ents,
Of city for city and land for land."

The solitude of the most sublime idealist is broken in upon by other
people's faces; he sees a look in their eyes that corresponds to
something in his own heart; there comes a tone in their voices which
convicts him of a startling weakness for his fellow-creatures. While he
is hymning the _ego_ and commercing with God and the universe, a woman
goes below his window; and at the turn of her skirt, or the colour of
her eyes, Icarus is recalled from heaven by the run. Love is so
startlingly real that it takes rank upon an equal footing of reality
with the consciousness of personal existence. We are as heartily
persuaded of the identity of those we love as of our own identity. And
so sympathy pairs with self-assertion, the two gerents of human life on
earth; and Whitman's ideal man must not only be strong, free, and
self-reliant in himself, but his freedom must be bounded and his
strength perfected by the most intimate, eager, and long-suffering love
for others. To some extent this is taking away with the left hand what
has been so generously given with the right. Morality has been
ceremoniously extruded from the door only to be brought in again by the
window. We are told, on one page, to do as we please; and on the next we
are sharply upbraided for not having done as the author pleases. We are
first assured that we are the finest fellows in the world in our own
right; and then it appears that we are only fine fellows in so far as we
practise a most quixotic code of morals. The disciple who saw himself in
clear ether a moment before is plunged down again among the fogs and
complications of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because
Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and between
friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less intense political
sympathies; and his ideal man must not only be a generous friend but a
conscientious voter into the bargain.

His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the reader will
remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but to remind us how good
we are. He is to encourage us to be free and kind by proving that we are
free and kind already. He passes our corporate life under review, to
show that it is upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in his big,
plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the
wheel'd