of conservative tastes results from his effort to take up into his verse elements which poetry has usually left out—­the ugly, the earthy, and even the disgusting; the “under side of things,” which he holds not to be prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in life and nature seen in all their aspects.  The lack of these elements in the conventional poets seems to him and his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts.  Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit.  The effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak out his thought just as it comes to him, accounts, too, for his way of cataloguing objects without selection.  His single expressions arc often unsurpassed for descriptive beauty and truth.  He speaks of “the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue,” of the “lisp” of the plane, of the prairies, “where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles.”  But if there is any eternal distinction between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these: 

  “And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
  He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north.”

Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; full of brotherliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious pressure of the crowd and the touch of his comrade’s elbow in the ranks.  He liked the people—­multitudes of people; the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a Brooklyn ferry-boat.  The rowdy and the Negro truck-driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and the scholar.  “I loaf and invite my soul,” he writes; “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”  His poem Walt Whitman, frankly egotistic, simply describes himself as a typical, average man—­the same as any other man, and therefore not individual but universal.  He has great tenderness and heartiness—­“the good gray poet;” and during the civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the wounded soldiers in the Washington hospitals—­an experience which he has related in the Dresser and elsewhere.  It is characteristic of his rough and ready comradery to use slang and newspaper English in his poetry, to call himself Walt instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a slouch hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat.  His decriers allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a backward eddy in the tide, and significant only as a temporary reaction against ultra civilization—­like Thoreau,