words, apart from and without any consideration
of constructive form? Under the influence of the expansive, creative
force that plays upon me from these pages, like sunlight or gravitation,
the question of form never comes up, because I do not for one moment
escape the eye, the source from which the power and action emanate.

I know that Walt Whitman has written many passages with reference far
more to their position, interpretation, and scanning ages hence, than
for current reading. Much of his material is too near us; it needs time.
Seen through the vista of long years, perhaps centuries, it will assume
quite different hues. Perhaps those long lists of trades, tools, and
occupations would not be so repellent if we could read them, as we read
Homer's catalogue of the ships, through the retrospect of ages. They are
justified in the poem aside from their historic value, because they
are alive and full of action,--panoramas of the whole mechanical and
industrial life of America, north, east, south, west,--bits of scenery,
bird's-eye views, glimpses of moving figures, caught as by a flash,
characteristic touches indoors and out, all passing in quick succession
before you. They have in the fullest measure what Lessing demands in
poetry,--the quality of ebbing and flowing action, as distinct from the
dead water of description; they are thoroughly dramatic, fused, pliant,
and obedient to the poet's will. No glamour is thrown over them, no wash
of sentiment; and if they have not the charm of novelty and distance,
why, that is an accident that bars them in a measure to us, but not to
the future. Very frequently in these lists or enumerations of objects,
actions, shows, there are sure to occur lines of perfect description:--

"Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short
jerks;
Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome
prairie;
Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles
far and near;
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon;
Where the katydid works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree
over the well."

"Spar-makers in the spar-yard, the swarming row of well-grown
apprentices,
The swing of their axes on the square-hew'd log, shaping it toward
the shape of a mast,
The brisk short crackle of the steel driven slantingly into the pine,
The butter-color'd chips flying off in great flakes and slivers,