THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 213 
The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records 
reach, is in you this hour, and myths and tales the same: 
If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they 
all be? 
The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays 
would be vacuums. 
“ All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it; 
(Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines 
of the arches and cornices ?) 
“ All music is what awakens from you when you are reminded 
by the instruments; 
It is not the violins and the cornets —it is not the oboe, nor 
the beating drums — nor the score of the baritone singer 
singing his sweet romanza — nor that of the men’s 
chorus, nor that of the women’s chorus, 
It is nearer and farther than they.’ 
Out of this same spirit of reverence for man and all 
that pertains essentially to him, and the steady 
ignoring of conventional and social distinctions and 
prohibitions, and on the same plane as the universal 
brotherhood of the poems, come those passages in 
“Leaves of Grass” that have caused so much abuse 
and fury, — the allusions to sexual acts and organs, 
—the momentary contemplation of man as the per- 
petuator of his species. Many good judges, who 
have followed Whitman thus far, stop here and re- 
fuse their concurrence. But if the poet has failed 
in this part, he has failed in the rest. It is of a 
piece with the whole. He has felt in his way the 
same necessity as that which makes the anatomist 
or physiologist not pass by, or neglect or falsify, 
the loins of his typical personage. All the passages 
and allusions that come under this head have a sci- 
entific coldness and purity, but differ from science, 
