the divine in the human. Indeed it is here that he
sounds his most joyous and triumphant note. No such faith in spiritual
results, no such conviction of the truth of immortality, no such
determined recognition of the unseen world as the final reality is to be
found in modern poetry.

As I have said, Whitman aimed to put his whole nature in a poem--the
physical or physiological, the spiritual, the aesthetic and
intellectual,--without giving any undue prominence to either. If he has
not done so, if he has made the animal and sexual too pronounced, more so
than nature will justify in the best proportioned man, then and then only
is his artistic scheme vitiated and his work truly immoral.

It may be true that the thing a man is least likely to forget is that he
is an animal; what he is most likely to forget, is that the animal is just
as sacred and important as any other part; indeed that it is the basis of
all, and that a sane and healthful and powerful spirituality and
intellectuality can only flow out of a sane and healthful animality.

"I believe in you, my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other."

III

Furthermore, Whitman's main problem is to project into literature the new
democratic man as he conceives him,--the man of the future, intensely
American, but in the broadest sense human and cosmopolitan; he is to
project him on a scale large enough for all uses and conditions, ignoring
the feudal and aristocratic types which have for the most part dominated
literature, and matching them with a type more copious in friendship,
charity, sympathy, religion, candor, and of equal egoism and power.

It is to exploit and enforce and illustrate this type or character that
"Leaves of Grass" is written. The poems are the drama of this new
democratic man. This type Whitman finds in himself. He does not have to
create it as Shakespeare did Hamlet or Lear; he has only to discover it
in himself. He is it and he gives it free utterance. His work is,
therefore, as he says, the poem of himself,--himself written
large,--written as upon the face of the continent, written in the types
and events he finds on all sides. He sees himself in all men, the bad as
well as the good, and he sees all men in himself. All the stupendous
claims he makes for himself he makes for others. His egotism is vicarious
and embraces the world. It is not the private individual Walt Whitman that
makes