uch absence or unconsciousness was entirely
real. He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men,
or time in the world's history, or against any trades or
occupations--not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate
things, nor any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those
laws, such as illness, deformity, and death. He never complained or
grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, or anything else. He
never swore. He could not very well, since he never spoke in anger and
apparently never was angry. He never exhibited fear, and I do not
believe he ever felt it."[38]

[38] R. M. Bucke: Cosmic consciousness, pp. 182-186, abridged.

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic
expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only
sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order;
and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere
monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously
for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion
suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and
women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as
the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with
his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist.
Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists
for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are
already beginning to be drawn;[39] hymns are written by others in his
peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder
of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the
latter.

[39] I refer to The Conservator, edited by Horace Traubel, and
published monthly at Philadelphia.

Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan." The word nowadays means
sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes
it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious
consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this
poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the
tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be
present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his
freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the
first sense of the word would