his fellow-creatures without showing
any deep personal attachment. In fact, the wider a man's sympathies are
the less room is there for any strong individual feeling. His friend,
Mr. Donaldson, has told us that he never remembers Whitman shedding a
tear of grief over the death of any friend. Tears of joy he shed often;
but no tear of sorrow, of personal regret. It is true that Mr. Donaldson
draws no particular inference from this fact. It seems to me highly
significant. The absence of intense emotion is no argument truly for
insensibility; but to a man of large, sweeping sympathies such as Whitman
the loss of a particular friend did not strike home as it would do in men
of subtler temperaments.

Cosmic emotions leave no room for those special manifestations of
concentrated feeling in individual instances which men with a narrower
range of sympathies frequently show.

For in denying that Whitman was a man capable of "a very deep human
love," no moral censure is implied. If not deep, it was certainly
comprehensive; and rarely, if ever, do the two qualities coexist. Depth
of feeling is not to be found in men of the tolerant, passive type; it is
the intolerant, comparatively narrow-minded man who loves deeply; the man
of few friends, not the man who takes the whole human race to his heart
in one colossal embrace. Narrowness may exist, of course, without
intensity. But intensity of temperament always carries with it a certain
forceful narrowness. Such a man, strongly idiosyncratic, with his
sympathies running in a special groove, is capable of one or two
affections that absorb his entire nature. Those whom he cares for are so
subtly bound up with the peculiarities of his temperament that they
become a part of his very life. And if they go, so interwoven are their
personalities with the fibres of his being, that part of his life goes
with them. To such the death of an intimate friend is a blow that
shatters them beyond recovery. Courage and endurance, indeed, they may
show, and the undiscerning may never note how fell the blow has been.
But though the healing finger of Time will assuage the wound, the scars
they will carry to their dying day.

As a rule, such men, lovable as they may be to the few, are not of the
stuff of which social reformers are made. They feel too keenly, too
sensitively, are guided too much by individual temperamental preferences.
It is of no use for any man who has to deal with coarse-