things that quicken his pulses,
please his eyes or delight his nostrils. There is an element of
poetry in all this, but it is by no means the highest. If a joyous
elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be
very much like Whitman's famous "song of myself." It would have just
about as much delicacy and deftness and discriminations. He says:

"I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid
and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do
not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in
the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick
discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied nor not one is
demented with the mania of many things. Not one kneels to another
nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is
respectable or unhappy, over the whole earth." And that is not irony
on nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him. He
accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, the seemly and
unseemly, the good and the bad. He had no conception of a difference
in people or in things. All men had bodies and were alike to him,
one about as good as another. To live was to fulfil all natural laws
and impulses. To be comfortable was to be happy. To be happy was the
ultimatum. He did not realize the existence of a conscience or a
responsibility. He had no more thought of good or evil than the
folks in Kipling's Jungle book.

And yet there is an undeniable charm about this optimistic vagabond
who is made so happy by the warm sunshine and the smell of spring
fields. A sort of good fellowship and whole-heartedness in every
line he wrote. His veneration for things physical and material, for
all that is in water or air or land, is so real that as you read him
you think for the moment that you would rather like to live so if
you could. For the time you half believe that a sound body and a
strong arm are the greatest things in the world. Perhaps no book
shows so much as "Leaves of Grass" that keen senses do not make a
poet. When you read it you realize how spirited a thing poetry
really is and how great a part spiritual perceptions play in
apparently sensuous verse, if only to select the beautiful from the
gross.

_Nebraska State Journal_, January 19, 1896

_Henry James_

Their mania for careless and hasty work is not confined to the
lesser men. Howells and Hardy have gone with the c