“I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth.  Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight....  With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,—­in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,—­with these I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument....  The great sun, burning with light, the strong earth,—­dear earth,—­the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus.  With this inflatus, too, I prayed....  The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object:  it was a passion.  I hid my face in the grass.  I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away....  Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes.  I made no outward show.  Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as I reclined there!"[I]

    [I] Op. cit., Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.

Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value.  Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?

Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life’s meaning on a large objective scale.  Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up.  You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.

Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet.  He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race.  For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being.  His verses are but ejaculations—­things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale.  He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one’s mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man.  As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels:—­