THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 189 
titious point. He does not make the impression of 
the scholar or artist or littérateur, but such as you 
would imagine the antique heroes to make, — that of 
a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic 
man, with, further than that, a look about him that 
is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical. 
It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, 
after an hour’s interview, that he suggested ‘‘ some- 
thing a. little more than human.” In fact, the main 
clew to Walt Whitman’s life and personality, and 
the expression of them in his poems, is to be found 
in about the largest emotional element that has ap- 
peared anywhere. This, if not controlled by a po- 
tent rational balance, would either have tossed him 
helplessly forever, or wrecked him as disastrously as 
ever storm and gale drove ship to ruin. These vol- 
canic emotional fires appear everywhere in his books; 
and it is really these, aroused to intense activity 
and unnatural strain during the four years of the 
war, and persistent labors in the hospitals, that have 
resulted in his illness and paralysis since. 
It has been impossible, I say, to resist these per- 
sonal impressions and magnetisms, and impossible 
with me not to follow them up in the poems, in 
doing which I found that his ‘‘ Leaves of Grass” 
was really the drama of himself, played upon va- 
rious and successive stages of nature, history, pas- 
sion, experience, patriotism, etc., and that he had 
not made, nor had he intended to make, mere excel- 
lent “poems,” tunes, statues, or statuettes, in the 
ordinary sense. 
