The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's moth is
mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven, and cannot think
too highly of our sublunary tapers. The universe is so large that
imagination flags in the effort to conceive it; but here, in the
meantime, is the world under our feet, a very warm and habitable corner.
"The earth, that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any
nearer," he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and composed,"
says he, "before a million universes." It is the language of a
transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau held and sometimes uttered.
But Whitman, who has a somewhat vulgar inclination for technical talk
and the jargon of philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints;
he must put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of
Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He tells his
disciples that they must be ready "to confront the growing arrogance of
Realism." Each person is, for himself, the keystone and the occasion of
this universal edifice. "Nothing, not God," he says, "is greater to one
than oneself is"; a statement with an irreligious smack at the first
sight; but like most startling sayings, a manifest truism on a second.
He will give effect to his own character without apology; he sees "that
the elementary laws never apologise." "I reckon," he adds, with quaint
colloquial arrogance, "I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I
plant my house by, after all." The level follows the law of its being;
so, unrelentingly, will he; everything, every person, is good in his own
place and way; God is the maker of all, and all are in one design. For
he believes in God, and that with a sort of blasphemous security. "No
array of terms," quoth he, "no array of terms can say how much at peace
I am about God and about death." There certainly never was a prophet who
carried things with a higher hand; he gives us less a body of dogmas
than a series of proclamations by the grace of God; and language, you
will observe, positively fails him to express how far he stands above
the highest human doubts and trepidations.

But next in order of truths to a person's sublime conviction of himself,
comes the attraction of one person for another, and all that we mean by
the word love:--

"The dear love of man for his comrade--the attraction of friend for
friend,
Of the-well-married husband and wife, of children and par