The limber motion of brawny young arms and hips in easy costumes."

"Always these compact lands--lands tied at the hips with the belt
stringing the huge oval lakes."

"Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd!--the diverse!
the compact!"

Tried by the standards of the perfect statuesque poems, these pages will
indeed seem strange enough; but viewed as a part of the poetic
compend of America, the swift gathering-in, from her wide-spreading,
multitudinous, material life, of traits and points and suggestions that
belong here and are characteristic, they have their value. The poet
casts his great seine into events and doings and material progress,
and these are some of the fish, not all beautiful by any means, but all
terribly alive, and all native to these waters.

In the "Carol of Occupations" occur, too, those formidable inventories
of the more heavy and coarsegrained trades and tools that few if any
readers have been able to stand before, and that have given the scoffers
and caricaturists their favorite weapons. If you detach a page of these
and ask, "Is it poetry? have the 'hog-hook,' the 'killing-hammer,' 'the
cutter's cleaver,' 'the packer's maul,' met with a change of heart, and
been converted into celestial cutlery?" I answer, No, they are as barren
of poetry as a desert is of grass; but in their place in the poem, and
in the collection, they serve as masses of shade or neutral color in
pictures, or in nature, or in character,--a negative service, but still
indispensable. The point, the moral of the poem, is really backed up
and driven home by this list. The poet is determined there shall be
no mistake about it. He will not put in the dainty and pretty things
merely,--he will put in the coarse and common things also, and he swells
the list till even his robust muse begins to look uneasy. Remember, too,
that Whitman declaredly writes the lyrics of America, of the masses,
of democracy, and of the practical labor of mechanics, boatmen, and
farmers:--

"The sum of all known reverence I add up in you, whoever you are;
All doctrines, all politics and civilization, exude from you;
All sculpture and monuments, and anything inscribed anywhere, are
tallied in you;
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records
reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same:
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they
all be?
The most renown'd