blend; how
the man is developed and recruited, his spirit's descent; how he walks
through materials absorbing and conquering them; how he confronts the
immensities of time and space; where are the true sources of his power,
the soul's real riches,--that which "adheres and goes forward and is not
dropped by death;" how he is all defined and published and made certain
through his body; the value of health and physique; the great solvent,
Sympathy,--to show the need of larger and fresher types in art and in
life, and then how the state is compacted, and how the democratic idea
is ample and composite, and cannot fail us,--to show all this, I
say, not as in a lecture or a critique, but suggestively and
inferentially,--to work it out freely and picturesquely, with endless
variations, with person and picture and parable and adventure, is the
lesson and object of "Leaves of Grass." From the first line, where the
poet says,

"I loafe and invite my Soul,"

to the last, all is movement and fusion,--all is clothed in flesh and
blood. The scene changes, the curtain rises and falls, but the theme is
still Man,--his opportunities, his relations, his past, his future, his
sex, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, his "great hands," his
yearning heart, his seething brain, the abysmal depths that underlie him
and open from him, all illustrated in the poet's own character,--he the
chief actor always. His personality directly facing you, and with its
eye steadily upon you, runs through every page, spans all the details,
and rounds and completes them, and compactly holds them. This gives the
form and the art conception, and gives homogeneousness.

When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, like an apple or a peach;
slowly wrought out and dismissed, it drops from his boughs holding
a conception or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. It is
completed, distinct, and separate,--might be his, or might be any man's.
It carries his quality, but it is a thing of itself, and centres and
depends upon itself. Whether or not the world will hereafter consent,
as in the past, to call only beautiful creations of this sort _poems,_
remains to be seen. But this is certainly not what Walt Whitman does,
or aims to do, except in a few cases. He completes no poems apart and
separate from himself, and his pages abound in hints to that effect:--

"Let others finish specimens--I never finish specimens;
I shower them by exhaustless la