222 BIRDS AND POETS 
“Move eastward, happy earth, and leave 
Yon orange sunset waning slow; 
From fringes of the faded eve, 
O happy planet, eastward go; 
Till over thy dark shoulder glow 
Thy silver sister-world, and rise 
To glass herself in dewy eyes 
That watch me from the glen below.” 
A recognition of the planetary system, and of the 
great fact that the earth moves eastward through the 
heavens, in a soft and tender love-song! 
But in Walt Whitman alone do we find the full, 
practical absorption and re-departure therefrom, of 
the astounding idea that the earth is a star in the 
heavens like the rest, and that man, as the crown 
and finish, carries in his moral consciousness the 
flower, the outcome, of all this wide field of turbulent 
unconscious nature. Of course in his handling it is 
no longer science, or rather it is science dissolved 
in the fervent heat of the poet’s heart, and charged 
with emotion. ‘‘The words of true poems,” he 
says, ‘are the tufts and final applause of science.” 
Before Darwin or Spencer he proclaimed the doc- 
trine of evolution: — 
“Tam stuccoed with quadrupeds and birds all over, 
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons, 
And call anything close again when I desire it. 
“Tn vain the speeding and shyness; 
In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my ape 
proach; 
In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder’d bones; 
In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes; 
In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great monsters 
lying low.” . 
