man. But when all things have been duly considered,
it will be found, I think, that he finally rests only with great personal
qualities and traits. He is drawn by powerful, natural persons, wherever
found,--men and women self-poised, fully equipped on all sides:--

"I announce a great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate,
compassionate, fully arm'd,
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold,"--

and much more to the same effect.

"I say nourish a great intellect, a great brain:
If I have said anything to the contrary, I hereby retract it."

Whitman is a formalist, just as every man who has a way of his own of
saying and doing things, no matter how natural, is a formalist; but he is
not a stickler for form of any sort. He has his own proper form, of
course, which he rarely departs from. At one extreme of artificiality Mr.
Stedman apparently places the sonnet. This is an arbitrary form; its rules
are inflexible; it is something cut and shaped and fitted together after a
predetermined pattern, and to this extent is artificial. If Whitman's
irregularity was equally studied; if it gave us the same sense of
something cunningly planned and wrought to a particular end, clipped here,
curbed there, folded back in this line, drawn out in that, and attaining
to a certain mechanical proportion and balance as a whole,--then there
would be good ground for the critic's charge. But such is not the case.
Whitman did not have, nor claim to have, the architectonic power of the
great constructive poets. He did not build the lofty rhyme. He did not
build anything, strictly speaking. He let himself go. He named his book
after the grass, which makes a carpet over the earth, and which is a sign
and a presence rather than a form.

XXII

Whitman's defects flow out of his great qualities. What we might expect
from his size, his sense of mass and multitude, would be an occasional
cumbrousness, turgidity, unwieldiness, ineffectualness: what we might
expect from his vivid realism would be an occasional over-rankness or
grossness; from his bluntness, a rudeness; from his passion for country, a
little spread-eagleism; from his masterly use of indirection, occasional
obscurity; from his mystic identification of himself with what is
commonest, cheapest, nearest, a touch at times of the vulgar and unworthy;
from his tremendous practical democracy, a bias at times toward too low an
average; fr