ts seal upon him? I know not, but I feel
the man with that look is not of the day merely, but of the centuries. His
eye was not piercing, but absorbing,--"draining" is the word happily used
by William O'Connor; the soul back of it drew things to himself, and
entered and possessed them through sympathy and personal force and
magnetism, rather than through mere intellectual force.

XII

Walt Whitman was of the people, the common people, and always gave out
their quality and atmosphere. His commonness, his nearness, as of the
things you have always known,--the day, the sky, the soil, your own
parents,--were in no way veiled, or kept in abeyance, by his culture or
poetic gifts. He was redolent of the human and the familiar. Though
capable, on occasions, of great pride and hauteur, yet his habitual mood
and presence was that of simple, average, healthful humanity,--the virtue
and flavor of sailors, soldiers, laborers, travelers, or people who live
with real things in the open air. His commonness rose into the uncommon,
the extraordinary, but without any hint of the exclusive or specially
favored. He was indeed "no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women
or apart from them."

The spirit that animates every page of his book, and that it always
effuses, is the spirit of common, universal humanity,--humanity apart from
creeds, schools, conventions, from all special privileges and refinements,
as it is in and of itself in its relations to the whole system of things,
in contradistinction to the literature of culture which effuses the spirit
of the select and exclusive.

His life was the same. Walt Whitman never stood apart from or above any
human being. The common people--workingmen, the poor, the illiterate, the
outcast--saw themselves in him, and he saw himself in them: the attraction
was mutual. He was always content with common, unadorned humanity.
Specially intellectual people rather repelled him; the wit, the scholar,
the poet, must have a rich endowment of the common, universal, human
attributes and qualities to pass current with him. He sought the society
of boatmen, railroad men, farmers, mechanics, printers, teamsters, mothers
of families, etc., rather than the society of professional men or
scholars. Men who had the quality of things in the open air--the virtue of
rocks, trees, hills--drew him most; and it is these qualities and virtues
that he has aimed above all others to put into his poetry, and to put th