Another Limitation

175

ed the clean-swept keeping-rooms of the land of mountain breezes and transparent streams *.

Yet Burroughs says, with his usual heroworship:

Emerson is our divine man, the precious quintessence of the New England type, invaluable for his stimulating and ennobling strain; but his genius is too astral, too select, too remote, to incarnate and give voice to the national spirit. Clothe him with flesh and blood, make his daring affirmations real and vital in a human personality and imbued with the American spirit, and we are on the way to Whitman 5.

XXXIII

Whitman has another fault, a limitation. He dearly loved the word "unrefined". It was one of the words he would have us apply to himself. He was unrefined, as the air, the soil, the water, and all sweet natural things are unrefined (fine but not refined). He applies the word to himself two or three times in the course of his poems. He loved the words sun-tan, air-sweetness, brawn, etc.. It seemed to him breadth and cosmic sympathy to throw in his fortunes with the coarse and unrefined, even with the lawbreakers. In the library or parlor he con

fessed that he was as a gawk or one dumb, and in his journal he says in his homely way of the difficulty of comprehending Robert Ingersoll's address:

One thing is, my hearing is not to-day real good, and another thing probably is, I am rather slow anyhow.

Again his devotion to America led him into extravagances. In pledging These States to work out a perfect democracy and the salvation of the world he out-vied the loudest peak-and prairie brag".

So while considerable attention was paid. to him by literary men, and while he remarks for instance, of William Cullen Bryant, that

for years he used to take rambles with him miles long, on which occasions Bryant gave him clear accounts of scenes in Europe, "the cities, the looks, architec

ture, art, especially Italy, where he

had travelled a good deal 3 ", yet on the whole. in his poems, as Stedman says:

His Reverence for Abraham Lincoln 177

There is always an implication that the employer is inferior to the employed,-that the man of training, the "civilizee ", is less manly than the rough, the pioneer. He suspects those who, by chance or ability, rise above the crowd.

XXXIV

To this there was one marked exception. He revered Abraham Lincoln, and when news came of the assassination he says in his diary:

The day of the murder we heard the news very early in the morning. Mother prepared breakfastand other meals afterward-as usual; but not a mouthful was eaten all day by either of us. We each drank half a cup of coffee; that was all. Little was said. We got every newspaper morning and evening, and the frequent extras of that period, and pass'd them silently to each other 3.

Two of his best-known poems were inspired by this event, "When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloomed ", and "My Captain ", of which Stedman said after hearing him recite it:

It is, of his poems, among those nearest to a wonted lyrical form, as if the genuine sorrow of his theme had given him new pinions. He read it simply and well, and as I listened to its strange pa

thetic melodies, my eyes filled with tears, and I felt that here, indeed, was a minstrel of whom it would be said, if he could reach the ears of the multitude and stand in their presence, that not only the cultured, but "the common people heard him gladly" ".

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wreck, the prize we sought is won.

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring.

But, O heart heart! heart!

Leave you not the little spot

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

2

O Captain my Captain! rise up and hear the bells! Rise up for you the flag is flung, for you the bugle trills:

For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths, for you the shores a-crowding:

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning.

O Captain dear father!

O Captain! My Captain!

179

This arm I push beneath you.

It is some dream that on the deck

You've fallen cold and dead!

3

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still:

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor

will.

But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done :

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won!

Exult, O shores! and ring, O bells!
But I, with silent tread,

Walk the spot my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

XXXVI

In his old age, looking back upon his work, Walt Whitman wrote:

After an interval, reading, here in the midnight, With the great stars looking on-all the stars of Orion looking,

And the silent Pleiades-and the duo looking of Saturn and ruddy Mars;

Pondering, reading my own songs, after a long interval (sorrow and death familiar now),

Ere closing the book, what pride! what joy! to find

them

Standing so well the test of death and night,
And the duo of Saturn and Mars!