The soul, as Whitman knows it to be, is its

own answer to all doubts.

Once in existence,

eternity is its destiny.

It is enough, O soul,

O soul, we have positively appeared — that is enough.

The love of life and all things mundane is so strong in this poet that he is almost jealously fearful that he will seem to be depreciating this life when rejoicing in the promise of further existence. He knows he shall visit the stars, that present experiences will prove only one out of myriad experiences, but he expects to find nowhere anything

More majestic and beautiful than I have already found on the earth.

He has no doubt but the new house he will inhabit will be good, but he is quite in love with the studs and rafters of this one, which has grown part of him.

However, in the poem, "Night on the Prairies," he reconsiders his hesitancy to affirm greater things to come.

In the open, looking at the stars, it all bursts upon him anew and he sees how infinite and inconceivable are the experiences yet ahead.

Now I absorb immortality and peace.

I admire death and test propositions.

I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-day exhibited,

I was thinking this globe enough, till there trembled upon me myriads of other globes,

O, how plainly I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me as the day cannot,

O, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

The body occupies a position of dignity and significance in Whitman's philosophy.

Without the material body he feels the personal identity could never have reached perfection. The soul receives "identity through materials," the "temporary use of materials for identity's sake" are expressions characteristic of many.

Physical birth, he says, "is to identify you. It is not that you should be undecided, but decided."

It is not strange, then, that he believes strongly in a spiritual body which is now present in the physical form and which will continue to give the promoted soul a habitation and identity.

I do not doubt that from under the feet and beside the hands and face I am cognizant of, are now looking faces I am not cognizant of -calm and actual faces.

I do not doubt that interiors have their interiors and exteriors have their exteriors-and that the eye

sight has another eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice.

O, what is proved to me this day beyond cavil, that it is not my material eyes which finally see

Nor my material body which finally lives, walks, laughs, embraces, procreates.

After speaking of the discharge of his "voided body" at death, he suggests:

My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres.

The future toward which Whitman's stimulating bugle is calling us is a virile, purposeful one. There is no inane, negative monotony in his thought, nor cowardly quiescence.

Muscle and pluck forever!

What invigorates life invigorates death,

And the dead advance as much as the living advance, And the future is no more uncertain than the present.

In "Song of Prudence" is as noble an asser

The

tion of true value as could be penned. prudence which has to do with getting and having, with appearance and indirectiondrops quietly aside "from the prudence which suits immortality," "charity and personal force are the only investments worth anything."

No specification is necessary; all that a male or female does, that is vigorous, benevolent, clean, is so

much profit to him or her, in the unshakable order of the universe, and through the whole scope of it forever.

It is only rarely that there is in these poems any recognition that any one can or does doubt. When there is, the suggestion is tossed aside with ironical denial.

Do you suspect death? If I were to suspect death, I should die now;

Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well suited toward annihilation?

Again he affirms, as if in half sarcastic reference to the attitude of others, that the purport of us here is "not a speculation, or a bonmot, or reconnaissance" that may by good luck turn out well or may be retracted under certain contingencies.

The secret of this absorbing, all-conquering confidence lies in his confidence in the all of things in the divine inherency—in God.

There is little here which even suggests a hard and fast plan by an outside, throne-occupying deity-but everything to show how the poet's sense of a God-filled Cosmos permeates his every other ideal and belief.

In this faith in an All Good he cannot leave out any atom of humanity from the ultimate triumph.

Immortality is for the least as for the great

CALD

est. "Each is considered.

Not a single one

can it fail"—not the young man, or young

woman.

Not the little child that peeped in at the door, and then drew back, and was never seen again, nor the old man who has lived without purpose, and feels it with bitterness worse than gall.

Not the least wisp that is known.

And all of "these least" must arrive at the highest sometime. A few giant souls will not content Walt Whitman, all must come sometime to the same estate. "We must have the indestructible breed of the best, regardless of time."

A faith in immortality grounded in a universe pure gold all through, reinforced by unquestioned and valiant loyalty to human nature in every aspect, rests upon bedrock. With this foundation we cannot wonder at the jubilant affirmation closing the poem, "To Think of Time,"

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality! That the exquisite scheme is for it, and the nebulous float is for it, and the cohering is for it!

And all preparation is for it, and identity is for it, and life and death are altogether for it.