A poet who discovers his mission is already half done for; and even
Wordsworth, great genius though he was, succeeded in half drowning his
talents in his parochial theories, in his own self-consciousness and
self-conceit.

Walt Whitman thought he had a mission. He was a professional poet. He
had purposes and theories about poetry which he started out to enforce
and illustrate. He is as didactic as Wordsworth, and is thinking of
himself the whole time. He belonged, moreover, to that class of
professionals who are always particularly self-centred, autocratic,
vain, and florid,--the class of quacks. There are, throughout society,
men, and they are generally men of unusual natural powers, who, after
gaining a little unassimilated education, launch out for themselves and
set up as authorities on their own account. They are, perhaps, the
successors of the old astrologers, in that what they seek to establish
is some personal professorship or predominance. The old occultism and
mystery was resorted to as the most obvious device for increasing the
personal importance of the magician; and the chief difference to-day
between a regular physician and a quack is, that the quack pretends to
know it all.

Brigham Young and Joseph Smith were men of phenomenal capacity, who
actually invented a religion and created a community by the apparent
establishment of supernatural and occult powers. The phrenologists, the
venders of patent medicine, the Christian Scientists, the single-taxers,
and all who proclaim panaceas and nostrums make the same majestic and
pontifical appeal to human nature. It is this mystical power, this
religious element, which floats them, sells the drugs, cures the sick,
and packs the meetings.