea of
identity,--that you are you and I am I, and that we are henceforth secure
whatever comes or goes. He revels in this idea; it is fruitful with him;
it begets in him the ego-enthusiasm, and is at the bottom of his
unshakable faith in immortality. It leavens all his work. It cannot be too
often said that the book is not merely a collection of pretty poems,
themes elaborated and followed out at long removes from the personality of
the poet, but a series of _sorties_ into the world of materials, the
American world, piercing through the ostensible shows of things to the
interior meanings, and illustrating in a free and large way the genesis
and growth of a man, his free use of the world about him, appropri