The self-reliance urged by Emerson is fulfilled by Whitman in startling literalness.

He believes in his own message with unswerving assurance, and does not shift from what he feels is his own peculiar path, even when Emerson himself urges a modified form.

I know that I am august,

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

I see that the elementary laws never apologize;

I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.

This self-confidence he yearns to make each one of all the race feel each for himself.

O, the joys of a manly selfhood!

Personality to be servile to none—to defer to none not to any tyrant, known or unknown,

To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic, To look with a calm gaze, or with a flashing eye,

To speak with a full voice out of a broad chest, To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.

Its

The poem, "To You, Whoever You Are,' is an epitome of this and much besides in the peculiar burden of Whitman to his kind. message is to each one, especially to the man or woman who feels alone, uncounted, useless. In it he appeals with personal passion to each uncounted person in the concrete. They have

been lost to themselves in the rush of affairs,
but he looks through to the soul and finds the
real man or woman. While others do not
understand he will understand. While others
find imperfections he will see only the perfect.
I only am he who places over you no master, owner,
better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in
yourself-

O, I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are.

He assures them that no glory or power anywhere that is not for this one person whoever he may be whom he addresses.

Every endowment, every virtue, all the beauty, pluck, endurance of any is tallied in this imaginary average one over whom he

yearns.

Whoever you are! claim your own at all hazards!

Under any and all conditions if you assert yourself, all hindrances will slip away and through whatever bogs of disposition or ignorance "what you are picks its way."

The quality of life is as important as the courage and vehemence with which it is asserted.

"Copious" and spiritual it must be large of spirit-wide as all sympathies can make it,

electric at every pore with the sensitive thrills that unite to all nature, all humankind.

Tender as he is of all men, even the dullest and the most shallow, he yet challenges them to arouse out of such death in life and learn to live in real things.

He finds many walking about with the dimes of death on the eyelids, liberally spooning the brains to feed the greed of the belly; working with the trappings of life, never with the reality.

Tickets buying, taking, selling, and then to the feast never once going.

All this torpid poverty to the best in life need not be. Each may claim whatever he is

ready to appropriate.

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete!

I swear the earth remains broken and jagged only to him or her who remains broken and jagged.

The poorest in dollars may by richness of feeling take possession of more than the "ticket-selling" millionaire knows is in existence. "For you, pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the universe."

This fullness of life lies in freedom from the bonds of convention, fear, self-distrust, and

through entering into the love and joy open to all.

Freedom is the condition of all real life; love and joy, the substance of that life when it is found.

"Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, dressed in his own shroud." Sympathy, without pity-the sympathy of imaginative oneness of life— the sympathy that becomes all men under all circumstances this is the enlarging life of love.

Such sympathy swallows up even the nobler bondage of duty. For to the nature alive to the living selves of others, duty gives place to glad spontaneity.

What others give as duties, I give as living impulses; (Shall I give the heart's action as a duty?)

"A Song of Joys" fairly splashes in an ocean of delights, and yet all this exultation is in the commonest of the common life experiences. He enters into the life of all kinds of persons: the fisher and the boatman, delighting in the freedom and freshness of their work, its fragrance, and its spur; the engineer's pride and delight in the power he controls and the swiftness he secures; the horseman, the fireman, even the "strong brawned fighter"-the

pleasures of each are embraced in full appreciation.

All over the continent the poet's imagination carries him, seeking the delights of inland lake and stream, of the forests and mountains. The farmer, the miner, soldier, the mother, the child-the peculiar charm in the experience of each is caught and held with skillful touch.

And among all none is more delicious than "the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods," or the ripe joy of "my soul leaning poised on itself"'-the soul which has caught the sense of supremacy over circumstances and calamities.

Whitman everywhere expresses this poise which comes from unlimited self-confidence and appreciation balanced by an equal regard for the potential self of every one else.

There need be no fear of an egotism along whose whole length runs sympathy and belief in mankind. Moreover, an egotism which yields fullness of joy is thereby proven to be off the level of petty selfhood on the plane of the universal and true.

The human distinction above all else is power to grow, on and on, in mind and soul