these stupendous claims for himself; it is Walt Whitman as the
spokesman of the genius of American democracy. He is not to discuss a
question. He is to outline a character, he is to incarnate a principle.
The essayist or philosopher may discuss the value of any given idea,--may
talk about it; the creative artist alone can give us the thing itself, the
concrete flesh-and-blood reality. Whitman is not only to make this survey,
to launch this criticism; he is to embody it in a living human
personality, and enable us to see the world of man and morals through its
eyes. What with the scientist, the philosopher, is thought, must be
emotion and passion with him.

Whitman promises that we shall share with him "two greatnesses, and a
third one rising inclusive and more resplendent,"--

"The greatness of Love and Democracy and the greatness of Religion"--

not merely as ideas, but as living impulses. He is to show the spirit of
absolute, impartial nature, incarnated in a human being, imbued with
love, democracy, and religion, moving amid the scenes and events of the
New World, sounding all the joys and abandonments of life, and re-reading
the oracles from the American point of view. And the utterance launched
forth is to be imbued with poetic passion.

Whitman always aims at a complete human synthesis, and leaves his reader
to make of it what he can. It is not for the poet to qualify and explain.
He seeks to reproduce his whole nature in a book,--reproduce it with all
its contradictions and carnalities, the good and the bad, the coarse and
the fine, the body and the soul,--to give free swing to himself, trusting
to natural checks and compensations to ensure a good result at last, but
not at all disturbed if you find parts of it bad as in creation itself.

His method being that of the poet, and not that of the moralist or
preacher, how shall he sort and sift, culling this virtue and that, giving
parts and fragments instead of the entire man? He must give all, not
abstractly, but concretely, synthetically.

To a common prostitute Whitman says:--

"Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you;
Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you, and the leaves to rustle
for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you."

We are housed in social usages and laws, we are sheltered and warmed and
comforted by conventions and institutions and numberless traditions;
their value no one disputes. But for purposes