of debility, not an excess of strength--I mean his bluster. His own
personal and national self-reliance and arrogance, I need not tell you, I
applaud, and sympathise and rejoice in; but the blatant ebullience of
feeling and speech, at times, is feeble for so great a poet of so great a
people. He is in part certainly the poet of democracy; but not wholly,
_because_ he tries so openly to be, and asserts so violently that he is--
always as if he was fighting the case out on a platform. This is the only
thing I really or greatly dislike or revolt from. On the whole" (adds my
correspondent), "my admiration and enjoyment of his greatness grow keener
and warmer every time I think of him"--a feeling, I may be permitted to
observe, which is fully shared by myself, and, I suppose, by all who
consent in any adequate measure to recognise Whitman, and to yield
themselves to his influence.

To continue. Besides originality and daring, which have been already
insisted upon, width and intensity are leading characteristics of his
writings--width both of subject-matter and of comprehension, intensity of
self-absorption into what the poet contemplates and expresses. He scans and
presents an enormous panorama, unrolled before him as from a mountain-top;
and yet, whatever most large or most minute or casual thing his eye glances
upon, that he enters into with a depth of affection which identifies him
with it for a time, be the object what it may. There is a singular
interchange also of actuality and of ideal substratum and suggestion. While
he sees men, with even abnormal exactness and sympathy, as men, he sees
them also "as trees walking," and admits us to perceive that the whole show
is in a measure spectral and unsubstantial, and the mask of a larger and
profounder reality beneath it, of which it is giving perpetual intimations
and auguries. He is the poet indeed of literality, but of passionate and
significant literality, full of indirections as well as directness, and of
readings between the lines. If he is the 'cutest of Yankees, he is also as