smical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau
to write, after an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a
little more than human." In fact, the main clew to Walt Whitman's life
and personality, and the expression of them in his poems, is to be found
in about the largest emotional element that has appeared anywhere. This,
if not controlled by a potent rational balance, would either have tossed
him helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as ever storm
and gale drove ship to ruin. These volcanic emotional fires appear
everywhere in his books; and it is really these, aroused to intense
activity and unnatural strain during the four years of the war and his
persistent labors in the hospitals, that have resulted in his illness
and paralysis since.

It has been impossible, I say, to resist these personal impressions and
magnetisms, and impossible with me not to follow them up in the poems,
in doing which I found that his "Leaves of Grass" was really the _drama
of himself,_ played upon various and successive stages of nature,
history, passion, experience, patriotism, and that he had not made,
nor had he intended to make, mere excellent "poems," tunes, statues, or
statuettes, in the ordinary sense.

Before the man's complete acceptance and assimilation by America, he
may have to be first passed down through the minds of critics and
commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new quality
taken off,--a quality like that which adheres to objects in the open
air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as one's mood is
healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The processes are silently
at work. Already seen from a distance, and from other atmospheres and
surroundings, he assumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for in curious
contrast to the general denial of Whitman in this country (though he
has more lovers and admirers here than is generally believed) stands
the reception accorded him in Europe. The poets there, almost without
exception, recognize his transcendent quality, the men of science his
thorough scientific basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all
his towering picturesque personality and modernness. Professor Clifford
says he is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of
advanced scientism than any other living poet. Professor Tyrrell and Mr.
Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to be natural
and "self-regulated by the law of perfe