tional and took his stand upon the natural. With rude hands he tore
away the veils and concealments from the body and from the soul. He
ignored entirely all social and conventional usages and hypocrisies, not
by revolt against them, but by choosing a point of view from which they
disappeared. He embraced the unrefined and the savage as well as the
tender and human. The illusions of the past, the models and standards, he
freed himself of at once, and declared for the beauty and the divinity of
the now and the here. The rude realism of his "Leaves" shocked like a
plunge in the surf, but it invigorated also, if we were strong enough to
stand it.

Out of Whitman's absolute self-trust arose his prophetic egotism,--the
divine fervor and audacity of the simple ego. He shared the conviction of
the old prophets that man is a part of God, and that there is nothing in
the universe any more divine than the individual soul. "I, too," he says,
and this line is the key to much there is in his work--

"I, too, have felt the resistless call of myself."

With the old Biblical writers the motions of their own spirits, their
thoughts, their dreams, were the voice of God. There is something of the
same sort in Whitman. The voice of that inner self was final and
authoritative with him. It was the voice of God. He could drive through
and over all the conventions of the world in obedience to that voice. This
call to him was as a voice from Sinai. One of his mastering thoughts was
the thought of identity,--that you are you, and I am I. This was the final
meaning of things, and the meaning of immortality. "Yourself, _yourself_,
YOURSELF," he says, with swelling vehemence, "forever and ever." To be
compacted and riveted and fortified in yourself, so as to be a law unto
yourself, is the final word of the past and of the present.

II

The shadow of Whitman's self-reliance and heroic self-esteem--the sort of
eddy or back-water--was undoubtedly a childlike fondness for praise and
for seeing his name in print. In his relaxed moments, when the stress of
his task was not upon him, he was indeed in many respects a child. He had
a child's delight in his own picture. He enjoyed hearing himself lauded as
Colonel Ingersoll lauded him in his lecture in Philadelphia, and as his
friends lauded him at his birthday dinner parties during the last two or
three years of his life; he loved to see his name in print, and items
about himself in the newspapers;