of his own Whitman ignores
them all; he lets in upon us the free and maybe raw air of the great
out-of-doors of absolute nature; his standards are not found inside of any
four walls; he contemplates life, and would quicken it in its
fundamentals; his survey is from a plane whence our arts and refinements
and petty distinctions disappear. He sees the evil of the world no less
necessary than the good; he sees death as a part of life itself; he sees
the body and the soul as one; he sees the spiritual always issuing from
the material; he sees not one result at last lamentable in the universe.

IV

Unless, as I have already said, we allow Whitman to be a law unto himself,
we can make little of him; unless we place ourselves at his absolute point
of view, his work is an offense and without meaning. The only question is,
Has he a law, has he a steady and rational point of view, is his work a
consistent and well-organized whole? Ask yourself, What is the point of
view of absolute, uncompromising science? It is that creation is all good
and sound; things are as they should be or must be; there are no
conceivable failures; there is no evil in the final analysis, or, if there
is, it is necessary, and plays its part also; there is no more beginning
nor ending than there is now, no more heaven or hell than we find or make
here:--

"Did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be work'd over and
rectified?"

It has been urged that Whitman violates his own canon of the excellence of
nature. But what he violates is more a secondary or acquired nature. He
violates our social conventions and instincts, he exposes what we cover
up; but the spirit of his undertaking demanded this of him. Remember that
at all hazards he is to let nature--absolute nature--speak; that he is to
be the poet of the body as well as of the soul, and that no part of the
body of a man or woman, "hearty and clean," is vile, and that "none shall
be less familiar than the rest."

His glory is, that he never flinched or hesitated in following his
principle to its logical conclusions,--"my commission obeying, to question
it never daring."

It was an heroic sacrifice, and atones for the sins of us all,--the sins
of perverting, denying, abusing the most sacred and important organs and
functions of our bodies.

V

In Whitman we find the most complete identification of the man with the
subject. He always is, or becomes, the thing he portrays. Not me