stream of
people--men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
foreigners--and then in the streets the thick crowd of
carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in
fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile
after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so
many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white
marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not
wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a
great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy
world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement,
while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes."[K]

[K] Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.

Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not
altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point
of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less,--Whitman
on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle
inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his
occupation excites?

When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete
with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs,
crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, _his_ fancy does not thus 'soar
away into the colors of the sunset' as did Whitman's, nor does he
inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did
anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of
eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which
his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is
death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old
human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the
sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened
eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust.
"Hech! it is a sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one
who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very
repetition of the scene to new generations of men in _secula seculorum_,
that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman
with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional
anaesthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he
views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is
life