y
universal standards; we see them vivified by a powerful imagination. We
see America as an idea, and see its relation to other ideas. We get a new
conception of the value of the near, the common, the familiar. New light
is thrown upon the worth and significance of the common people, and it is
not the light of an abstract idea, but the light of a concrete example. We
see the democratic type on a scale it has never before assumed; it is on a
par with any of the types that have ruled the world in the past, the
military, the aristocratic, the regal. It is at home, it has taken
possession, it can hold its own. Henceforth the world is going its way. If
it is over-confident, over-self-assertive, too American, that is the
surplusage of the poet, of whom we do not want a penny prudence and
caution; make your prophecy bold enough and it fulfills itself. Whitman
has betrayed no doubt or hesitation in his poetry. His assumptions and
vaticinations are tremendous, but they are uttered with an authority and
an assurance that convince like natural law.

IV

I think he gives new meaning to democracy and America. In him we see a new
type, rising out of new conditions, and fully able to justify itself and
hold its own. It is the new man in the new world, no longer dependent upon
or facing toward the old. I confess that to me America and the modern
would not mean very much without Whitman. The final proof was wanting
till they gave birth to a personality equal to the old types.

Discussions and speculations about democracy do not carry very far, after
all; to preach equality is not much. But when we see these things made
into a man, and see the world through his eyes, and see new joy and new
meaning in it, our doubts and perplexities are cleared up. Our universal
balloting, and schooling, and material prosperity prove nothing: can your
democracy produce a man who shall carry its spirit into loftiest regions,
and prove as helpful and masterful under the new conditions as the by-gone
types were under the old?

V

I predict a great future for Whitman, because the world is so unmistakably
going his way. The three or four great currents of the century--the
democratic current, the scientific current, the humanitarian current, the
new religious current, and what flows out of them--are underneath all
Whitman has written. They shape all and make all. They do not appear in
him as mere dicta, or intellectual propositions, but as impulses, w