everyone who knew Walt Whitman throughout his life believed him to be more nearly clean and noble in all thought and conduct than any but the very few. And yet in his capacity as the representative of each and all he stoutly asserts:

I own that I have been sly, thievish, mean, a prevaricator, greedy, derelict;

And I own that I remain so yet.

You felons on trial in courts;

You convicts in prison cells—you sentenced assassins, chained and handcuffed with iron,

Who am I, that I am not on trial, or in prison? Me, ruthless and devilish as any, that my wrists are not chained with iron, or my ankles with iron?

This abounding sympathy and freedom from Pharisaic judgment is not based upon any failure to appreciate the distinction between the good and the evil.

He loves the good with a natural spontaneity and sees so clearly the rich returns brought by the high, clean life that he can have only a commiserating tenderness for any whose unfortunate blindness has made them go wrong.

He no more judges harshly the victim of moral blindness than of bodily disease. The same laws by which insight has finally come to the righteous will lead each stumbling one into clearer light.

The difference between sin and goodness is no delusion, he affirms, and the difference lies in no artificial mandate, but is the difference between joy and misery, between sweetness and gall.

say what tastes sweet to the most perfect person; that is finally right.

Two poems, "Kosmos," or "Gods," and "A Hand Mirror,' are placed side by side in "Leaves of Grass" with no suggestion that they are related to each other. "Gods" pictures a full-grown soul, vigorous to be and to do-able to enter into the joys and faiths of all the universe. "A Hand Mirror" holds the glass up to one who has burnt out the gold of life.

Outside fair costume, within ashes and filth.

The ashes and filth are mirrored with a horrible realism, closing with no sermon, onlySuch a result so soon; and from such a beginning! This clear-eyed knowledge of the full blackness of the night of wrong does not make him any the less confident when he urges courage and faith upon its victims. No one can sink so low as to be out of reach of his extended hand and cheery call.

The mockeries are not you;

Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk;
I pursue you where none else has pursued you:

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion; if these balk others, they do not balk me; The pert apparel, the deformed attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death; all these I part aside;

I track through your windings and turnings; I come upon you where you thought eye should never come upon you.

Then he assures them that the best the human soul can attain is theirs.

As for me, I give nothing to anyone, except I give the like carefully to you;

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the glory of you.

A saving power for these lies in the persons who can see the real man "behind and through" the "greasy and pimpled" exterior. Let a

man "of perfect blood" come in contact with the "insulter, the angry person," he "strangely transmutes them." "They hardly know themselves, they are so clean."

The puzzling "Problem of Evil" is faced by Whitman with no shirking.

I sit and look out upon the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame.

All these all meanness and agony without end I sitting, look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.

But he promptly reasserts his faith that it will all be right in some way. "Nothing fails its perfect return."

O me, man of slack faith so long!

Standing aloof-denying portions so long;

Me, with mole's eyes, unrisen to buoyancy and vision — unfree.

When he sees with full horizon he knows that in an evolving humanity, there must be half development, crude outcroppings.

He learns to think of the "diseased and despairing, of thieves and dwarfs" as among

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars-and of wombs, and of the fatherstuff.

The character dwarfs are simply later in the process, but all shall "flow and unite." The universe is in order, although part is further advanced than others. The "twisted skull waits, and the watery or rotten blood waits," but all these "far behind are to go on in their turn."

The atheism or theism of recent times has left the question of origins. The believers and unbelievers may be known, not by their opinion as to how the universe was created, but by their answer to the questions. kind of a universe is it? Are there rotten places in it? Has the good any eternal, intrinsic meaning at the heart of things? It is

What

by this test that Whitman is found among the most devout and doubt-free theists. He has no faintest question but that all is essentially sound and sane throughout every atom of the Cosmos.

There is perfection in final results, if not in details of the process. Wherever there is disease, there is healing.

Amelioration is one of the earth's words;
The earth neither lags nor hastens;

It has all attributes, growths, effects-latent in itself from the jump.

"The purifying chemistry of nature" might well be the title of one of the "Leaves." In this he is, at first, startled by the earththinking suddenly of the disease and death which has been buried in it. How can there be health even in the roots of spring? The earth is a veritable mass of horrible decay.

Yet, behold!

The grass covers the prairies;

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden;

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward;

The apple buds cluster together on the apple branches. The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead;

What chemistry!

That all is clean forever and ever!