of death, the beauty of nature, are in a balance and dream of natural
symmetry such as no cunning could come at, no conscious art could do
other than spoil.

It is ungrateful to note Whitman's limitations, his lack of human
passion, the falseness of many of his notions about the American people.
The man knew the world merely as an observer, he was never a living part
of it, and no mere observer can understand the life about him. Even his
work during the war was mainly the work of an observer, and his poems
and notes upon the period are picturesque. As to his talk about comrades
and Manhattanese car-drivers, and brass-founders displaying their brawny
arms round each other's brawny necks, all this gush and sentiment in
Whitman's poetry is false to life. It has a lyrical value, as
representing Whitman's personal feelings, but no one else in the country
was ever found who felt or acted like this.

In fact, in all that concerns the human relations Walt Whitman is as
unreal as, let us say, William Morris, and the American mechanic would
probably prefer Sigurd the Volsung, and understand it better than
Whitman's poetry.

This falseness to the sentiment of the American is interwoven with such
wonderful descriptions of American sights and scenery, of ferryboats,
thoroughfares, cataracts, and machine-shops that it is not strange the
foreigners should have accepted the gospel.

On the whole, Whitman, though he solves none of the problems of life and
throws no light on American civilization, is a delightful appearance,
and a strange creature to come out of our beehive. This man committed
every unpardonable sin against our conventions, and his whole life was