of the time-spirit out of which America grew, and
which is now shaping the destiny of the race upon this continent. He
strikes under and through our whole civilization.

He despised our social gods, he distrusted our book-culture, he was
alarmed at the tendency to the depletion and attenuation of the national
type, and he aimed to sow broadcast the germs of more manly ideals. His
purpose was to launch his criticism from the basic facts of human life,
psychic and physiologic; to inject into the veins of our anaemic literature
the reddest, healthiest kind of blood; and in doing so he has given free
swing to the primary human traits and affections and to sexuality, and has
charged his pages with the spirit of real things, real life.

We have been so long used to verse which is the outcome of the literary
impulse alone, which is written at so many removes from the primary human
qualities, produced from the extreme verge of culture and artificial
refinement, which is so innocent of the raciness and healthful coarseness
of nature, that poetry which has these qualities, which implies the body
as well as the mind, which is the direct outgrowth of a radical human
personality, and which make demands like those made by real things, is
either an offense to us or is misunderstood.

II

Whitman says his book is not a good lesson, but it takes down the bars to
a good lesson, and that to another, and that to another still. To take
down bars rather than to put them up is always Whitman's aim; to make his
reader free of the universe, to turn him forth into the fresh and
inexhaustible pastures of time, space, eternity, and with a smart slap
upon his back with the halter as a spur and send-off, is about what he
would do. His message, first and last, is "give play to yourself;" "let
yourself go;"--happiness is in the quest of happiness; power comes to him
who power uses.

"Long enough have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore;
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout,
and laughingly dash with your hair."

To hold Whitman up to ridicule, and to convict him of grossness and
tediousness, is easy enough; first, because he is so out of relation to
the modes and taste of his times, and, secondly, because he has somewhat
of the uncouthness and coarseness of large bodies. Then his seriousness
and simplicity, like that of Biblical and Oriental writers,-