favourite endeavours is to get the whole matter into a
nutshell; to knock the four corners of the universe, one
after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him, in
breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in
time and space; to focus all this about his own momentary
personality; and then, drawing the ground from under his
feet, as if by some cataclysm of nature, to plunge him into
the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous suns and systems,
and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by
striking into us some sense of that disproportion of things
which Shelley has illuminated by the ironical flash of these
eight words: The desire of the moth for the star.

The same truth, but to what a different purpose! Whitman's
moth is mightily at his ease about all the planets in heaven,
and cannot think too highly of our sublunary tapers. The
universe is so large that imagination flags in the effort to
conceive it; but here, in the meantime, is the world under
our feet, a very warm and habitable corner. "The earth, that
is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any nearer,"
he remarks. And again: "Let your soul stand cool and
composed," says he, "before a million universes." It is the
language of a transcendental common sense, such as Thoreau
held and sometimes uttered. But Whitman, who has a somewhat
vulgar inclination for technical talk and the jargon of
philosophy, is not content with a few pregnant hints; he must
put the dots upon his i's; he must corroborate the songs of
Apollo by some of the darkest talk of human metaphysic. He
tells his disciples that they must be ready "to confront the