190 BIRDS AND POETS 
Before the man’s complete aceeptance and assimi- 
lation by America, he may have to be first passed 
down through the minds of critics and commenta- 
tors, and given to the people with some of his rank 
new quality taken off, —a quality like that which 
adheres to objects in the open air, and makes them 
either forbidding or attractive, as one’s mood is 
healthful and robust or feeble and languid. The 
processes are silently at work. Already seen from 
a distance, and from other atmospheres and surround- 
ings, he assumes magnitude and orbic coherence; for 
in curious contrast to the general denial of Whit- 
man in this country (though he has more lovers and 
admirers here than is generally believed) stands the 
reception accorded him in Europe. The poets there, 
almost without exception, recognize his transcendent 
quality, the men of science his thorough scientific 
basis, the republicans his inborn democracy, and all 
his towering picturesque personality and modern- 
ness. Professor Clifford says he is more thoroughly 
in harmony with the spirit and letter of advanced 
scientism than any other living poet. Professor 
Tyrrell and Mr. Symonds find him eminently Greek, 
in the sense in which to be natural and “self-regu- 
lated by the law of perfect health” is to be Greek. 
The French “ Revue des Deux Mondes” pronounces 
his war poems the most vivid, the most humanly 
passionate, and the most modern, of all the verse of 
the nineteenth century. Freiligrath translated him 
into German, and hailed him as the founder of a 
new democratic and modern order of poetry, greater 
