The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and of
Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is _par
excellence_ the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity--
that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the
most rhapsodic or passionately abstract. Picturesqueness it has, but mostly
of a somewhat patriarchal kind, not deriving from the "word-painting" of
the _litterateur_; a certain echo of the old Hebrew poetry may even be
caught in it, extra-modern though it is. Another most prominent and
pervading quality of the book is the exuberant physique of the author. The
conceptions are throughout those of a man in robust health, and might alter
much under different conditions.

Further, there is a strong tone of paradox in Whitman's writings. He is
both a realist and an optimist in extreme measure: he contemplates evil as
in some sense not existing, or, if existing, then as being of as much
importance as anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary,
he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the
body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of
things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy
of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other
developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of
the poems is such that one may sometimes find them in conflict with what
has preceded, and would not be much surprised if they said at any moment
the reverse of whatever they do say. This is mainly due to the multiplicity
of the aspects of things, and to the immense width of relation in which
Whitman stands to all sorts and all aspects of them.

But the greatest of this poet's distinctions is his absolute and entire
originality. He may be termed formless by those who, not without much