s country, drying us up in the viscera? Is
there not a decay--a deliberate, strange abnegation and dread--of sane
sexuality, of maternity and paternity, among us, and in our literary
ideals and social types of men and women? For myself, I welcome any
evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that deeper and counteracting
agencies are at work, as unspeakably precious. I do not know where this
evidence is furnished in such ample measure as in the pages of
Walt Whitman. The great lesson of nature, I take it, is that a sane
sensuality must be preserved at all hazards, and this, it seems to me,
is also the great lesson of his writings. The point is fully settled in
him that, however they may have been held in abeyance or restricted to
other channels, there is still sap and fecundity, and depth of virgin
soil in the race, sufficient to produce a man of the largest mould and
the most audacious and unconquerable egotism, and on a plane the last to
be reached by these qualities; a man of antique stature, of Greek fibre
and gripe, with science and the modern added, without abating one jot or
tittle of his native force, adhesiveness, Americanism, and democracy.

As I have already hinted, Whitman has met with by far his amplest
acceptance and appreciation in Europe. There is good reason for this,
though it is not what has been generally claimed, namely, that the
cultivated classes of Europe are surfeited with respectability, half
dead with _ennui_ and routine, and find an agreeable change in the
daring unconventionality of the new poet. For the fact is, it is not the
old and jaded minds of London, or Paris, or Dublin, or Copenhagen, that
have acknowledged him, but the fresh, eager, young minds. Nine tenths of
his admirers there are the sturdiest men in the fields of art, science,
and literature.

In many respects, as a race, we Americans have been pampered and
spoiled; we have been brought up on sweets. I suppose that, speaking
literally, no people under the sun consume so much confectionery, so
much pastry and cake, or indulge in so many gassy and sugared drinks.
The soda-fountain, with its syrups, has got into literature, and
furnishes the popular standard of poetry. The old heroic stamina of our
ancestors, that craved the bitter but nourishing home-brewed, has died
out, and in its place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be
pampered and cosseted. Among educated people here there is a mania for
the bleached, the double-r