the language of men and in the spirit of real things, and see how
he fares.

XV

Whitman was afraid of what he called the beauty disease. He thought a poet
of the first order should be sparing of the direct use of the beautiful,
as Nature herself is. His aim should be larger, and beauty should follow
and not lead. The poet should not say to himself, "Come, I will make
something beautiful," but rather "I will make something true, and
quickening, and powerful. I will not dress my verse up in fine words and
pretty fancies, but I will breathe into it the grit and force and
adhesiveness of real things." Beauty is the flowering of life and
fecundity, and it must have deep root in the non-beautiful.

Beauty, as the master knows it, is a spirit and not an adornment. It is
not merely akin to flowers and gems and rainbows: it is akin to the All.
Looking through his eyes, you shall see it in the rude and the savage
also, in rocks and deserts and mountains, in the common as well as in the
rare, in wrinkled age as well as in rosy youth.

The non-beautiful holds the world together, holds life together and
nourishes it, more than the beautiful. Nature is beautiful because she is
so much else first,--yes, and last, and all the time.

"For the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the
delicates of the earth and of man,
And nothing endures but personal qualities."

Is there not in field, wood, or shore something more precious and tonic
than any special beauties we may chance to find there,--flowers, perfumes,
sunsets,--something that we cannot do without, though we can do without
these? Is it health, life, power, or what is it?

Whatever it is, it is something analogous to this that we get in Whitman.
There is little in his "Leaves" that one would care to quote for its mere
beauty, though this element is there also. One may pluck a flower here and
there in his rugged landscape, as in any other; but the flowers are always
by the way, and never the main matter. We should not miss them if they
were not there. What delights and invigorates us is in the air, and in the
look of things. The flowers are like our wild blossoms growing under great
trees or amid rocks, never the camellia or tuberose of the garden or
hot-house,--something rude and bracing is always present, always a breath
of the untamed and aboriginal.

Whitman's work gives results, and never processes. There is no return of
the mind upon i