THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 205 
stamina of our ancestors, that craved the bitter but 
nourishing home-brewed, has died out, and in its 
place there is a sickly cadaverousness that must be 
pampered and cosseted. Among educated people 
here there is a mania for the bleached, the double- 
refined, — white houses, white china, white marble, 
and white skins. We take the bone and sinew out 
of the flour in order to have white bread, and are 
bolting our literature as fast as possible. 
It is for these and kindred reasons that Walt 
Whitman is more read abroad than in his own coun- 
try. It is on the rank, human, and emotional side 
—sex, magnetism, health, physique, etc. — that he 
is so full. ‘Then his receptivity and assimilative 
powers are enormous, and he demands these in his 
reader. In fact, his poems are physiological as much 
as they are intellectual. They radiate from his en- 
tire being, and are charged to repletion with that 
blended quality of mind and body —psychic and 
physiologic — which the living form and _ presence 
send forth. Never before in poetry has the body 
received such ennoblement. The great theme is 
IpeNnTITY, and identity comes through the body; 
and all that pertains to the body, the poet teaches, 
is entailed upon the spirit. In his rapt gaze, the 
body and the soul are one, and what debases the 
one debases the other. Hence he glorifies the body. 
Not more ardently and purely did the great sculp- 
tors of antiquity carve it in the enduring marble 
than this poet has celebrated it in his masculine and 
flowing lines. The bearing of his work in this direc- 
