* * * * *

  “There was never any more inception than there is now;
  Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

A perception of eternity as an ever-present reality is one of the characteristic signs of the inception of the new birth.

Birth and death become nothing more nor yet less, than events in the procedure of eternal life; age becomes merely a graduation garment; God and heaven are not separated from us by any reality; they become every-day facts.

Whitman tells of the annihilation of any sense of separateness from his soul side, in the following words: 

  “Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my
      soul.”

He did not confound his mortal consciousness, the lower manas, with the higher—­the soul; neither did he recognize an impassable gulf between them.

While admittedly ascending to the higher consciousness from the lower, Whitman refused to follow the example of the saints and sages of old, and mortify or despise the lower self—­the manifestation.  He had indeed struck the balance; he recognized his dual nature, each in its rightful place and with its rightful possessions, and refused to abase either “I am” to the other.  He literally “rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” by claiming for the flesh the purity and the cleanliness of God’s handiwork.

In Whitman, too, we find an almost perfect realization of immortality and of blissfulness of life and the complete harmony and unity of his soul with all there is.  Following closely upon the experience that seems to have been the most vivid of the many instances of illumination which he enjoyed throughout a long life, he wrote the following lines, indicative of the emotions immediately associated with the influx of illumination: 

  “Swiftly arose and spread around me, the peace and joy and knowledge that
      pass all the art and argument of earth;
  And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own,
  And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
  And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my
      sisters and lovers,
  And that a kelson of creation is love.”

In lines written in 1860, about seven years after the first vivid instance of the experience of illumination which afterward became oft-recurrent, Whitman speaks of what he calls “Perfections,” and from what he writes we may assume that he referred to those possessing cosmic consciousness, and the practical impossibility of describing this peculiarity and accounting for the alteration it makes in character and outlook.

Says Whitman: 

  “Only themselves understand themselves, and the like of themselves,
  As souls only understand souls.”