LITERATURE 



pagan feeling of simple fear and wonder, we are all 

 sharers of. It is the aftermath of the human mind 

 that follows the decay of the old religious forms and 

 creeds. Wordsworth's natural religion was the real- 

 ity with him; his Church of England religion was 

 only a form. 



I return to Whitman again and again, year after 

 year, not for his privacies with Nature, but for the 

 sweep of his mind and the power of his personality. 

 His tremendous humanism and large style always re- 

 fresh me. He makes me ashamed of our partialities 

 and refinements and false modesties. His frankness 

 and directness are as appealing as his unconvention- 

 alities. His candor equals his charity, his democracy 

 matches his patriotism. He does not distil the es- 

 sence of wild Nature for me as Wordsworth does 

 Nature transmuted into a kind of intellectual sen- 

 timent; he distils nothing, he confronts me with 

 the immeasurable universe and makes me feel how 

 the ground I walk upon is a part of the solar system. 

 It is not Nature perfumed with literature that he 

 gives me, but something much nearer the breath of 

 Nature as she appears on the shore, the plains, the 

 mountain-tops. 



There is no direct savor of science in this pas- 

 sage: 



"I open my scuttle at night and see the far-sprinkled systems, 

 And all I see multiplied as high as I can cipher edge but the 

 rim of the farther systems. 



