THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 208 
he is not afraid of over-praising, or making too 
much of the commonest individual. What exalts 
others exalts him. 
We have had great help in Emerson in certain 
ways, — first-class service. He probes the conscience 
and the moral purpose as few men have done, and 
gives much needed stimulus there. But, after him, 
the need is all the more pressing for a broad, power- 
ful, opulent, human personality to absorb these 
ideals, and make something more of them than fine 
sayings. With Emerson alone we are rich in sun- 
light, but poor in rain and dew, — poor, too, in soil, 
and in the moist, gestating earth principle. Emer- 
son’s tendency is not to broaden and enrich, but to 
concentrate and refine. 
Then, is there not an excessive modesty, without 
warrant in philosophy or nature, dwindling us ir 
this country, drying us up in the viscera? Is there 
not a decay —a deliberate, strange abnegation and 
dread — of sane sexuality, of maternity and pater- 
nity, among us, and in our literary ideals and social 
types of men and women? For myself, I welcome 
any evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that 
deeper and counteracting agencies are at work, as 
unspeakably precious. I do not know where this 
evidence is furnished in such ample measure as in 
the pages of Walt Whitman. The great lesson of 
nature, I take it, is that a sane sensuality must be 
preserved at all hazards, and this, it seems to me, 
is also the great lesson of his writings. The point 
is fully settled in him that, however they may have 
