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Whitman's so-called "mysticism" is a muddled echo of New England Transcendentalism; itself a pale dilution of an outworn German idealism what Coleridge called "the holy jungle of Transcendental metaphysics." His concrete imagination automatically rejected metaphysics.
After Whitman's conclusion that "One of the great portrait painters of two or three hundred years ago is needed," the mere historian should proceed with caution. There is historic significance in his very appearance.
Have you ever realized it, my friends, that Lincoln, though grafted on the West, is essentially in personnel and character a Southern contribution?" The most of the poet's address was devoted to the actual occurrences and details of the murder. We believe the delivery on Tuesday was Whitman's thirteenth of it. The old poet is now physically wreck'd. But his voice and magnetism are the same.
These excuses might be accepted as fully accounting for our failure or shall we say our delay? if it were not for two or three of our literary performances. It is true that no novel has been written, and we dare say no novel will be written, that is, or will be, an epitome of the manifold diversities of American life, unless it be in the form of one of Walt Whitman's catalogues.
Nevertheless, in the years following Whitman's arrival, other parties of missionaries and settlers worked their way into the country, until, in 1842, their number reached about a hundred and fifty. The Hudson Bay Company realized that neither England nor America had a clear title to the region, and that its population must, in the end, determine its nationality.
Whitman's movements among the soldiers in the hospitals, has since told me that his principles of operation, effective as they were, seemed strangely few, simple, and on a low key, to act upon the appetite, to cheer by a healthy and fitly bracing appearance and demeanor; and to fill and satisfy in certain cases the affectional longings of the patients, was about all.
Joe Stanfield, a half-breed Canadian and a member of Whitman's family, was observed to spend many of the lengthening evenings with the Cayuses in their lodges. He had been given a home by Whitman, to whom he had seemed for a time devoted.
Hence, a new difficulty for Whitman's scrupulous and argumentative poet: he must do more than waken up the sleepers to his words; he must persuade them to look over the book and at life with their own eyes. This side of truth is very present to Whitman; it is this that he means when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of all times." But he is not unready.
If any ideal is possible, it must be already in the thoughts of the people; and, by the same reason, in the thoughts of the poet, who is one of them. And hence Whitman's own formula: "The poet is individual he is complete in himself: the others are as good as he; only he sees it, and they do not."
I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a book of singular service, a book which tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again upon a strong foundation of all the original and manly virtues. But it is, once more, only a book for those who have the gift of reading.
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