But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, practical absorption, and re-departure therefrom, of the astounding idea that the earth is a star in the heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent unconscious nature.  Of course in his handling it is no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved in the fervent heat of the poet’s heart, and charged with emotion.  “The words of true poems,” he says, “are the tufts and final applause of science.”  Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doctrine of evolution:—­

 “I am stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over,
  And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
  And call anything close again when I desire it.

 “In vain the speeding and shyness;
  In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach;
  In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder’d bones;
  In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes;
  In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters
     lying low.”

In the following passage the idea is more fully carried out, and man is viewed through a vista which science alone has laid open; yet how absolutely a work of the creative imagination is revealed:—­

 “I am an acme of things accomplish’d, and I am incloser of things
     to be. 
  My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs;
  On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
     steps;
  All below duly travel’d, and still I mount and mount.

 “Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me;
  Afar down I see the huge first Nothing—­I know I was even there;
  I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
  And took my time, and took no hurt from the foetid carbon.

 “Long I was hugg’d close—­long and long,
  Immense have been the preparations for me,
  Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me,
  Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful
     boatmen;
  For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings;
  They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.

 “Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me;
  My embryo has never been torpid—­nothing could overlay it,
  For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
  The long low strata piled to rest it on,
  Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
  Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths, and deposited
     it with care;
  All forces have been steadily employ’d to complete and delight
     me: 
  Now on this spot I stand with my robust Soul.”

I recall no single line of poetry in the language that fills my imagination like that beginning the second stanza:—­

       “Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me.”