passages more remarkable for grammar, but few of a more
ingenious turn, and none that could be more to the point in
our connection. The tenacity of many ordinary people in
ordinary pursuits is a sort of standing challenge to
everybody else. If one man can grow absorbed in delving his
garden, others may grow absorbed and happy over something
else. Not to be upsides in this with any groom or gardener,
is to be very meanly organised. A man should be ashamed to
take his food if he has not alchemy enough in his stomach to
turn some of it into intense and enjoyable occupation.

Whitman tries to reinforce this cheerfulness by keeping up a
sort of outdoor atmosphere of sentiment. His book, he tells
us, should be read "among the cooling influences of external
nature;" and this recommendation, like that other famous one
which Hawthorne prefixed to his collected tales, is in itself
a character of the work. Every one who has been upon a
walking or a boating tour, living in the open air, with the
body in constant exercise and the mind in fallow, knows true
ease and quiet. The irritating action of the brain is set at
rest; we think in a plain, unfeverish temper; little things
seem big enough, and great things no longer portentous; and
the world is smilingly accepted as it is. This is the spirit
that Whitman inculcates and parades. He thinks very ill of
the atmosphere of parlours or libraries. Wisdom keeps school
outdoors. And he has the art to recommend this attitude of
mind by simply pluming himself upon it as a virtue; so that
the reader, to keep the advantage over his author which most
readers enjoy, is tricked into professing the same view. And
this spirit, as it is his chief lesson, is the greatest charm