Before the man’s complete acceptance and assimilation by America, he may have to be first passed down through the minds of critics and commentators, and given to the people with some of his rank new quality taken off,—­a quality like that which adheres to objects in the open air, and makes them either forbidding or attractive, as one’s mood is healthful and robust or feeble and languid.  The processes are silently at work.  Already seen from a distance, and from other atmospheres and surroundings, he assumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for in curious contrast to the general denial of Whitman in this country (though he has more lovers and admirers here than is generally believed) stands the reception accorded him in Europe.  The poets there, almost without exception, recognize his transcendent quality, the men of science his thorough scientific basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all his towering picturesque personality and modernness.  Professor Clifford says he is more thoroughly in harmony with the spirit and letter of advanced scientism than any other living poet.  Professor Tyrrell and Mr. Symonds find him eminently Greek, in the sense in which to be natural and “self-regulated by the law of perfect health” is to be Greek.  The French “Revue des Deux Mondes” pronounces his war poems the most vivid, the most humanly passionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of the nineteenth century.  Freiligrath translated him into German, and hailed him as the founder of a new democratic and modern order of poetry, greater than the old.  But I do not propose to go over the whole list here; I only wish to indicate that the absorption is well commenced abroad, and that probably her poet will at last reach America by way of those far-off, roundabout channels.  The old mother will first masticate and moisten the food which is still too tough for her offspring.

When I first fell in with “Leaves of Grass,” I was taken by isolated passages scattered here and there through the poems; these I seized upon, and gave myself no concern about the rest.  Single lines in it often went to the bottom of the questions that were vexing me.  The following, though less here than when encountered in the frame of mind which the poet begets in you, curiously settled and stratified a certain range of turbid, fluctuating inquiry:—­

 “There was never any more inception than there is now,—­
  Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
  And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
  Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

These lines, also, early had an attraction for me I could not define, and were of great service:—­

 “Pleasantly and well-suited I walk,
  Whither I walk I cannot define, but I know it is good,
  The whole universe indicates that it is good,
  The past and the present indicate that it is good.”

In the following episode, too, there was to me something far deeper than the words or the story:—­