ws, as Nature does, fresh
and modern continually."

His lines are pulsations, thrills, waves of force, indefinite dynamics,
formless, constantly emanating from the living centre, and they carry
the quality of the author's personal presence with them in a way that is
unprecedented in literature.

Occasionally there is a poem or a short piece that detaches itself,
and assumes something like ejaculatory and statuesque proportion, as
"O Captain, my Captain," "Pioneers," "Beat, Beat, Drums," and others in
"Drum-Taps;" but all the great poems, like "Walt Whitman," "Song of
the Open Road," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "To Working Men,"
"Sleep-Chasings," etc., are out-flamings, out-rushings, of the pent
fires of the poet's soul. The first-named poem, which is the seething,
dazzling sun of his subsequent poetic system, shoots in rapid succession
waves of almost consuming energy. It is indeed a central orb of fiercest
light and heat, swept by wild storms of emotion, but at the same time
of sane and beneficent potentiality. Neither in it nor in either of
the others is there the building-up of a fair verbal structure,
a symmetrical piece of mechanism, whose last stone is implied and
necessitated in the first.

"The critic's great error," says Heine, "lies in asking, 'What ought
the artist to do?' It would be far more correct to ask, 'What does the
artist intend?'"

It is probably partly because his field is so large, his demands
so exacting, his method so new (necessarily so), and from the whole
standard of the poems being what I may call an astronomical one, that
the critics complain so generally of want of form in him. And the
critics are right enough, as far as their objection goes. There is no
deliberate form here, any more than there is in the forces of nature.
Shall we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The void is filled
by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing, overarching will
in every page, every verse, that there is no escape from. Design and
purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, are just as pronounced
as in any poet.

There is a want of form in the unfinished statue, because it is
struggling into form; it is nothing without form; but there is no want
of form in the elemental laws and effusions,--in fire, or water, or
rain, or dew, or the smell of the shore or the plunging waves. And may
there not be the analogue of this in literature,--a potent, quickening,
exhilarating quality in