the mind and body in
health.

It is doubtful whether a man ever enjoyed life more intensely than Walt
Whitman, or expressed the physical joy of mere living more completely.
He is robust, all tingling with health and the sensations of health. All
that is best in his poetry is the expression of bodily well-being.

A man who leaves his office and gets into a canoe on a Canadian river,
sure of ten days' release from the cares of business and housekeeping,
has a thrill of joy such as Walt Whitman has here and there thrown into
his poetry. One might say that to have done this is the greatest
accomplishment in literature. Walt Whitman, in some of his lines, breaks
the frame of poetry and gives us life in the throb.

It is the throb of the whole physical system of a man who breathes the
open air and feels the sky over him. "When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloomed" is a great lyric. Here is a whole poem without a trace of
self-consciousness. It is little more than a description of nature. The
allusions to Lincoln and to the funeral are but a word or two--merest
suggestions of the tragedy. But grief, overwhelming grief, is in every
line of it, the grief which has been transmuted into this sensitiveness
to the landscape, to the song of the thrush, to the lilac's bloom, and
the sunset.

Here is truth to life of the kind to be found in King Lear or Guy
Mannering, in AEschylus or Burns.

Walt Whitman himself could not have told you why the poem was good. Had
he had any intimation of the true reason, he would have spoiled the
poem. The recurrence and antiphony of the thrush, the lilac, the thought
of death, the beauty of nature, are in a balance and dream of natural
symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do
other than spoil.

It is ungrateful to note Whitman's limitations, his lack of human
passion, the falseness of many of his notions about the American people.
The man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part
of it, and no mere observer can understand the life about him. Even his
work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems
and notes upon the period are picturesque. As to his talk about comrades
and Manhattanese car-drivers, and brass-founders displaying their brawny
arms round each other's brawny necks, all this gush and sentiment in
Whitman's poetry is false to life. It has a lyrical value, as
representing Whitman's personal feelings, but no one el