is
countrymen without arousing the pity which adds to their romantic
interest in Poe. Whatever our literary students may feel, and whatever
foreign critics may assert, it must be acknowledged that to the vast
majority of American men and women "good old Walt" is still an outsider.

Let us try to see first the type of mind with which we are dealing. It
is fundamentally religious, perceiving the unity and kinship and glory
of all created things. It is this passion of worship which inspired St.
Francis of Assisi's "Canticle to the Sun." It cries, "Benedicite, Omnia
opera Domini: All ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord!"
That is the real motto for Whitman's "Leaves of Grass." Like St.
Francis, and like his own immediate master, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Whitman
is a mystic. He cannot argue the ultimate questions; he asserts them.
Instead of marshaling and sifting the proofs for immortality, he
chants "I know I am deathless." Like Emerson again, Whitman shares that
peculiarly American type of mysticism known as Transcendentalism, but he
came at the end of this movement instead of at the beginning of it.
In his Romanticism, likewise, he is an end of an era figure. His
affiliations with Victor Hugo are significant; and a volume of Scott's
poems which he owned at the age of sixteen became his "inexhaustible
mine and treasury for more than sixty years." Finally, and quite
as uncompromisingly as Emerson, Thoreau, and Poe, Whitman is an
individualist. He represents the assertive, Jacksonian period of our
national existence. In a thousand similes he makes a declaration of
independence for the separate person, the "single man" of Emerson's
Phi Beta Kappa address. "I wear my hat as I please, indoors and out."
Sometimes this is mere swagger. Sometimes it is superb.

So much for the type. Let us turn next to the story of Whitman's life.
It must here be told in the briefest fashion, for Whitman's own prose
and poetry relate the essentials of his biography. He was born on Long
Island, of New England and Dutch ancestry, in 1819. Lowell, W. W. Story,
and Charles A. Dana were born in that year, as was also George Eliot.
Whitman's father was a carpenter, who "leaned to the Quakers." There
were many children. When little "Walt"--as he was called, to distinguish
him from his father, Walter--was four, the family moved to Brooklyn.
The boy had scanty schooling, and by the time he was twenty had tried
typesetting, teaching, and editing