but it is the only world that he knows; and the glowing interest, the passionate emotion, the vital rush and current of it, prove beyond all doubt that we are in touch with something very splendid and magnificent indeed, and that no misdeed or disaster forfeits our share in the inheritance.  He is utterly at variance with the hideous Calvinistic theory, that God sent some of His creatures into the world for their pain and ruin.  Whatever happens to your body or your soul, says Whitman, it is worth your while to live and to have lived.  He adopts no facile system of compensations and offsets.  He rather protests with all his might that, however broken your body or fatuous your mind, it is a good thing for you to have taken a hand in the affair; and that the essence of the whole situation has not been your success, your dignity, your comfortable obliteration of half your faculties, or on the other hand your failure, your vileness, or your despair, but that just at the time and place at which the phenomenon called yourself took place, that intricate creature, with its bodily needs and desires, its joys of the senses, its outlook on the strange world, took shape and made you exactly what you are, and nothing else.  As he says in one of his finest apologues: 

   Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided,
      nothing is scanted.

   Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui,
      what you are picks its way.

3

Then too Walt Whitman claims to be the poet, not of the past or even only of the present, but the singer of the future.  He says in The Backward Glance, which I have already quoted, and which must be carefully read by anyone who wishes to understand his work—­at least in so far as he understood it himself,—­“Isolated advantages in any rank or grace or fortune—­the direct or indirect threads of all the poetry of the past—­are in my opinion distasteful to the republican genius. . . .  Established poems, I know, have the very great advantage of chanting the already performed, so full of glories, reminiscences dear to the minds of men.”  And he says too that, “The educated world seems to have been growing more and more ennuied for ages, leaving to our time the inheritance of it all.”  And he further says:  “The ranges of heroism and loftiness with which Greek and feudal poets endow’d their godlike or lordly born characters, I was to endow the democratic averages of America.  I was to show that we, here and to-day, are eligible to the grandest and the best—­more eligible now than any times of old were.”

This is a lofty claim, boldly advanced and maintained; and here I am on uncertain ground, because I do not suppose that I can realise what the democratic spirit of America really is.  Granted, however, that it is a free and a noble spirit, I feel a doubt as to whether it is possible for any nation, at any time in the world’s history, really to take a new start.  The American nation is not a new nation;