“It may be candidly admitted that the American poet has not the elegance, special melody, nor recherche aroma of the accepted poets of Europe or his own country; but his compass and general harmony are infinitely greater.  The sweetness and spice, the poetic ennui, the tender longings, the exquisite art-finish of those choice poets are mainly unseen and unmet in him,—­perhaps because he cannot achieve them, more likely because he disdains them.  But there is an electric living soul in his poetry, far more fermenting and bracing.  His wings do not glitter in their movement from rich and varicolored plumage, nor are his notes those of the accustomed song-birds; but his flight is the flight of the eagle.”

Yes, there is not only the delighting of the ear with the outpouring of sweetest melody and its lessons, but there is the delighting of the eye and soul through that soaring and circling in the vast empyrean of “a strong bird on pinions free,”—­lessons of freedom, power, grace, and spiritual suggestion,—­vast, unparalleled, formless lessons.

It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt Whitman printed (in 1855) his first thin beginning volume of “Leaves of Grass;” and, holding him to the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, “that the proof of the poet shall be sternly deferred till his country has absorb’d him as affectionately as he has absorb’d it,” he is yet on trial, yet makes his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience.  That his complete absorption, however, by his own country and by the world, is ultimately to take place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and stronger within me as time passes, and I suppose it is with a hope to help forward this absorption that I write of him now.  Only here and there has he yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and more virile minds.  But considering the unparalleled audacity of his undertaking, and the absence in most critics and readers of anything like full-grown and robust aesthetic perception, the wonder really is not that he should have made such slow progress, but that he should have gained any foothold at all.  The whole literary technique of the race for the last two hundred years has been squarely against him, laying, as it does, the emphasis upon form and scholarly endowments instead of upon aboriginal power and manhood.

My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, has doubtless been much facilitated by contact—­talks, meals, and jaunts—­with him, stretching through a decade of years, and by seeing how everything in his personnel was resumed and carried forward in his literary expression; in fact, how the one was a living commentary upon the other.  After the test of time, nothing goes home like the test of actual intimacy; and to tell me that Whitman is not a large, fine, fresh, magnetic personality, making you love him and want always to be with him, were to tell me that my whole past life is a deception, and all the