lives, than that of any other man. Absolute candor, absolute pride,
absolute charity, absolute social and sexual equality, absolute nature. It
is not conditioned by what we deem modest or immodest, high or low, male
or female. It is not conditioned by our notions of good and evil, by our
notions of the refined and the select, by what we call good taste and bad
taste. It is the voice of absolute man, sweeping away the artificial,
throwing himself boldly, joyously, upon unconditioned nature. We are all
engaged in upholding the correct and the conventional, and drawing the
line sharply between good and evil, the high and the low, and it is well
that we should; but here is a man who aims to take absolute ground, and to
look at the world as God himself might look at it, without partiality or
discriminating,--it is all good, and there is no failure or imperfection
in the universe and can be none:--

"Open mouth of my Soul uttering gladness,
Eyes of my Soul seeing perfection,
Natural life of me, faithfully praising things,
Corroborating forever the triumph of things."

He does not take sides against evil, in the usual way, he does not take
sides with the good except as nature herself does. He celebrates the All.

Can we accept the world as science reveals it to us, as all significant,
as all in ceaseless transmutation, as every atom aspiring to be man, an
endless unfolding of primal germs, without beginning, without end, without
failure or imperfection, the golden age ahead of us, not behind us?

VIII

Because of Whitman's glorification of pride, egoism, brawn, self-reliance,
it is charged that the noble, the cultured, the self-denying, have no
place in his system. What place have they in the antique bards?--in Homer,
in Job, in Isaiah, in Dante? They have the same place in Whitman, yet it
is to be kept in mind that Whitman does not stand for the specially social
virtues, nor for culture, nor for the refinements which it induces, nor
for art, nor for any conventionality. There are flowers of human life
which we are not to look for in Walt Whitman. The note of fine manners,
chivalrous conduct, which we get in Emerson; the sweetness and light
gospel of Arnold; the gospel of hero-worship of Carlyle; the gracious
scholarship of our New England poets, etc.,--we do not get in Walt
Whitman. There is nothing in him at war with these things, but he is
concerned with more primal and elemental questions. He strikes under a