And yet Whitman is representative. He is a real product, he has a real
and most interesting place in the history of literature, and he speaks
for a class and type of human nature whose interest is more than local,
whose prevalence is admitted,--a type which is one of the products of
the civilization of the century, perhaps of all centuries, and which has
a positively planetary significance.

There are, in every country, individuals who, after a sincere attempt to
take a place in organized society, revolt from the drudgery of it,
content themselves with the simplest satisfactions of the grossest need
of nature, so far as subsistence is concerned, and rediscover the
infinite pleasures of life in the open air.

If the roadside, the sky, the distant town, the soft buffeting of the
winds of heaven, are a joy to the aesthetic part of man, the freedom
from all responsibility and accountability is Nirvana to his moral
nature. A man who has once tasted these two joys together, the joy of
being in the open air and the joy of being disreputable and unashamed,
has touched an experience which the most close-knit and determined
nature might well dread. Life has no terrors for such a man. Society has
no hold on him. The trifling inconveniences of the mode of life are as
nothing compared with its satisfactions. The worm that never dies is
dead in him. The great mystery of consciousness and of effort is quietly
dissolved into the vacant happiness of sensation,--not base sensation,
but the sensation of the dawn and the sunset, of the mart and the
theatre, and the stars, the panorama of the universe.

To the moral man, to the philosopher or the business man, to any one who
is a cog in the wheel of some republic, all these things exist for the
sake of something else. He must explain or make use of them, or define