before is plunged down again among the fogs and complications
of duty. And this is all the more overwhelming because
Whitman insists not only on love between sex and sex, and
between friends of the same sex, but in the field of the less
intense political sympathies; and his ideal man must not only
be a generous friend but a conscientious voter into the
bargain.

His method somewhat lessens the difficulty. He is not, the
reader will remember, to tell us how good we ought to be, but
to remind us how good we are. He is to encourage us to be
free and kind, by proving that we are free and kind already.
He passes our corporate life under review, to show that it is
upheld by the very virtues of which he makes himself the
advocate. "There is no object so soft," he says somewhere in
his big, plain way, "there is no object so soft but it makes
a hub for the wheel'd universe." Rightly understood, it is
on the softest of all objects, the sympathetic heart, that
the wheel of society turns easily and securely as on a
perfect axle. There is no room, of course, for doubt or
discussion, about conduct, where every one is to follow the
law of his being with exact compliance. Whitman hates doubt,
deprecates discussion, and discourages to his utmost the
craving, carping sensibilities of the conscience. We are to
imitate, to use one of his absurd and happy phrases, "the
satisfaction and aplomb of animals." If he preaches a sort
of ranting Christianity in morals, a fit consequent to the
ranting optimism of his cosmology, it is because he declares
it to be the original deliverance of the human heart; or at
least, for he would be honestly historical in method, of the