perfectly at one with the forces and influences that play through all natural things. His response to their impact is a complete harmony that issues in happiness. In the same spirit of trust and joy that he yields to the persuasions of the external world, he gives himself to his fellows. The grateful love which floods his being overflows universally. He is not held by the ties of mere kinship: all men are in the deepest and truest sense his brothers. He is not limited to a few chosen intimacies, to the exclusion of the mass outside. There are no strangers now; there are only comrades. Attachment and devotion usurp the place of enmity, and banish fear. His friend and lover is the one with whom he happens to be. This humanly accidental, divinely intended, companionship is enough. “He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me." It is difficult to conceive the inclusiveness of Whitman's sympathy; it is impossible to measure its beneficence. That sympathy is living and potent to-day, not only through the miracle of the printed. page, but bridging in its impetus the chasm of death, and triumphing in its intensity over time and distance. To know Whitman is to feel it, and to go one's way enriched and enheartened. This is the human appeal of Whitman. But a word still remains to be spoken. Accepting life as it is with thankfulness and joy, he yet interprets it in terms of spiritual values. The power of which he is the reverent and happy instrument is of God. IV THE SOUL'S ADVENTURE We too take ship O soul, Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas, Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail, Amid the wafting winds, (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul,) Caroling free, singing our song of God, MMENSE as were the satisfactions which IM befell Walt Whitman on his leisurely way through the world, yet his whole life, in the inner meaning of it, figures itself as an eager, unremitted quest. So potent is his immediately human appeal, that this good comrade does not at once reveal himself as a spiritual pioneer. Those who knew him in the life were drawn to him irresistibly by the undefinable attraction of his presence, without perhaps divining the true sources of his poise and power. Something more than his compelling personal magnetism, however, distinguishes him from the mass: there are depths, of which his abounding sympathy is but the overflow and expression. Endowed though he was with an heroic physique of singular perfection and beauty, yet the essential fibre of his nature is spiritual. He realizes practically, and to an extent that it is granted only to a chosen few to realize, that the central reality of being is the soul. The motive force of his life is the passion and the struggle to possess the soul's inheritance. Gladly upon this high adventure he dares all, risks all, suffers all. His happiness is to pursue the quest. His recompense is to know God. Whitman is launched upon experience as one in love with life, in all its multitudinousness. Indoors or out, in art or in nature, all sights and sounds, all contacts, all odors and tastes, in solitude or with companions, in the rush of streets, across the fields and hillsides, or by the sea, whatever and wherever, it is a wonderful and vivid rapture. How curious! how real! Underfoot the divine soil, overhead the sun. But Whitman is aware too of another reality. Out of the welter emerges an entity in contrast and seeming opposition to the external order. However curious and real this outer world and its actualities and excitements, yet" they are not the Me myself." Experience resolves itself, therefore, into two realities, the soul and that other that is not the soul. I and this mystery, here we stand. But how to reconcile the contrast, and in the opposition to find peace? Undaunted, Whitman confronts the mystery. To the fullest reaches of his strength he undergoes "the vehement struggle so fierce for unity in oneself." But not in himself only. For his great heart leaps out to the |