THE POET OF THE COSMOS 



fumes in his pages; he did not fill the lap of earth 

 with treasures not her own — all functions of true 

 poetry, we must admit, and associated with great 

 names. Yet he made more of Nature than any other 

 poet has done; he saw deeper meanings in her for 

 purposes of both art and life; but it was Nature as a 

 whole — not the parts, not the exceptional phases, 

 but the total scheme and unfolding of things. 



He sings more in terms of personality, of d emoc- 

 racy, of nationalism, of sex, oF immor tality. "f cnm- 

 jradeship; more of the general, the continuous, the 

 world-wide; more of wholes and less of parts, more 

 of man and less of men. His religion takes no ac- 

 count of sects and creeds, but arises from the 

 contemplation of the soul, of the Eternal, of the uni- 

 verse. We do not get the solace and the companion- 

 ship with rural nature in Whitman that we get in 

 the modern nature poets. With them we admire the 

 "violet by a mossy stone," or the pretty shell on the 

 seashore; with Whitman we saunter on the hills, or 

 inhale the salt air of the seashore, or our minds open 

 under the spread of the midnight skies — always 

 the large, the elemental, the processional, the mod- 

 ern. The scholarly, the elaborated, the polished, the 

 architectural, the Tennysonian perfume and tech- 

 nique, the Wordsworthian sweet rusticity and af- 

 filiation with fells and groves, the Emersonian mys- 

 ticism and charm of the wild and the sequestered, 

 were not for him or in him; nor the epic grandeur of 



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