floods the soul. After years of search and longing, in the crowded ways of men, in spaces of open fields, in the baffling solitude of the sea, Whitman receives illumination. He is filled with the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth. With a certainty beyond logic and proof, he knows that the spirit of God is the brother of his own. Veritably, Whitman is possessed of God. The vision is indeed the crown of his endeavor, but he does not here resign the quest. God's instant presence lights his way, but the soul has yet a consummation to achieve. Surges of the "sea of torment, doubt, despair and unbelief" toss and constrain him; "wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture, wealth, inventions, civilization," he loses recognition of the silent, ever-swaying power of the vital universal force that quickens all life toward its goal. The struggle is never to be remitted; but through it he presses on to the ultimate

fulfillment, when the soul shall be forever and perfectly one in God.

Reckoning ahead O soul, when thou, the time achiev'd, The seas all cross'd, weather'd the capes, the voyage

done,

Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim

attain'd,

As fill'd with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found,

The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.

Whitman's inmost experience is not to be told in words. Only the soul may know God, and the soul has no vocabulary. Whitman's religious experience is so intimate and personal that he has himself succeeded in communicating it in his poetry only by such symbols as his imagination could wrest from the current language of men. One fact, however, defines itself as salient, namely, that the sum and essence of Whitman's life is religion. In a wholly practical, no less than mystical, sense, his supreme concern is the soul's relation to God. As he conceives and lives it, religion is not a part of

man's experience, though indeed the highest part. It is the entirety of existence, giving their import to all the varied forms of man's activity, and making "the whole coincide."

It, magnificent, beyond materials, with continuous hands sweeps and provides for all.

This conception of the scope and significance of religion determines Whitman's attitude toward the world. Certain beyond peradventure of the essential spirituality of all things, and sustained by his conviction of the profound religiousness of every act, he sees that the struggle of contending forces in which man finds himself enmeshed is but the necessary condition of the soul's progress to its goal, its union with the divine. · He welcomes every experience that can befall him, for through it God is working out His purpose for the soul. To interpret the world in the light of the illumination vouchsafed to him is the motive of his poetry.

Know you, solely to drop in the earth the germs of a greater religion,

The following chants each for its kind I sing.

Whitman thus expressly declares himself a prophet. His vision of ultimate truths is authentic; his immediate experience of God, ecstatic and transcendent, is yet a vital reality. It is a proud title, however, that he arrogates to himself, that of a prophet of a "greater religion." Its justification is to be sought in Whitman's relation to the general religious experience of the race. Its value may perhaps be suggested by a consideration of its practical consequences for men's life to-day, as they too are engaged in a like adventure.

In point of intellectual content, Whitman's faith has elements in common with historic religions. Although he is to be regarded in some sense as a new voice, as another messiah, among many, to whom God has given a special revelation of Himself, yet

he gladly acknowledges his debt to the older faiths and to the prophets of all times. His mission, as he takes it, is "following many and follow'd by many," to "inaugurate a religion"; and he sings "a worship new." Yet Whitman has the historic sense, and he recognizes that the religious consciousness of man is a development. In his representative character, he identifies himself imaginatively with worshipers of every degree in the evolution of the race. With the savage, he makes a fetich of the first rock or stump; "to Shastas and Vedas admirant," he helps the eastern lama or brahmin as he trims the lamps of the idols; he waits responses from oracles, and as a Greek, he dances through the streets in a phallic procession; he does not ignore the Koran. He accepts the Gospels, "accepting Him that was crucified, knowing assuredly that He is divine." He is in turn Catholic, Puritan, Quaker, Methodist. Interpreted, this symbolism means that the modern man, as whose representative finally