THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE 233 
as you, and the whole spirit of our current times, 
have been trained to feed on and enjoy, not Nature 
or Man, or the aboriginal forces, or the actual, but 
pictures, books, art, and the selected and refined, — 
just so these poems will doubtless first shock and 
disappoint you. Your admiration for the beautiful 
is never the feeling directly and chiefly addressed in 
them, but your love for the breathing flesh, the con- 
crete reality, the moving forms and shows of the 
universe. A man reaches and moves you, not an 
artist. Doubtless, too, a certain withholding and 
repugnance has first to be overcome, analogous to a 
cold sea plunge; and it is not till you experience the 
reaction, the after-glow, and feel the swing and surge 
of the strong waves, that you know what Walt 
Whitman’s pages really are. They don’t give them- 
selves at first,— like the real landscape and the sea, 
they are all indirections. You may have to try 
them many times; there is something of Nature’s 
rudeness and forbiddingness, not only at the first, 
but probably always. But after you have mastered 
them by resigning yourself to them, there is nothing 
like them anywhere in literature for vital help and 
meaning. The poet says: — 
“The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, 
That scorn the best I can do to relate them.’’ 
And the press of your mind to these pages will 
certainly start new and countless problems that po- 
etry and art have never before touched, and that 
afford a perpetual stimulus and delight. 
It has been said that the object of poetry and the 
