8 AN EGOTISTICAL CHAPTER 



to contemporary authors than to the men of the 

 past. I have lived in the present time, in the pre 

 sent hour, and have invested myself in the objects 

 nearest at hand. Besides the writers I have men 

 tioned, I am conscious of owing a debt to Whitman, 

 Ruskin, Arnold, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Ten 

 nyson. To Whitman I owe a certain liberalizing 

 influence, as well as a lesson in patriotism which 

 I could have got in the same measure from no 

 other source. Whitman opens the doors, and opens 

 them wide. He pours a flood of human sympathy 

 which sets the whole world afloat. He is a great 

 humanizing power. There is no other personality 

 in literature that gives me such a sense of breadth 

 and magnitude in the purely human and personal 

 qualities. His poems are dominated by a sense 

 of a living, breathing man as no other poems are. 

 This would not recommend them to some read 

 ers, but it recommends them to such as I, who 

 value in books perennial human qualities above all 

 things. To put a great personality in poetry is to 

 establish a living fountain of power, where the jaded 

 and exhausted race can refresh and renew itself. 



To a man in many ways the opposite of Whit 

 man, who stands for an entirely different, almost 

 antagonistic, order of ideas, to wit, Matthew 

 Arnold, I am indebted for a lesson in clear think 

 ing and clean expression such as I have got from 

 no other. Arnold's style is probably the most lucid, 



