THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 201 
One great service of Walt Whitman is that he 
exerts a tremendous influence to bring the race up 
on this nether side, — to place the emotional, the as- 
similative, the sympathetic, the spontaneous, intui- 
tive man, the man of the fluids and of the affections, 
flush with the intellectual man. That we moderns 
have fallen behind here is unquestionable, and we 
in this country more than the Old World peoples. 
All the works of Whitman, prose and verse, are 
embosomed in a sea of emotional humanity, and 
they float deeper than they show; there is far more 
in what they necessitate and imply than in what 
they say. 
It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we 
are in danger in America, but of calcareous. The 
fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating; surfaces 
are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in 
the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp 
and hard, nothing is held in solution, all is precipi- 
tated in well-defined ideas and opinions. 
But when I think of the type of character planted 
and developed by my poet, I think of a man or wo- 
man rich above all things in the genial human 
attributes, one ‘“‘nine times folded” in an atmos- 
phere of tenderest, most considerate humanity, — an 
atmosphere warm with the breath of a tropic heart, 
that makes your buds of affection and of genius start 
and unfold like a south wind in May. Your inter- 
course with such a character is not merely intellec- 
tual; it is deeper and better than that. Walter 
Scott carried such a fund of sympathy and good-will 
