onder really is
not that he should have made such slow progress, but that he should have
gained any foothold at all. The whole literary _technique_ of the race
for the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying, as
it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead of upon
aboriginal power and manhood.

My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much
facilitated by contact--talks, meals, and jaunts--with him, stretching
through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his
_personnel_ was resumed and carried forward in his literary expression;
in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other. After the
test of time, nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy; and to
tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh, magnetic personality,
making you love him and want always to be with him, were to tell me
that my whole past life is a deception, and all the impression of my
perceptive faculties a fraud. I have studied him as I have studied
the birds, and have found that the nearer I got to him the more I saw.
Nothing about a first-class man can be overlooked; he is to be studied
in every feature,--in his physiology and phrenology, in the shape of his
head, in his brow, his eye, his glance, his nose, his ear (the ear is
as indicative in a man as in a horse), his voice. In Whitman all these
things are remarkably striking and suggestive. His face exhibits a rare
combination of harmony and sweetness with strength,--strength like the
vaults and piers of the Roman architecture. Sculptor never carved a
finer ear or a more imaginative brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing
eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of
starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman
was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so
now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You
know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that,
if he achieve the height at all, it will be from where every man stands,
and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious
point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or
_litterateur,_ but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to
make,--that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic
man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by
the word elemental or co