myself!" with this addition, not so feminine and perhaps not
altogether so satisfactory: "I am large - I contain
multitudes." Life, as a matter of fact, partakes largely of
the nature of tragedy. The gospel according to Whitman, even
if it be not so logical, has this advantage over the gospel
according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the
existence of temporal evil. Whitman accepts the fact of
disease and wretchedness like an honest man; and instead of
trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, sets
himself to spur people up to be helpful. He expresses a
conviction, indeed, that all will be made up to the victims
in the end; that "what is untried and afterward" will fail no
one, not even "the old man who has lived without purpose and
feels it with bitterness worse than gall." But this is not
to palliate our sense of what is hard or melancholy in the
present. Pangloss, smarting under one of the worst things
that ever was supposed to come from America, consoled himself
with the reflection that it was the price we have to pay for
cochineal. And with that murderous parody, logical optimism
and the praises of the best of possible words went
irrevocably out of season, and have been no more heard of in
the mouths of reasonable men. Whitman spares us all
allusions to the cochineal; he treats evil and sorrow in a
spirit almost as of welcome; as an old sea-dog might have
welcomed the sight of the enemy's topsails off the Spanish
Main. There, at least, he seems to say, is something obvious
to be done. I do not know many better things in literature
than the brief pictures, - brief and vivid like things seen
by lightning, - with which he tries to stir up the world's
heart upon the side of mercy. He braces us, on the one hand,