XII. Comradeship

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon;

I will make divine magnetic lands

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,

Along the shores of the Great Lakes, and all over the prairies;

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other's necks,

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you, "6 ma femme!"

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

The circle of Whitman's thought finds its perfect round in the idea of comradeship.

Abstract approval of men and principles does not satisfy him. He vitalizes all with the warmth and color of personal human affection.

He has written no love poems of the common sort, but most of his poems are love poems of the most ardent type, addressed,

however, to anyone and everyone-man or woman, coarse or gentle, good or bad.

This is not the ordinary love to man of the benevolent; it is the passionate fervor of the enamored.

All the high-minded writers have lauded Friendship. In reading Emerson or Thoreau on Friendship one wonders if they are not after all writing of something too ethereal and mystical for this prosaic sphere.

Moreover, they confine their expectations of friendship to the very few, and even suggest that it may never be found upon the earth. Whitman draws no boundaries. He not only does not limit the number of his friends, but he expressly invites all men, even the unborn, into the circle of his affections, and urges upon each a like inclusive ardor. And yet it is personal affection he offers and asks for in return. He sees a live oak growing vigorously all alone apart from other trees. He wonders how it can grow and thrive and "utter joyous leaves, when there was no friendship for it. He is sure he could not.

When I peruse the conquer'd fame of heroes and the victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the generals,

Nor the president in his presidency, nor the rich in his great house;

But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was

with them,

How together through life, through dangers, odium, un

changing long and long;

Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were, Then I am pensive-I hastily walk away fill'd with the bitterest envy.

Whitman keeps the perspective in human values. We e are too apt in the hurry of buying and selling, coming and going to forget that nothing really counts except the things that make us live deeply and enjoy truly.

People come to be a part of the world's furniture. They make the wheels go 'round for us in practical affairs. We forget that they are human souls with rich capacities for fellowship and sympathy. Many of them belong to us by some kinship of feeling or experience. They would enlarge the heart's boundaries for us, if the stone fences of our indifference did not close us in.

This poet would raze to the ground all fences. Conventions, formalities, foolishness, which keep us from making the world electric with an all-around hand-clasp, he would away with.

The measure of a man is found in his capacity for affection, and the wider the range of those who receive this "ocean of love freely poured forth," the greater the man.

His dependence for that glorious America of the future is upon this growing "love of man for his comrades."

He dreams that the adoring admiration which he himself possesses for the typical American, in each and every phase, may become an enthusiasm common to the whole people. The legal ties of a common government would then be made vital by the glowing life streams of fraternity.

Man, fulfilling himself in an organic democracy that democracy incarnated in America . with her rich race inheritance. America, the nation, vivified by citizens bound to each other through a hearty comradeship and all-pervading personal good will-this is the sequence of Whitman's great conceptions.

I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;

I dream'd that was the new city of friends;

Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love it led the rest;

It was seen every hour in the action of the men of the

city,

And in all their looks and words.

Again he affirms:

I believe the main purport of these states is to found a superb friendship, exalted, previously unknown, Because I perceive it waits, and has been always waiting,

latent in all men.

Probably nothing is more unique in Whitman than this faith in the coming lover-bond to unite the children of earth. It is akin, of course, to the old, old story, of the reign of brotherhood destined to come to the earth, but Whitman gives it an utterly new coloring, and it is only upon second thought that one associates it at all with the more general teaching. In the poet it is alive and human—a sturdy, wholesome heartiness of good will that carries contagion in its atmosphere.

This, from the "Drum Taps," is characteristic of this spirit, and voices again, his confidence for America:

Over the carnage rose prophetic a voice,

Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problem of freedom yet;

Those who love each other shall become invincible;
They shall yet make Columbia victorious.

No danger shall balk Columbia's lovers;

If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves

for me.

The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers,

The continuance of equality shall be comrades.

These shall tie you and band you stronger than hoops of iron;

I, ecstatic, O partners! O lands! with the love of lovers

tie you.

(Were you looking to be held together by lawyers?

Or by agreement on a paper? or by arms?

Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.)