truly an enthusiast as any the most typical poet. All his faculties and
performance glow into a white heat of brotherliness; and there is a
_poignancy_ both of tenderness and of beauty about his finer works which
discriminates them quite as much as their modernness, audacity, or any
other exceptional point. If the reader wishes to see the great and more
intimate powers of Whitman in their fullest expression, he may consult the
_Nocturn for the Death of Lincoln_; than which it would be difficult to
find anywhere a purer, more elevated, more poetic, more ideally abstract,
or at the same time more pathetically personal, threnody--uniting the
thrilling chords of grief, of beauty, of triumph, and of final unfathomed
satisfaction. With all his singularities, Whitman is a master of words and
of sounds: he has them at his command--made for, and instinct with, his
purpose--messengers of unsurpassable sympathy and intelligence between
himself and his readers. The entire book may be called the paean of the
natural man--not of the merely physical, still less of the disjunctively
intellectual or spiritual man, but of him who, being a man first and
foremost, is therein also a spirit and an intellect.

There is a singular and impressive intuition or revelation of Swedenborg's:
that the whole of heaven is in the form of one man, and the separate
societies of heaven in the forms of the several parts of man. In a large
sense, the general drift of Whitman's writings, even down to the passages
which read as most bluntly physical, bear a striking correspondence or
analogy to this dogma. He takes man, and every organism and faculty of man,
as the unit--the datum--from which all that we know, discern, and
speculate, of abstract and supersensual, as well as of concrete and
sensual, has to be computed. He knows of nothing nobler than that unit man;
but, knowing that, he can use it for any multiple, and for any dynamical
extension or recast.