THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 187 
It is now upwards of twenty years since Walt 
Whitman printed (in 1855) his first thin beginning 
volume of “Leaves of Grass;” and, holding him to 
the test which he himself early proclaimed, namely, 
“that the proof of the poet shall be sternly deferred 
till his country has absorb’d him as affectionately as 
he has absorb’d it,” he is yet on trial, yet makes 
his appeal to an indifferent or to a scornful audience. 
That his complete absorption, however, by his own 
country and by the world, is ultimately to take 
place, is one of the beliefs that grows stronger and 
stronger within me as time passes, and I suppose it 
is with a hope to help forward this absorption that 
I write of him now. Only here and there has he 
yet effected a lodgment, usually in the younger and 
more virile minds. But considering the unparalleled 
audacity of his undertaking, and the absence in most 
critics and readers of anything like full-grown and 
robust esthetic perception, the wonder really is not 
that he should have made such slow progress, but 
that he should have gained any foothold at all. The 
whole literary technique of the race for the last two 
hundred years has been squarely against him, laying 
as it does the emphasis upon form and _ scholarly 
endowments instead of upon aboriginal power and 
manhood. 
My own mastery of the poet, incomplete as it is, 
has doubtless been much facilitated by contact — 
talks, meals, jaunts, etc. —with him, stretching 
through a decade of years, and by seeing how every- 
thing in his personnel was resumed and carried tor- 
