THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 207 
lished and made certain through his body; the value 
of health and physique; the great solvent, Sympa- 
thy, — to show the need of larger and fresher types 
in art and in life, and then how the state is com- 
pacted, and how the democratic idea is ample and 
composite, and cannot fail us, — to show all this, I 
say, not as in a lecture or critique, but suggestively 
and inferentially, —to work it out freely and pic- 
turesquely, with endless variations, with person and 
picture and parable and adventure, is the lesson and 
object of ‘‘ Leaves of Grass.” From the first line, 
where the poet says, 
“T loafe and invite my Soul,”’ 
to the last, all is movement and fusion,—all is 
clothed in flesh and blood. The scene changes, the 
curtain rises and falls, but the theme is still Man, — 
his opportunities, his relations, his past, his future, 
his sex, his pride in himself, his omnivorousness, 
his “great hands,” his yearning heart, his seething 
brain, the abysmal depths that underlie him and 
open from hin, ete., all illustrated in the poet’s own 
character. Himself is the chief actor always. His 
personality directly facing you, and with its eye 
steadily upon you, runs through every page, spans 
all the details, and rounds and completes them, and 
compactly holds them. This gives the form and the 
art conception, and gives homogeneousness. 
When Tennyson sends out a poem, it is perfect, 
like an apple or a peach; slowly wrought out and 
dismissed, it drops from his boughs holding a con- 
eeption or an idea that spheres it and makes it whole. 
