rely does
he portray America,--he speaks out of the American spirit, the spirit that
has broken irrevocably with the past and turns joyously to the future; he
does not praise equality, he illustrates it; he puts himself down beside
the lowest and most despised person, and calls him brother.

"You felons on trial in courts,
You convicts in prison-cells, you sentenced assassins chain'd and
handcuff'd with iron,
Who am I too that I am not on trial or in prison?
Me ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chain'd with
iron, or my ankles with iron?"

He does not give a little charity, he gives himself as freely as the
clouds give rain, or the sun gives light; he does not write a treatise on
democracy, he applies the democratic spirit to everything in heaven and on
earth, and redistributes the prizes from its points of view; he does not,
except very briefly, sing the praises of science, but he launches his
poems always from the scientific view of the world, in contradistinction
to the old theological and mythical point of view. It is always the
example, it is always the thing itself, he gives us. Few precepts, no
sermon, no reproof. Does he praise candor? No, he is candor; he confesses
to everything; he shows us the inmost working of his mind. We know him
better than we know our nearest friends. Does he exalt the pride of man in
himself, or egoism? Again he illustrates it: he is egoism; he makes the
whole universe revolve around himself; he never for a moment goes out of
himself; he does not seek a theme; he is the theme. His egocentric method
of treatment is what characterizes him as an artist. He elaborates no
theme, he builds nothing, he carves nothing, but makes himself a source
and centre of pulsing, vital energy. Wave after wave radiates from him.
What we see and get always is Walt Whitman. Our attention is never fixed
upon the writer, but always upon the man.

Of course this method of Whitman of becoming one with his subject, and
speaking out of it, is always the method of the creative artist. It is
this that distinguishes the artist from the mere thinker or prose-writer.
The latter tells us about a thing; the former gives us the thing, or the
spirit of the thing itself.

If Whitman had put his criticism of our time and civilization in an
argument or essay, the world would have received it very differently. As
an intellectual statement or proposition, we could have played with