of ridicule. Emerson said he had heard with admiring submission the remark
of a lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gave
a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion was powerless to bestow;
and what ranks before religion with us as a people is being in the mode,
and writing our verse and cutting our coats in the approved style. Pride
of the eye, a keen sense of the proprieties and the conventionalities, and
a morbid feeling for the ridiculous, would have been death to Whitman's
undertaking. He would have faltered, or betrayed self-consciousness. He
certainly never could have spoken with that elemental aplomb and
indifference which is so marked a feature of his work. Any hesitation, any
knuckling, would have been his ruin. We should have seen he was not
entirely serious, and should have laughed at him. We laugh now only for a
moment; the spell of his earnestness and power is soon upon us.

VII

Thoreau considered Whitman's "Leaves" worth all the sermons in the country
for preaching; and yet few poets have assumed so little the function of
the preacher. His great cure-all is love; he gives himself instead of a
sermon. His faith in the remedial power of affection, comradeship, is
truly Christ-like. Lover of sinners is also his designation. The reproof
is always indirect or implied. He brings to bear character rather than
precept. He helps you as health, as nature, as fresh air, pure water help.
He says to you:--

"The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you:
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustomed
routine,--if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they
do not conceal you from me.
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion,--if these balk
others, they do not balk me.
The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature
death,--all these I part aside.
I track through your windings and turnings,--I come upon you where you
thought eye should never come upon you."

Whitman said, in the now famous preface of 1855, that "the greatest poet
does not moralize, or make applications of morals,--he knows the soul."
There is no preaching or reproof in the "Leaves."

"I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive s